Page 68 of Revelry

I glare at him. “Because it was a one-time thing.”

“What was a one-time thing?” Cooper asks, shaking out his wet hair as he walks towards us. He flops down on the seat beside me.

“Levi … and you … and I … together.”

“Really?” Cooper cocks his head to the side to look at me. He stretches one arm across the back of the booth and the other bounces in his lap in time with his leg. He smells so good right now: leather and soap and the spice of his cologne. Cooper lowers his voice and asks, “And this morning, was that a one-time thing?”

“Oh my god, I cannot be here for this,” Deb says, and she stalks to the back of the bus, but none of us have bothered to clean the room yet and it more than likely still smells of sex. She turns around, setting her steely-eyed scowl on us, and then throws herself onto her bunk, pulling the curtain firmly closed.

I look at Coop. “You really wanna do this here? In front of everyone?”

“Yeah, I kinda do.”

“Okay, then I don’t know what that was. It was nice—”

“Oooh,” Zed says, at the same time that Levi drops his spoon on the table and Ash screws up his face.

“What?”

“Nice?” Coop asks, looking for validation.

“What’s wrong with nice?”

“Dude, it’s like saying, ‘Well, the gig was okay’,” Zed says around a mouthful of bacon. “It totally means it was shit.”

I laugh. “No it’s not, it means it was nice. This morning was nice, that doesn’t mean it was bad—it was just different from last night …” I trail off because from the dejected look on Coop’s face I know I’m only making this worse. I sigh and stand up, making him shift off the couch in order to let me pass.

“I’m gonna go catch up on some sleep.” I smile, though it feels forced. “Coop?” I say, and I wait until his gaze meets mine before I open my mouth. I know everyone on the bus, including James, can hear it, but I feel like it needs to be said because I can’t have him thinking this morning was average or mediocre. It wasn’t. “For the record, I’ve never had nice. I’ve had bored, and I’ve had hurry-up-and-come-already-so-I-can-roll-over-and-forget-that-you-were-a-complete-jerk-off, and I’ve had holy-fuck-what-the-hell-just-happened? But I’ve never had nice. I kinda like nice.”

“I was totally that second last one, right?” Levi says with a smirk. I roll my eyes.

“Jesus Christ,” Ash says. “We could write a billboard fucking hit with the amount of lovey-dovey shit circulating this room right now.”

“Then do it, and we might get a private jet to fly around in instead of this crappy tour bus.” I wink and climb into my bunk, pulling the curtain closed behind me. I cover my face with my hands and fight the urge to squeal or kick my legs into the mattress like a fucking overexcited five-year-old.

Draped only in a towel, I waddle from the bathroom and down the aisle to Deb’s bunk. I can’t ask for Coop or Levi’s help with this problem.How embarrassing would that be? No, I need another female, possibly someone who has been through something this humiliating before. I whisper her name, pulling back her curtain, but she’s not there.Shit. I limp a little farther, and locate her at the very front of the bus, making coffee in the kitchen, her head bent over a gossip mag. Zed is sitting in the booth seat across from her, eating a mountain of a sandwich. His eyebrows shoot skyward when he sees me, little bits of food falling from his open mouth. Mercifully, the others are nowhere in sight.

“Deb, can I talk to you?” I venture.

She whirls around at the sound of my voice. Her eyes drift over my near-naked body and she gives me a quizzical expression, “Sure. Only I’m not my brother, so if you could put some clothes on first that’d be great.”

“That’s kind of the problem.”

Deb glares impatiently at me over the edge of her magazine. She sets it down on the table and I notice yet another article speculating over why two members of the band Taint are leaving different hotels in Vegas with the same mysterious redhead.I can’t believe she buys that shit.

“What’s the problem?”

“Well, I sort of decided to try my hand at waxing and let’s just say Mr Miyagi was a lying arsehole because this certainly wasn’t a ‘wax on, wax off’ kind of scenario. I’m … well, I’m sort of stuck.”

She bursts into peals of laughter, and I glare between her and Zed, his head cocked to the side, his gaze firmly fixed on my crotch, which is thankfully covered by the towel.

“When you say stuck …?” Zed ventures, and I ignore him in favour of hissing at Deb.

“Could you keep your voice down, please? I don’t want the others to hear.”

“Why don’t you want them to hear? And how are you stuck?” Zed asks. Sometimes it’s like Zed’s brain works on a completely different level. Musical genius he may be, but a smart man he is not.

“My outer labia are stuck together, Zed, possibly my inner labia too, now that I think about it. Not only is it humiliating, but it’s also really very uncomfortable, so if we could just move past the laughter and all the questions and get my vagina unstuck, that would be awesome.”

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