The thought makes me moan again, and its deepness means there’s no mistaking where it’s derived from this time around. It sees Lennox snatching his hands away like I confessed his profile was the only one I hit ‘matched’ with three years ago. His response bruises my ego even more than it did when I realized his arrival at Books N Bites wasn’t because he had returned my match. He was there to hook up with another Matched user, and the memory still hacks at my confidence to this day.
My aching ego gets a small moment of reprieve when I crank my neck in the direction Lennox’s wide eyes are gawking. He didn’t solely retreat because my moan was inappropriate for friends. My father’s glare would make the cockiest guy hesitant, so I won’t mention what it does to a man who has no interest in his daughter for anything more than her ability to sniff out a psycho.
“Your wager, right?” Lennox murmurs after a cough, downplaying my father’s arrival to my room as if it has nothing to do with his overbearing personality. “Let me get that for you.”
While he digs his wallet out of the trousers he dumped on the floor an hour ago, I slip into the bathroom for my third cold shower today. That’s a new record for me, but unfortunately, the reasoning behind it hasn’t changed.
Even three years of friendship hasn’t altered the facts.
I want to play tonsil hockey with my best friend, but unfortunately, he doesn’t feel the same way.
“Are you okay? You’ve been a little quiet since you handed Dad his well-deserved barter.”
It’s a dog act pretending Lennox’s unusual reservedness is because he lost a wager with my father, but I’d rather place the blame on that than instigate a conversation I never want us to have. It’s bad enough he knows I hit ‘match’ on his Matched profile. I don’t need more marks against my best friend tally.
When Lennox’s silence continues, I roll onto my hip before peering up at him with my puppy dog eyes on full display. They’ll lessen the severity of his scorn. They always do.
After drinking in my wide eyes and dropped lip, he hits me with a wicked sideways glance that has no heat to it whatsoever. “Save that look for when we’re hitchhiking the last thirty miles to Ravenshoe because you shafted me out of the last of our gas money.”
“I didn’t shaft you. I just…”
“Shafted me!” he fills in with a laugh when I can’t come up with an excuse for my family’s swindling ways.
When people look at my dad, they see a huge brute of a man with air for brains. Not many people realize he was once the most scouted minor league baseball player in the state. Greatness was in his grasp, then my mom fell pregnant with me.
You’d think he’d despise me on sight for ruining his life, but when you learn my birth saved him from eternal misery, you’ll understand that everything in life happens for a reason.
Things weren’t great for my dad when he went away on a drafting trip similar to the one Lennox is about to undertake. Women threw themselves at him, and men who wished they could be him did everything in their power to take him down. Within weeks of living the highlife, it dawned on him that fancy things aren’t for everyone.
You can’t buy love nor happiness, but misery is easily obtainable.
My dad spiraled so fast, if it hadn’t been for a little ray of sunshine he spotted under the bleachers one afternoon after training, he would have struck out long before two little blue lines ended his career. He wasn’t giving my mother or me up for anything or anyone, and to this day, he’s upheld the pledge he made to my mom the day they glanced down at a positive pregnancy test.
We didn’t have the world, but we had each other, and to us, that was more valuable than anything.
Lennox tugs on a springy curl compliments to the drenching I gave my head when he made me hotter than the blistering Buffalo sun, drawing my focus back to him. “He made me promise not to tell you this, but since our promise to always be honest with each other on this trip was before his request, it overrules it. Right?” When I sit up slowly, confident I won’t like what he has to say, he pushes out, “It isn’t anything bad. You don’t have an evil stepmom arriving with two hideously ugly daughters anytime soon.” He reels in his train wreck before blurting out, “Your father slipped the hundred he won into your backpack while you were showering. He said you needed it more than him.”
His comment makes me happy and angry at the same time. I love that my dad can’t help but take care of me, but I’m as mad as hell he lied. Honesty is one of his best assets. I also saw the stack of overdue bills on the kitchen counter. He needs a lot more than a measly hundred dollars to claw his way out of financial deficit.
“Don’t tell him I told you,” Lennox begs when I slip off the twin bed we’re pretending is a queen before storming toward the door. “I don’t want to get tossed on my ass like Three Pump Paul did earlier.”
He stops snickering when I sling my narrowed eyes to him. It would have taken a lot of nerve for Paul to arrive late to the barbecue like he did, but his efforts were disregarded when Lennox greeted him by the nickname he derived when we commiserated about our traumatic prom stories. He not only outed Paul’s inability to please me, but he also disclosed him as the man I lost my virginity to.
I’m shocked Paul made it out of the park in one piece. It was a close call when he suggested he had upped his game since our ‘quickie’ in the back seat of his Chevrolet. My father wanted to kill him, and not all his anger centered around his admittance he’d taken my virginity. He wanted him lynched for doing it in the back seat of a piece of shit car.
“Oh, don’t worry. Daddy will toss you to the curb the instant I tell him about the trick you taught me on the drive here. The one with my tongue and your—”
“Cherries! Fucking cherries,” Lennox screams when my father bursts into my room like a madman for the second time this evening, proving I was right when I told Lennox the shadow under my now closed door wasn’t the power pole outside. Our trailer has only two bedrooms, and despite my father’s multiple offers to sleep on the couch so Lennox could have his room, I was as adamant as Lennox that we should share the same room. I didn’t solely enjoy his warmth last night. I also liked that his presence will discourage Paul from climbing through my window like he did the weeks following prom senior year. The sex wasn’t close to great, so I’m far from ready to relive it. “I taught her how toknotthe stem of a cherry with her tongue.”
“Did you notice he failed to mention how he learned that trick?” I ask my father when the redness on his face weakens a smidge.
Lennox’s eyes bulge when my father cocks his head to the side then asks, “How did you learn it?”
Before pushing my father into the hallway I wait a beat, ensuring Lennox knows I’m not playing. “He didn’t acquire the knowledge from me, and as far as you should be concerned, that’s all that matters.”
I only just close the door in enough time for Lennox to miss my father’s reply. “It’s the fact he wants to perfect it on you that I’m worried about.”
This isn’t the first time he’s hinted today that Lennox wants to be more than friends. He doesn’t look at me with the same pair of eyes as everyone else, so he doesn’t see the flaws promiscuous men like Lennox see.
