Random Acts of Fantasy (11 page)

When she looked up, her eyes did that thing only Darla could do, where somehow the way they moved told me everything she was feeling. The eyes themselves were a beacon, a light inviting me to come on an intense journey with her into our hearts and bodies.

And I was hard. Just like that.

All thoughts of Suzy vanquished, what was left in me was a big, roaring train full of want and hope aimed straight at this crooked-smiled, bright-eyed, curvy woman wearing no bra and looking like the most beautiful, vulnerable, challenging person in the world.

Who had my heart and dick handcuffed to her hip.

Voluntarily.

I leaned down and brushed her golden hair away from her jaw, those knowing eyes finding mine. I heard the guys urging us to get our asses in gear, something about boarding, and then Amy’s beseeching tone, but when my lips found Darla’s it was all I could do not to take her right there, the world disappearing as my arms wrapped around her, the hair on my forearms brushing under her long, frizzy waves, buried in her the way I inhaled and found myself encased by her entire being.

As it should be.

She grounded me. Made my feet feel like I wasn’t always buzzing, needing to run off to do the Next Thing that someone expected of me, to tap dance on top of a rolling stone engulfed in flames. With Darla I could exhale. Then inhale. Smile. Then really smile.

Sappy, huh?

Suck it. You’re not the one who gets to feel her very real body pressed against yours, to breathe in her essence, to know that she is rock solid in her devotion and loyalty to you. Nothing replaces that. Not one damn thing in this world can, because the fakery and pretension that I subscribe to won’t let it.

She makes me believe that the Suzys and Moms of the world are the
pretend
, and that my own doubt about them is
truth
.

Which is why she’s so damn dangerous, and why I pried my lips from hers.

“Damn it! They’re right. We’re going to miss the plane if we keep this up.” I grabbed her hand and my bag and started to move us toward the gate.

Flustered, all she did was stand there, arm pulled nearly out of its socket by me. Darla looked like a deer stuck in headlights, and not a deer wearing a guitar.

And only a guitar.

She broke the statue thing she was doing and took off like a shot, lumbering through and weaving between people like she was on roller skates. Gave me a sweet view of her ass, too.

And I was still hard.

Darla

Just when I damn near got to knock my brain out of this anxious loop-de-loop it was doing about being afraid of flying, I had to run. Joe gave me the perfect fucking excuse to get out of my own head: his fiancee.

FEE-ON-SAY. Like Beyonce, only without the Hulk face while dancing. Fiancee. He put a ring on that toothpick-legged chick with the useless shoes and a bitchface that could give Tori Spelling a run for her money.

We got to the counter thingy in front of the gate where we were supposed to get on the plane, the unnecessary glare from an uptight airline employee ratcheting up my overall state like someone falling off their roof and snapping a femur after getting attacked by a swarm of bees.

I just didn’t need that shit at that exact moment.

“You’re cleared to board,” said the perfectly coiffed woman with hazel eyes and drawn-on eyebrows, her lips a shade of red that you only found on mail-order-bride websites from Russia.

“Thank you!” Joe and I said in unison, looking around. No Trevor, Sam, Liam, or Amy.

Hope they boarded already.

Oh—and no Suzy.

FEE-ON-SAY. Joe almost married the woman. That meant love, right? Men don’t put a ring on it if they don’t intend to declare themselves before a justice of the peace or the president of Harvard or whoever the fuck performs weddings out here in Fancyland.

Joe almost made Chicken Legs his forever woman.

And never said one single word about her to me.

So, if you are with someone for seven months, and you’re trying to figure out whether you’re in love, you talk about your past loves, right? Me and Trevor had. He knew all the nitty-gritty about Davey, the atrocious car-window speller, and the other mumblety-mumblety number of guys I’d been with. And that one girl.

Maybe. We were seventeen and I had a lot of peach and peppermint liqueur, so my recollection of that night is hazy. I do know there was a kiss…

“What are you thinking about?” Joe asked sweetly, which made all my sensors go off and scream like DEFCON 9000. Because Joe didn’t
do
sweet.

And no straight man ever,
ever
asks a woman what she’s thinking. It would be like a man having a period or suddenly thinking Josh Groban is the best singer
ever
, or begging to rent
The Notebook
and watch it. Nuh-uh.

“I am thinking that you are trying to deflect me by going all gooey-metrosexual man on me and that shit ain’t gonna work.” I handed my boarding pass to a woman who used a handheld scanner on it.
Beep!
And then she handed the paper back and did the same with Joe’s.

But she didn’t tell me what to do next, and I stared at a doorway that looked like the tunnel to hell. A gaping maw without teeth, and a whooshing sound with the distinct scent of cooked rubber and air freshener. My stomach roiled.

Wasn’t this all enough already? Mama’s diabetes problems, Joe being gone and coming back, juggling his jealousy and Trevor’s needs, adjusting to my new, weird job, and then this invitation to a place called “Eden”—and to top it off, Joe’s ex-fiancee shows up and there’s some sort of kinky ex-stalkerchick element there that I’m supposed to process?

Hello! Too much. Overload. Not okay. My motherboard just fritzed out as I stood there.

I couldn’t move. Joe bumped into me as he tried to go, and whispered, “Darla. Go through the door to board.”

Silence. My brain just…wandered off. Like an American hockey player in the finals against Canada at the Olympics.

“Darla,” he said more urgently. People were looking at us. I didn’t care. My brain was picking daisies in the sunlight. My brain was a little girl dressed in a bee costume in a field of flowers. My brain was a teenage singer dressed in a bear costume licking a rope. My brain had done gone over.

Joe grabbed my upper arm and yanked me out of the way. Everything smelled like chemicals, like structure and oppression and fear and control. I couldn’t go down that hallway. There Be Dragons, or something like that.

Why couldn’t we just take a bus and then a nice ferry to the island?

“What is wrong with you?” Now his voice was a blend of anger and genuine concern. Nice of Joe to summon that from the depths of that cold little heart.

Truth. My brain decided to let my mouth open and dump out the truth.

“I hate you and Trevor’s better in bed than you.”

OKAY. NOT TRUE. But apparently my brain had decided that it was better to piss him off than to admit my vulnerability. My brain can be stupid like that. It’s part Justin Bieber in an M&M factory with a tricked-out forklift made from a Hummer. With a flamethrower attachment.

“I love you, too, dear,” he said. It felt like a smack in the face, but he said it with a smile. Our eyes locked. My heart slammed in my chest. The air smelled like flowers and hope and freedom. Nothing but Joe was here, and he reached for my hand and slipped something in it.

A ring?

Nope. A pill.

“Swallow this. You clearly have a problem with flying,” he added, his voice clinical and nonchalant, as if the “I love you” meant nothing. Apparently it hadn’t. It was a joke to him, said as a joke and meant as a joke, and dammit, that’s how I’d have to take it, too.

My head pounded in a jagged off-beat, out of sync with my heart. I dry-swallowed it and grabbed my bag, following him into that tunnel. Then my brain kicked back in and I asked:

“What was that you just gave me?”

“It’s like a Valium. Just don’t drink any alcohol on the plane and you’ll be fine. What do you normally take when you fly?”

See? He assumed I’d flown before. And if I admitted I never had, it would become another thing that separated me from Trevor and Joe. I’d be poor, underprivileged Darla who didn’t know anything about the world, and I was sick of that. So I played along.

“I don’t take anything.” Which was technically true.

“Nothing? I’d think for anxiety like you have—”

The floor was a series of sections with thick edges, covered with a rolling black industrial carpet that smelled like rotten oil. The air was pumped through by some kind of fan and a jumbled pile of hastily dropped strollers greeted my view as we came around a slight curve. The stewardess looked like a warden.

“I don’t have anxiety!” I said.

He laughed, that low, comfortable sound people make when they’ve been together a while and know each other. “If you don’t have anxiety, then I don’t have ambition.”

Fair enough. I let it slide because why argue when you’re boarding the plane to your own death? At least I’d get a bag of peanuts and a watered-down cup of pop before meeting Satan.

Acting like a mute eight-year-old got me through greeting the stewardess, who seemed to glare at me and speak in words I didn’t understand, but I forged ahead as a nice, low-level glow started to build inside me. She sounded like she was speaking Bulgarian.

The inside of the plane looked exactly like it did in the movies and on television, except all the seats seemed to be designed for people with twelve-inch asses. I possess an ass that is distinctly not in the twelve-inch range. Not even close. Hell, I think I slithered out of my mama’s body with an ass bigger than that. When we got to our row, Trevor was already there, his brow creased with worry.

He looked hot.

And I creased my brow, too, and said, “You don’t think my ass can fit in any of these seats either, do you? Don’t worry. I’m sure they have an ass crowbar somewhere here.”

Someone in the row ahead of us chuckled and I fell in love.

“Your ass is fine,” Trevor said, shooting Joe a look that I didn’t understand, because my hands had decided to defect from the rest of my body. It was kind of nice, being handless and all. Suddenly, the plane seemed so loving. I wanted to just start singing that old ’70s Coca-Cola commercial song.

So I did.

Trevor un-clicked his seatbelt and jumped up. He’d taken the aisle seat, and Joe whispered furiously in his ear, the two arguing while I looked around the plane for my hands. Detachable hands.

“Detachable penis,” I began to sing, and that caught Liam’s and Sam’s attention. A big old red head of hair turned around and looked at me with more expression than I knew Sam was capable of making with that beautiful face.

“You our new lead singer?” he asked. Amy giggled.

“I hear you, Amy. How’s your phone?”

She went silent.

And then a wave of fear poured over me. Where would I sit? My ass was too juicy to squeeze between my men. The only way this would work would be to reduce the amount of stuff that I had to fit in that itty-bitty seat, and I couldn’t cut off chunks of my own flesh.

So I came upon a lovely solution as I began to panic in earnest.

My clothes had to go. Any layer that added bulk to my body was now non-essential. While Joe and Trevor hissed at each other like they were speaking in Parseltongue, I began to unbutton my jeans. Joe caught me out of the corner of his eye and smacked Trevor’s shoulder.

“Darla?” Trevor’s hand grabbed mine. Oh my God! My hands were back! I wrenched the one he held away and started clapping. Yup. If you love your hands set them free. If they come back, they’re yours. If they don’t, then they’ll probably end up in the property of some serial killer who uses your skin as a pussy pocket.

Words to live by.

“Pussy pocket hands,” I marveled. Hands. Hands look like five-legged spiders, you know? Spiders. I hate spiders. I began to shake, because holy motherfucking shit, there were spiders attached to the ends of my arms!

“I think the flight is terrifying her,” Joe explained as Trevor made me sit down. He took the window seat, carefully guiding me into the middle, and Joe took the aisle seat, his face smug as a bug in a rug.

Or something like that.

“You’re shivering,” Trevor said, throwing a thin blanket with the airline’s logo on it over my lap.

“Spiders,” I murmured. “Spiders on a motherfucking plane.”

He laughed. “No, that’s snakes on a motherfucking plane.”

“SNAKES?” I screamed. “OH MY GOD, WHERE?”

A few people who were loading their luggage into those bins up top stopped and frowned at us, and Trevor clutched me in his arms, pushing my mouth against his shoulder. “There aren’t any snakes or spiders anywhere, Darla. It’s okay. It’s fine to be a nervous flyer. You’ll be okay.”

“I am not a nervous flyer.”