Page 8 of Roadrunner

I carried my coffee to the living room and sat down, annoyed at myself for having hoped, even a little, that he’d stay. I reached for the remote.

Then I saw the headlights backing out of the driveway. My Jeep’s headlights. He had three cars and a golf cart, and he’d taken the one thing that was actually mine, for no reason except that it would bother me.

I ran to the door and yanked it open. “Don’t you dare take my Jeep.” I went after him barefoot down the driveway. “Joshua. Stop. Joshua!”

He didn’t. I watched the taillights shrink and disappear. I turned back toward the house.

He’d left in enough of a hurry to leave the garage door up. His Porsche 911 sat there under the fluorescent lights, freshly waxed. Beside it a mid-1960s Dino Ferrari he’d recently restored. His old set of golf clubs leaned against the wall where the new set used to be.

I smiled.

It seemed like an invitation.

One I wasn’t going to turn down.

CHAPTER FIVE

Alex

Then

We saw each other every day after that. Hiking, sightseeing, working our way through every dive with a menu worth trying. We kissed. We did more than kiss. By then there wasn’t much of him left for me to learn with my hands or my mouth.

We hadn’t had sex.

It wasn’t for lack of signal on my end. I made it plain, every time, what I wanted. He’d leave anyway, every night, without asking for more.

I was starting to wonder if something was wrong with me. When a room went quiet in Monterey, I assumed I had caused it.

The waiter set our plates down. “Anything else?”

“This is good,” Riley said, looking it over. He glanced at me. “Alex?”

My chili dog smelled like every summer I’d ever spent on the boardwalk with Martina, cheese and onions, the same order every time. “I’m set,” I said, and took a bite without bothering to be careful about it.

“This place is great.” Chili escaped the bun, but I didn’t care. “Diner food, root beer on tap, homemade malts. What else does a person need?”

He raised his burger like he was toasting a celebration. “Good find.” He said it around a mouthful of food.

“How’s Lackey’s wife?”

“Girlfriend,” he said.

“Girlfriend.”

“Just a mole. Nothing to worry about. Nice of you to ask, though.”

Lackey was Riley’s sponsor in the club, and something like his landlord besides. A few weeks back, someone had noticed an odd-looking mole on his girlfriend’s back while they were swimming. Even secondhand, the thought of it had stuck with me.

“I was worried,” I said. “You never know, especially out here. Nobody wears sunscreen.”

“She got checked head to toe. They took off a couple of moles, but nothing was cancerous.”

“That’s good, at least.”

I was working through my fries at a pace that wasn’t polite. Riley matched me bite for bite, a sip of chocolate malt between each one, and seemed to be enjoying the meal as much as I was.

I liked watching him eat. Three weeks in, I was still as caught up in him as I’d been the day we met. Enough that even the way he picked up a fork felt like something worth noticing. Everything he touched, he touched carefully. Me included. Careful was not a word I put on boys. Gone, was more like it.