Page 32 of Suddenly Dating
“I don’t mean...” She shook her head and pressed a palm to her forehead. “Forget it. I don’t know what I mean.”
“It’s okay, Lola. Come on.” He looked at her shoes. He extended his hand, palm up, and gestured for them. She put the implements of torture in his hand, then stepped gingerly off the mower.
She followed him to the truck, hopping on bare feet across the lot. She went around to the passenger side of the truck, but Harry said, “Over here.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve got some tools on that side. Over here.”
She went around the front of the truck to the driver’s side. He was holding the door open. “Get in,” he said, nodding.
Lola ducked under his arm and slid in, pausing underneath the steering wheel. The passenger seat was full of papers, blueprints, a metal box, a leather tool belt. The back seat had what looked like a bunch of rebar iron. “I don’t—”
“Console,” he said. “I would have moved stuff around but I was too tired. Move over.”
Lola slid on top of the closed console. There was no place to put her feet, really, and her dress was sliding up her thigh, but she managed to perch on top of it. Harry got in and shut the door. She was pressed against him now, her thigh wedged between his side and the console, and her bare arm against his shoulder. He was warm. Hot. A furnace that was going to blister her skin every place they touched.
He reached over her to deposit her shoes on the passenger seat, his arm brushing against her chest. “Sorry,” he muttered. He smelled clean—spicy soap clean. An image of him in a shower, rubbing some man soap all over his naked body, popped uninvited into her head.
Great. Now her cheeks were flaming. She glanced down... at the rolled up blueprints, and the Green Bean coffee cup she was straddling in the cup holder.
Harry put the truck in gear, his arm moving against her bare thigh—no matter what she did, she couldn’t keep her dress from sliding. He started a slow turnaround and said, “You wanna tell me what happened?”
He sounded brotherly, and Lola suddenly wished for Ty or Ben to magically appear and threaten to kill someone on her behalf. “No, I don’t want to tell you what happened, because you’ll think I’m an idiot if you don’t already. But I feel like I owe you an explanation since you so graciously came to get me, and I thank you so much—”
“You said. What happened?”
“Okay, I’ll tell you—it was aswingerparty.”
Harry jerked his gaze to her. And then he laughed. Quite roundly, too, as if that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. His head fell back and the cab of that truck filled with uproarious laughter.
“It’s not funny.”
“Of course it is,” he said jovially. “Are you kidding me?”
“I’m not kidding!” she insisted. “Maybe technically it wasn’t a swinger party, but it was definitely a sex party. Everyone was there to hook up! Men and men, and women and women, and men and women. Or any combination thereof.”
“Seriously?” he asked.
“Well, I don’t know about all the combinations, but yes, everyone was there to hook up. And there was alotof cocaine.”
“Yikes,” he said as he pulled onto Juneberry Road.
“Yeah, yikes,” she said, catching herself on his shoulder when he gave the truck a little gas, so that she wouldn’t fall backward into the rebar. “I’m not into that,” she said flatly. “I thought cocaine went out with big hair and the eighties.”
“I don’t think so,” Harry said, smiling as if he found that amusing.
Lola was very serious. She could not think of a single person she knew who ever did cocaine. “And then there was this guy who thought I should want to hook up with him. He got super handsy.”
Harry’s smile faded. “Not cool.”
“Sonot cool. You want to know what’s really sad? I didn’t even get it at first. People were floating off to bedrooms, and I thought, okay, they’re going off to talk. But then this guy said, ‘Looks like it’s you and me, sweetheart,’” she said, mimicking his voice, “And then started getting pretty adamant about it. Asshole.”
He’d been more than adamant—he was a pushy drunk and Lola was still shaking a little. He’d been a big man, too, almost as big as Harry, and he’d put his hands on her, groping, trying to convince her with his whiskey-soaked breath that he coulddefinitelyshow her a good time, as if that qualifier would be the magic that would cause her to consent to his clumsy advances. He’d scared her. She’d wanted only to get out of there, but the first mistake she’d made was not knowing quite where she was, thanks to her gleeful chatter with Nolan all the way there.
“So what’d you do?” Harry asked.
“Well, first I panicked. And then I almost hyperventilated when I couldn’t find Nolan. But then I found him—on the lap of a man.” Relief had washed over her nonetheless... until Nolan opened his mouth to speak. “Unfortunately, Nolan had partaken in whatever was being passed around, because when I asked him to take me home, he tried to answer, and he started giggling, and he could hardly slur two words together. And when he started looking around for his keys, I realized he was the last person I would get into a car with. So I just... I just walked out,” she said. “I walked right out the back door and down the street.” She’d thought it couldn’t be very far. Maybe four or five miles at most? “But I didn’t know quite where I was, and after a couple of blocks, my super cute shoes turned into machetes and started hacking away at my feet.”
