Page 9 of Property of Baffle
“The dancers?”Rick scoffed the words as he asked and that made me giggle.
“No, dummy.Your best friend charging on stage to claim his woman.I don’t even know them, but I bet it was a sight to see.”
“There’s always next time,” he suggested.
“Your friends have parties in Vegas often before they get married?”
He shook his head.“No.Well, yeah, maybe.We have a chapter of the club here, so I guess it happens more often than it might for people not in our club.”
“That’s fair.”I shifted to unfold my legs since I’d lost feeling in them at some point.Rick’s eyes tracked the movement and he almost got a whole show when the sheet slid down.I snatched it up so fast his eyes shot up to meet mine.
“What are you wearing under there besides my shirt?”
“Um,” I hesitated to answer.
“Never mind.It’s best if you don’t tell me.”Rick got up and made his way to the bathroom as I sat there staring at the train-wreck still paused on the TV.
It took a few minutes to remember what I left hanging in the bathroom.My face heated to lava-level redness because it took a good long while for Rick to come back out.When he finally did, the man went straight to his duffle bag, grabbed a pair of gym shorts, and tossed them to me.
“Unless you had spare panties hidden in a pocket somewhere, you must be bare under that sheet.”When I didn’t answer to confirm or deny he nodded his head.“Yeah, you should put those on.”
A tiny part of me was disappointed he asked me to cover up.Then I remembered how we met and why I was camped out in his room.Rick was trying to do right by me after what I’d been through.Damn if it didn’t make me like and respect the man even more.
I managed to pull the shorts on underneath the sheet before I stood and tied, then rolled them, as tight as I could get.Once that was done, I turned back to Rick who held the remote.“Are you really invested in this or can we get comfortable and get to know one another better?”
“Get to know one another better?”I parroted his question as my mind immediately went to dirty, naked, sweaty introductions.Rick’s smirk made it obvious he knew exactly what I’d been thinking.
“Like how old are you?More about your art, your background, family, are you dating anyone?”He rattled those questions off so quickly it was clear they’d been on his mind for some time.”
“Will you reciprocate and answer some, too?”
“Sure.A question for a question seems fair.”Rick reached out his hand to me and I took it without hesitation.We walked into the separate area that had a king bed with a nightstand on each side of it.He let go of my hand long enough to turn down the bedding on the left side before he indicated that I should hop on in.
“It’s late, been a long, draining couple of days, and I’m not going to disrespect you by trying anything.We’re going to get to know one another in a comfy place so if one of us gets tired and passes out, the other doesn’t have to carry someone to bed.”
A giggle burst free as I slipped between the sheets.“No offense, but carrying you to bed was never in the cards,” I teased.
“Damn.Thought it might be my lucky week.”Rick winked as he rounded the bed and got in on the other side.Sadly, it felt like he was a world away.
Stupid, giant beds.
“Now, tell me about Petronella.Where did you grow up?”
“You go straight for the jugular,” I mentioned as a nervous chuckle escaped me.“Long story short, I grew up in a little town just outside of Phoenix and moved to Flagstaff after my parents disowned me when I was seventeen.”
“Seventeen?What happened to make them decide that?”
“I think it had been in the works for a few years.My dad was an Evangelical pastor.My mom was the cliched pastor’s wife mixed with a good dose of evil nun and she thought very highly of herself.She had that holier than thou attitude, nose in the air, I’m better than you because I’m married to a man of God entitlement with everyone.It was worse with me, though, because I could never please her.”I rolled my eyes as I tried to put a good description of my mother together.“Do you remember that one pastor’s wife from the big TV church in the 1980s?The one who wore all the clown makeup?”
Baffle chuckled and shook his head.“Bit before my time.I was a kid in the 90s.”
“Yeah, I guess so.I know who she was because my mom wanted to be her for some reason.Honestly, I think she just wanted my father to be more popular, so it would increase her standing and the money they had wouldn’t hurt her feelings either.She could buy more pearls to clutch.Anyway, you’ll have to Google the woman, and you can get that image stuck in your head and pretend it’s my mom.”I chuckled at the thought.The one thing my mother didn’t want to emulate was that woman’s makeup.Anyway, if you mixed that Godly, power-hungry, crazy lady vibe with the cliched evil nun who abuses the kids in Catholic schools, you would have Gloria Bushing to a tee.”
“Sounds like a peach.”
I rolled my eyes again.“There wasn’t a warm, empathetic, or maternal bone in her body.”
“And your dad, the pastor?”Rick asked.
