Page 104 of Bad at Love
“I can’t remember what I said. Probably along the lines of, bring that hot blonde friend of yours and then she probably told me to shut up.”
Huh. To think that he was looking formewhen I first showed up at The Joint.
“But you had a girlfriend,” I point out.
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
Whoa. My eyes narrow at him. I’m his girlfriend now, so what doesthatmean?
“The truth is,” he goes on, “that night, I consulted the 8 Ball and asked it if I should break up with my girlfriend and go for you instead.” He laughs to himself. “It told me Outlook Not So Good.”
“What?” I cry out softly. “You mean to tell me you would have asked me out if the fucking Magic 8 Ball would have said yes?”
He nods. “Pretty much.”
“Laz…that’scrazy. You can’t do that.”
“Do what?” His brows knit together. “I told you that’s what I do.”
“But this is…this is playing with other people. This is playing with me. I mean, my life…my life would be completely different now if I had gone out with you back then.”
“Different, but not better. Neither of us would have been better off.” He takes off his seatbelt and leans in closer, cupping my face in his hands. His eyes search mine. “Marina, I was an absolute fool until we got together. You would have not wanted to date me back then. Fuck, you wouldn’t have wanted to date me a month ago. The time is right, finally, now, for both of us.”
He’s right. I know he is. The timing would have been off. We would have dated then broken up because he’s such a commitment-phobe or whatever his problem is and then we would have never been friends. We would have never had what we have now.
“Just promise me, you’ll stop using that damn 8 Ball. I’m a part of your life now. I don’t want a toy dictating our fate.”
“I haven’t been. Not seriously.”
I chew on my lip for a moment, gathering courage to ask him a serious question. “Why do you do it? Why the 8 Ball? What does it mean to you?”
He squints off into the distance, looking a tad embarrassed. “Well,” he says in a low voice. “My father had one as a joke.”
“Oh.” He doesn’t have to say anymore.
But he does. “At night, when he had been drinking, he’d get me to play fortune teller. We would do this for hours. It helped calm him down. It calmed me down. Sometimes it didn’t work and he’d throw it across the room, trying to smash it, then smash everything he could lay his hands on. Sometimes that was me.”
Oh,shit.
“But, you know, that thing never broke. I did but…it didn’t.” He glances at me. “Don’t worry, he wasn’t beating the shit out of me or my mother or anything. But he would hurt me. And what would break was everything inside. You know, that place where love comes from. That’s what he’d break.”
“Your heart?” I whisper.
“I don’t know, you’d think I’d be more eloquent,” he says, his eyes wide, staring blankly at nothing. He shakes his head. “When I came home to visit right after he left us, the only thing he left behind of his was that Magic 8 Ball. I still have it. I don’t use it though. It’s in a box in the closet. But I use one because it calms me…just to know that you don’t have to make decisions, that someone else, something else, is making them for you. There’s no responsibility. And I like that. I like to think that my father consulted it before he left us and that the ball made the decision to leave us and never look back. Then…it wouldn’t be personal.” He pauses, looks at me. “But it’s personal.”
“Laz,” I say softly, my heart breaking for him. “I am so sorry.”
He stares at me for a moment then his gaze falls to my lips. He undoes his seatbelt. Shoves his chair back as far as it will go, reaches for me. “Come here,” he says gruffly.
There’s not a lot of space but there’s enough that I’ll fit. I move carefully over the console, balancing myself on his shoulders until I’m straddling him, grateful I’m wearing a miniskirt.
He grins at me, his hands trailing up into my hair, my eyes closing from that sensation. I know he’s making this physical because he doesn’t want to talk about the emotional, and that’s okay. One step at a time. Besides, I did say I wanted to fuck him in this car.
I adjust myself on his hips, my hand slipping down toward his pants. I shift to undo the top button, bracing myself on his shoulder. I bite my lip as I tug down his zipper. I can feel him hard, bare, and ready beneath me. I’m wet as hell. It’s instant now, even justthinkingabout sex with him.
He knows too. He puts one hand at the small of my back, the other slipping between my legs, pushing the dress up, shoving my underwear aside. My clit screams with pleasure the moment his fingers slide against me, slick and hard.
“You need to stop wearing knickers,” he murmurs, staring at me with shiny eyes. “You’re drenched.”
