Page 76 of Here We Go Again
When Logan falls asleep in a damp pile of sheets, Rosemary slinks over to the small hotel desk. She moves the pizza and sits in the chair, still completely naked, and starts writing on the hotel stationery.
Chapter Twenty-Three
ROSEMARY
“Are you really going to eat a shrimp po’boy at ten in the morning?”
Both Joe and Logan look at her from across the table like that question is the most ridiculous part of this little tableau. Logan has her po’boy suspended midair in front of her unhinged jaw, and Odie is halfway in her lap, ready to catch any falling shrimp. “Why wouldn’t I?” Logan asks before cramming the monstrosity into her mouth, remoulade sauce dripping down her chin. And for some inexplicable reason, Rosemary finds the whole thing very attractive.
She imagines Logan’s mouth wrapped around a moan of pleasure, her fingers grazing her own skin across the bathtub…
Maybe it’s not so inexplicable.
Rosemary banishes all sexy shrimp thoughts and turns to Joe. “Really, Joe. For breakfast?”
“Rosemary, I’m dying,” Joe snaps. “I’m not sure how many times I have to tell you this. And if I’m going to be dead tomorrow, then I absolutely need to eat this shrimp po’boy.”
“You aren’t going to die tomorrow.” She rolls her eyes, and then she hands him an extra napkin. Joe chomps down on his po’boy with slightly less vigor than Logan, but his eyes still go wide in his wrinkled face.
“Best po’boy ever, right?” Logan asks through a full mouth.
Joe swallows. “Better than any po’boy I’ve had in New Orleans. The perfect last meal.” Then they’re both stuffing their faces again.
Joe got them up early this morning and said nothing about the state of their damp, rumpled king bed. Rosemary was too tired to be subtle. She didn’t sleep at all—she’d been too wired, too awake, too filled up with Logan to know what to do with herself. So, she wrote while Logan snored. She wrote until her eyes became too sore and too heavy to keep staring at the white paper in the dark hotel room. And even when she finally got into bed, she still couldn’t sleep. She lay there beside Logan, counting her own heartbeats and Logan’s exhalations.
They left Dallas before six in the morning. Texas sunrise is almost as beautiful as New Mexico sunset: pinks, blues, and yellows stretched out across a never-ending sky as they drove east. Rosemary took the first shift, and as she drove through the quiet of the morning, she couldn’t wrap her mind around how the outside world appeared relatively unchanged while her world had been flipped upside down.
She’d had sex. With Logan Maletis.
Sex had never felt like a goalpost or a major life event she needed to reach. It was never an item on her to-do list. It didn’t matter to her the way it seemed to for everyone else, and until she kissed Logan in the rain, she wasn’t sure she would ever have it.
But then Logan gave her total control, made her feel safe, made her feel sexy. She gave all her trust to Logan, and Logan showed her a version of sex that felt like emotional connection. Like a really good conversation on the front porch watching the stars.
And now. Now, she doesn’t entirely know how tobe. She doesn’t know what any of it means to Logan. Or what it means to her. They were best friends, and then they were high school enemies; they spent ten years apart and four years hating each other. The friendship truce and feelings.
Where do they even stand now? What are they to each other? And where do they go from here?
She might be spiraling a bit.
Joe insisted they stop in Shreveport, Louisiana, and he directed them to a restaurant in what appeared to be an old auto repair shop. A man in a fedora greeted them and introduced himself as the owner. Then, when he saw the Gay Mobile parked outside, he smacked his thigh and loudly declared in front of all the Shreveport locals—“I’m queer too! Queers get the special discount!”
Rosemary nervously glanced around the restaurant, but none of the locals batted an eye at the owner’s antics. They got fifteen percent off their order, and Rosemary felt some kind of way about this gay man in the Deep South who owned a popular small business and was unapologetically himself.
“I-I’ve changed my mind,” Joe suddenly announces over breakfast. “I don’t think I can go to Ocean Springs.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
Joe blots his mouth with a napkin. “I-I don’t want him to… to see me like this.”
Rosemary reaches for him across the table. “You’re beautiful, Joe.”
“Oh, fuck you! I look like a man who isactivelydying. I have liver spots, girls.Liver spots!At sixty-four!”
“You look like a man who haslived,” Rosemary insists. “And Remy will have aged, too.”
Under the table, Logan reaches for her. It’s just a hand brushing against her leg, then settling itself on her knee.
“Yes, but he probably aged like a Black Harrison Ford. I want him to remember the version of me that was young and lithe and wrinkle-free, with a fully functioning cock.”
