Lingus (3 page)

The guy next to me chuckled. "Well, I'll be damned, she made Calum blush."

I wanted to ask him why he thought that was funny, but Nikki was in my face a split second later, smirking. "What did you tell him?" I asked her.

"I told him I wanted to look for his g-spot with my tongue."

Even the guy that was standing next to me laughed at Nicole's admission.

"Well, I bet he's never heard that one before," she scoffed, a big smile on her face while her eyes flickered between looking at me and the perfect face just to my left. "Ready to go?"

I nodded at her, taking a step forward to walk around the line, but I stopped and turned back around. The big green orbs were burning a hole into me, but his face was so calm it seemed like an oxymoron, so I didn't know what to think. I settled for just giving him a little wave. He gave me a crooked, soft grin and waved at me too before I filed out behind Nikki.

"Who was that?" she asked me when we were a couple of booths down.

"Some guy who caught me pulling my underwear out of my crack."

She made a little humming noise in her throat like she was thinking, completely disregarding my wedgie pulling. "He looked familiar..."

Nikki was an attorney who practiced family law. She had the memory of an elephant, and could remember each and every one of her clients' names along with their faces, and could recite the most obscure things from memory. For example, when we went to Washington D.C. a few years back, she randomly began reciting the Gettysburg Address in its entirety. I wouldn't be surprised if he did look familiar to her. She remembered absolutely everything.

"He was pretty cute," she offered, elbowing me in the rib.

I snickered, elbowing her back. "Cuter than—"

"Are you blind? Hell no! That guy isn't my type, you know what kind of men I like."

"Men with dicks, I know!" I snorted, and she laughed in response.

"You're such a bitch, Kat," she said between laughs. We both knew she tended to like the huge muscular-type build. Frankly, I'd be afraid to get squished by the weight, but she was pretty much a giant of a woman and lean, like an Amazon, so I guessed her body build could handle that much man.

Our conversation was forgotten when she spotted the booth that Zoey was at a few feet away, down our row. There were so many people crowded around the corner where the tables were stationed, that a tiny feeling of claustrophobia filled my senses for a second before Nikki pulled on my arm and dragged me around the mass of people.

There was a girl with long, black hair standing around a pole wearing what looked like clear platform shoes on steroids, tossing her hair one way and shaking her ass the other way. I wanted to ask her if she stole her skirt from her six-year-old niece, because it wasn't covering up anything. The hot pink scrap of nylon called a shirt had less fabric than my bathing suit tops.

I guessed I could safely assume that this was another porn star.

"That's Dakota Amber," Nicole confirmed in my ear. "She wants to be the new anal queen of porn."

Well, hello there. That would explain the huge mass of men crowded around her, all chattering like excited little frogs.

"NIKKI! KATHERINE ALBA BERGER!" a shrill voice screamed out from the edge of the crowd, and sure enough, people turned to look at the source of the voice.

Fuck me.

Of course, the one person in existence who insisted on calling me by my entire name every time she saw me, would continue to do so at the convention that I was trying my best to be as inconspicuous as possible. After eight years of screaming out my full name when we first saw each other, this was the first time that I'd dreaded it. Thin arms wrapped around my neck as she clung to me, all ninety something pounds wrapped around me like a spider monkey.

The crowd of people who were following the trail of the loud voice locked their gazes on the three of us, and then nodded in appreciation at our spectacle.

Zoey Quinn or Zoey Star, as she was known to her fans, was one of the most popular porn stars out.

She was famous because she only did girl-on-girl scenes.

She jumped up and down while also giving me kisses on both cheeks, like she always did, but usually in private, not in front of a ton of fucking people. At a porn convention.

I asked the sweet Lord Jesus to bless me with the power of invisibility, at least for a few minutes.

Chapter 4

"I've missed you both so much!" Zoey gushed against my neck before dropping her hold and giving Nicole the same treatment.

The men closest to us were staring with their eyes glazed over, much like I imagined a brain-eating zombie's gaze to be when it caught sight of a living, breathing human. I could only imagine what in the hell was going through their minds, and it made me feel really fucking uncomfortable. All they needed to do was go a little slack-jawed and start making droning noises from deep inside their cavities to complete their
Dawn
of
the
Dead
impersonations.

"Did you get to see your future husband?" she asked Nikki, who had an arm draped around our much shorter friend. Where Nicole was freakishly tall, I was freakishly average, and Zoey freakishly small. My brown hair and brown eyes only added to my average status in comparison to my blonde and raven-haired friends.

I told Zoey once she could pass for a middle-school aged boy, and she laughed her ass off. I really wasn't joking, but I think she thought I was. Zoey was the epitome of petite. Everything about her was doll-like, with her short, vibrant black hair, almond-shaped eyes, tiny boobies, and delicate facial features all packed into a small frame courtesy of her half Japanese ancestry.

I wanted to put her in my pocket and take her everywhere with me.

Nicole started telling Zoey all about our escapade at Calum's booth, but my attention span was practically nonexistent. I found myself looking around the mass of people that were creating a half circle surrounding the booth where the future anal queen was blowing kisses as she dropped her ass to the floor like a seasoned stripper.

"I'm gonna go pee," I poked Nikki in the back, and she just waved me off.

"I'll wait for you here," she said.

Shouldering my way through the crowd, I tried to venture in the direction where I thought the restrooms were. It amazed me how many people were here. Miami had some major pervs, I had to say. Myself included, of course. A couple of minutes later, I took a sharp left only to find that I was back right where I started.

"Need a tour guide?" a familiar, silky voice asked from behind me.

I turned around to find the same green eyes from earlier peering at me in amusement. "I'm looking for the restroom."

He tilted his head in the direction I had gone earlier, a soft smile crowding the corner of his full lips. "C'mon, I'll show you where it's at before you pee on yourself."

"Thanks," I told him, giving him a smile.

My new friend shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his slim-fitting, worn in jeans. I noticed that he put his hoodie up and over his baseball cap, so only his face was exposed beneath the black cotton. He smirked. "Are you having fun?"

An unladylike scoff escaped my throat. I blushed furiously, keeping my eyes glued to the floor while I followed him around a left turn. "Well, it's an experience, you know?"

He just laughed as he nodded, like he completely understood what I was talking about. "That's a polite way of putting it. Did you come out of curiosity or...?"

"You can put it like that," I said, with another smile, looking far up at him. His pretty, sparkly eyes flitted between the floor and me. "I keep expecting to see my Grandma here, or something though. It's weird."

I really didn't know why I told him that. It might have been because he seemed to be trying to blend in, like me, by wearing that cap and hoodie, or maybe not. It was his smile, probably, that did it. I was normally pretty quiet by nature. It took me six classes to talk to Josh for the first time, and he was the second most outgoing person I knew besides Zoey.

"I saw my aunt at one of these once a couple of years ago. I think we both wanted the ground to swallow us whole," he admitted to me with his clear, deep voice.

"I heard my parents having sex once. I was traumatized for life," I offered him, like a moron. If I could have punched myself right then without looking like a demented fool, I would have.

He grimaced, but chuckled. "Did you say anything to them afterward?"

"Are you insane?" I snorted.

"Well," he shrugged his broad shoulders up. "If you're stuck being traumatized forever, they should too. Don't you think?"

As stupid as it sounded, I realized he had a point. "I guess," I said before my bastard brain made me relive the memory of that fateful night. Ughhh. I had just come down the stairs to get a glass of water when I happened to walk by their room and heard noises that would haunt me for the rest of my life. The shudder that rumbled through my body was ridiculous, but he chuckled.

After taking another left turn, I realized we were actually just two booths down from where we'd started our walk, and I looked back and forth down the row before settling my gaze on his face. He gave me that cute bashful smile again, knowing he'd been caught. "The restroom is right here. I'll wait for you so you don't get lost on your way back, okay?"

He was too fucking cute for his own good, and I wanted to know why he was being so nice. "Okay, Magellan."

He held his hand out to me, with its long, limber fingers, for me to shake. I found myself grasping his large, warm hand without a second thought. "It's Tristan actually, you little gold digger." he said, with a wink.

----------

I laughed like a crazy person the entire time I was in the restroom. The lady that came out of the stall next to mine, wearing a dominatrix outfit, looked at me like I had two heads. I was so thoroughly amused, I didn't give a shit.

A gold digger.

I snorted while I rinsed off my hands, then dried them. This guy, Tristan, was too cute for his own good, it didn't help that he seemed to feel comfortable enough around me to crack jokes about me. It took Nicole months to start whipping out lines about my bladder control or hair when it resembled a rat's nest. Should I be offended? Probably, but if Andrew Wood, my all time favorite porn star, made fun of me, I would laugh and smile. If he said I was a man, I'd go with it. Tristan felt like an old friend, and I liked it. I felt more comfortable around him than I probably should have, but oh fucking well.

He stood right outside the door when I made my way out, his back facing the crowd behind him, but he looked up the moment he heard the door swing. Bright eyes looked me over so quickly I almost missed it but didn't. "I was starting to worry you fell in the toilet."

I rolled my eyes at him, but smiled. "I didn't even take that long."

"I know," he said, and we started walking toward where he found me. "So... I didn't catch your name..."

"It's Kat, well Katherine, but everyone calls me Kat," I said, and his face snapped up to peer at mine. He even stopped walking.

"You do porn?" he asked really low, like he didn't want anyone to hear the question. Tristan had a confused expression on his face. He looked at me again, up and down, like he was assessing me.

"No!" I huffed and almost said something that I definitely shouldn't and could never bring up. "I mean,
no
, I don't. Why?"

His eyes narrowed. "Kat sounds like a porn stage name. Next thing I know you'll tell me your last name is Lips or something."

My face blanched because for the first time in my life, I really thought about my God given name. Suddenly my lady bits reminded me of two hamburger buns for some stupid reason. I felt like I was giving in to my childhood nickname: Cheeseburger. To your average eight year old, Berger was as good as burger.

Holy shit. My name could pass for a porn name.

"It's Berger," I croaked out, mortified. Seriously? Kat fucking Burger, I could see it now on the cover of a DVD at the XXX Super Video down the street from my apartment. It was bad enough that I'd grown up getting called a cheeseburger, hamburger, and a kitty burger. As an adult, Josh called me Booger after our professor butchered my last name for an entire semester, calling me Katherine Booger for three and a half long months. But this was in a league of its own. I could already imagine Nicole telling me that I needed to get my burger eaten.

The smile on his face started out small as my words sunk in, then it grew and grew until it was so big and bright, there was no need to have any lights on in our near vicinity. He was amused beyond belief, and then he started laughing. "That's rich," he spit out between laughs. "I'm sure your parents never intended to give you such a usable name."

We started walking again, but he kept chuckling. "You aren't a stalker or anything? I guess I probably should have thought about that before telling you my last name."

"Nah, I gave up my stalker days after the last time I got a restraining order against me." He gave me a crooked grin when he slightly turned his head to look at me. "My last name is King, if it makes you feel any better. You aren't a stalker either, right?"