Random Acts of Fantasy (9 page)

But it’s kind of like watching your best friend walk down to his own execution to see him doing it in front of Crazy Suzy, who now looked like she was calculating the tension of the wire she’d need to garrote Darla.

“Joey!” Suzy exclaimed in the Voice of Death. How she dropped three octaves into
Exorcist
pea-soup-scene territory so quickly was a force of nature to admire.

Joe’s head snapped up and he caught my eyes for a split second as it registered who was standing next to me.

It was like watching hope die.

“Suzy?” he choked out. Now it was Darla’s turn to change expression, those apple cheeks nice and shiny then going slack as Suzy stomped her way to Joe, long, slim, tanned legs in five-inch stilettos click-clacking across the buffed marble floor like gunshots.

Aimed right for Darla’s heart.

Joe’s pleading look as he let go of Darla and steered himself toward Suzy said—without words—that I needed to man up and help him in no uncertain terms.

I’ve got your back
, I wanted to tell him. That hand on my ass. Just the memory of it made me shudder. Once a man identifies crazy, his body stops responding to it.

Except when drunk. Unfortunately, the dick shuts off in the presence of alcohol and turns into a golden retriever. It finds friends everywhere and loves to stick its nose in every woman’s crotch.

(Actually, alcohol isn’t always required.)

“Who is that?” Darla asked me, the twist of her neck dangerous and predatory. The hair on my arms stood up, a prickly sensation pouring over all my exposed skin. As Suzy and Darla locked eyes, it was like watching Magneto and Professor X square off, the electricity in the room taking on a taste.

The taste of a cat fight that reached into electromagnetic fields.

“I don’t like her,” Darla added, the words cold and dead, spoken with such conviction and clarity that I began to imagine random items in the airport levitating. Spinning out of control into a vortex of unimagined dimensions wasn’t on our list of things to do in the hour before our plane to Miami boarded.

Sorry. No time for this.

Joe looked like he’d just seen Elijah Wood from
Maniac
. Or wished he had. Maybe having Suzy scalped would be a kinder way to let her live out her remaining moments, because Darla turned away from where Suzy chatted with great animation and fervor as Joe really, truly turned green.

“And who, exactly, is she?” Darla asked with an arch in her voice higher than a runway fashion model’s foot in Milan. Her hand shot out and brushed against her braless boob and I froze, completely engrossed by the beauty of her soft roundness, how that arm got to rub up against her breast whenever it wanted, with heedless insouciance, and I wanted to be that upper arm.

Her elbow.

I wanted to be anything but me, Trevor, standing in an airport watching this train wreck unfold before me. We were supposed to be having fun, dammit, and watching Joe get air humped by the words coming out of Suzy’s mouth while Darla prepared to turn Suzy into a one-woman human centipede wasn’t my idea of frolicking.

Liam, Sam, and Amy walked up behind me, all gawking at Joe and—

“Is that Suzy?” Sam gasped, starting to laugh and then pretending to cough.

“Holy shit!” Liam burst out, letting his laughter come out. He clapped Sam on the shoulder and the two of them turned away, snickering.

“Dude is so fucked,” Sam added as Amy looked at me, bewildered.

“Suzy is…”

“Joe’s ex.”

Joe and I were no stranger to women fighting over us. Especially Joe. He’d been at the center of chick fights for all of college, and most of the band’s life.

Maybe we should have named ourselves Hair Pull.

Something about him drew women to him like moths to a flame. Babies to a breast. Middle-aged women to Benedict Cumberbatch. Sam to his sticks. Liam to pussy. A great dane to a woman’s crotch.

You get the point.

Darla hadn’t met any of our exes, though, and the look of confusion and pure revulsion as she and Suzy sized each other up and found the other deeply wanting made my hands clench.

And then it hit me.

Joe hadn’t told her.

Every relationship has that awkward point where you have to tell each other your innermost thoughts and feelings, and all that touchy-feely crap.

And then there’s your cock’s story. Oh, it has one. The cock has its own biography, and it can be a slim volume stapled and folded in half like a little pamphlet or a three-volume series complete with extensive footnotes. Some books even need to be read while wearing sterile gloves and an air-filter mask.

But our cocks all have a history, and when we get into a new relationship, the dick’s dirty laundry has to be aired.

Joe, though, had kept his stinkiest, most-stained nasty old cloth to himself. And now that old cloth was getting rubbed in his face in an airport terminal between a donut shop and an airport bookstore with a long line of
Fifty Shades
books the backdrop for his comeuppance. 

I groaned. Couldn’t help it. My time interpreting and explaining my dick’s adventures hadn’t been exactly fun, but Darla got it. Her pussy had some tales to tell as well, and her history was more Scheherazade than Pope Joan. I mean, my magic number was still larger than hers, but not by much. A finger or two, if we’re counting.

Those stories, I knew, had been told to Joe, because Darla told me she’d told him.

Turned out old Joe had been holding out on her.

“Joe never told you about Suzy,” I said in a hiss of a sigh. My chest ached and my legs were filled with a tight energy that needed to be kicked out.

On Joe’s ass.

“Suzy.” Darla might as well have said, “Shit.”

“Suzy is Joe’s
ex
,” I started to explain.

“I heard Sam say that. She better be.” I looked at Darla—really looked at her. The anxiety she’d shown in the TSA line was gone. All her focus was on Suzy, which was good. Whatever the fuck had happened back in Government Grope Land was done, and now we had this mess to deal with.

Her chest heaved and her eyes were so narrow and determined, so pinpoint smart, that my cock began to twitch, then slowly rise and make my pants tight.

The power emanating off Darla as she held herself back from marching over to Joe and Suzy showed a possessive side to her, a deep loyalty I knew was there but hadn’t been tested yet.

Groupies stayed the fuck away from us now, and all Darla had to do was glare at them.

Suzy?

Oh, my big blond beast had just met her match.

“She’s his ex, all right. The third restraining order finally took.” I knew my words would have to be chosen carefully, but Darla’s spitfire made my blood pump through me so hard it all collected in my penis and threatened to be mistaken for the nose of a jet plane.

“Restraining order? Did you say
restraining order
?”

I nodded.

“Cray cray?”

“Yep.”

Darla frowned, then rolled her eyes. “I bet she
still
got to meet Joe’s parents.”

Ouch. I winced. Not that I could say much. My parents still hadn’t met Darla, either, but they at least knew she existed. That made me slightly less of an asshole than Joe, and I’d take it.

I slipped my arm around her waist. Suzy’s eyes flicked up and caught the move, and the resulting smile made my balls crawl up and tuck into my ribcage.

She looked at Joe now like he was a plate of tiramisu and she was ten months pregnant.

“The reunion is lovely,” Sam said in his slow, quiet, neutral way, “but we need to get to our gate and prepare for the ride.”

“I’d miss a plane to watch this,” Liam whispered. “It’s like the best reality show ever.
Wedding Crashers
meets
Fantasy Island
.”

“You should write screenplays,” I said. Liam pointed his finger at me like a gun and pretended to fire, then walked off with Sam and Amy toward the gate, the three of them looking back at Joe and Suzy.

I’ve seen plenty of bored guys in my life. And I’ve seen Joe bored out of his mind, high as a kite, angry as fuck, terrified beyond belief, and filled with unrestrained glee.

I have never, ever seen him manage eighty percent of those in one look.

Until now.

Darla stepped forward and I grabbed her arm, which she shook off with a terrifying level of anger. Fuck. I needed to step up my game.

“The restraining order must have expired,” I explained, calculating the months in my head. Yup. About a month ago. “And it’s probably a coincidence—”

“Riiiiiiiggghhht.” Amy had walked up behind us and now stood right next to Darla, shoulder to shoulder, her head held high and eyes narrowed, like a hawk’s. She and Darla traded a look that made my blood run cold and my cock tighten.

Amy did that thing chicks do, where they suck in air through their teeth and then talk in a hushed, low voice while they act like they’re not talking. Major turn-on from anyone but Amy.

“Her thighs can’t be real,” Amy said.

I knew the answer to that one. “Liposuction.” Both women looked at me with raised eyebrows, not because they were surprised by my answer, but with twin looks of surprise that I was still there.

Taking the hint, I grabbed my bag and walked over to the water fountain. Amy could pull Darla off Suzy before an ear got ripped off or a nipple bitten. She was tougher than she looked.

But I was still in earshot. Joe needed backup.

“She’s plastic. Mommy and Daddy paid a boatload to keep that body going. Spray-on tan and shoes that cost $300,” Amy stage whispered to Darla.

“$300! And she can barely walk in them.” My eyes watched what they critiqued and it made me realize chicks live on a completely different plane from me. All I saw when I looked at Suzy was nice, high tits, athletic legs, and smooth skin.

Nice.

But the crazy eyes negated it all. There was a look in them that said she was as likely to give a guy head while driving down the highway as she was to cut off his penis with an old nail file and fling it out the open window.

Just as Amy was about to explain the $300 shoes to Darla, Suzy leaped forward and gave Joe a sweet kiss on the cheek. She grabbed her rolling bag and ran off down a slanted hallway to the international section of the airport.

Joe walked toward us, alternating expressions of deep relief and uncertainty.

“So that was Suzy,” he said to Darla as he got closer. “My—”

“Ex.” They said it in unison. Amy and Darla folded their arms over their chests simultaneously, shifting their weight onto one hip.

He was so fucked.

Chapter Five

Joe

In the movies, there’s this moment when someone—one of those dispensable characters who has a first name but no other meaningful qualities—sees something and has a change in expression that tells the audience that he or she is about to die, and that the entire trajectory of the movie’s story line is seconds away from changing.

Forever.

Irrevocably.

Meet that moment in my life. Right here. Right now.

Suzy made me want that bus to take me out, that sniper to put a shot through my brain, for that
deus ex machina
to rip into the scene and make the problem of Suzy, and the detonation of Darla, end with a bang that took me out of the picture.

Staying in the picture was a kind of torture.

Like being in
Saw 12
.

Her entire being gave me hives. Clinical case of actual hives. A release of histamine in my body was the reaction to seeing those pert tits, those tight little calves that used to wrap around my waist as she squealed my name when I made her come, her manicured fingers with that perfect, sophisticated shade of tannish-pink that had a name, like Sun-kissed Lips, that my mother would know if Suzy were to meet her for lunch at a vegan restaurant in the Back Bay and they traded fashion tips.

And the nail polish would be cruelty-free, vegan, fair trade, and tested only on fully consenting disabled little people who were undergoing sex-change operations.

In Darfur.

Suzy’s eyes had gripped me the same way her lean, petite little cheerleader’s ass made my dick swell. Painfully and with total engagement.

I could feel Darla’s eyes burning through us, like Godzilla, except with less control. Trevor could keep her contained, but why? There was nothing to worry about. Nothing to be jealous about.

And that tiny detail where I never told her that I’d dumped Suzy a few months before I came to Ohio, and that it had taken the full strength of the Massachusetts court system to get her to stop stalking and sexting?