I don’t turn around, I stare into the dark void ahead.
“Been looking all over for you,” he adds. “You wanna come in? The A-Chi-O girls are here and we’re about to do some body shots. Got a sexy redhead in there with your name on her. Don’t keep her waiting.”
Talon is hesitant at first, but he remains planted beside me. “Nah, man. I’m taking it easy tonight.”
I give him a slow side glance.
“What? No way. You sure?” his buddy asks.
Talon waves him away. “Yep, I’m good. I’ll catch you in a bit though.”
His friend leaves and once again it’s just the two of us.
“I hope you didn’t do that for my sake,” I tell him.
“You really think I’d rather be in there sucking Patron from some freshman’s belly button than sitting out here with you? Under the stars?”
“Duh.”
He brushes his shoulder against mine. “You’re out of your mind, Irie Davenport.”
No one ever calls me by my full name and in general, I find it a bit strange, but for some reason, coming from his lips with his crushed velvet voice vibrating in my ear, it sends my stomach into a somersault.
Silence settles between us, but in my defense, I don’t know how to transition from that. He’s pouring on the charm, trying so damn hard to get in my good graces, and I’d be lying to myself if I said I didn’t enjoy it—at least a little bit.
Half of me wants to send him inside to the waiting human shot glass sorority chick.
The other half of me wants to linger in this moment, under the stars, beside the warmth that radiates off his body and onto mine.
“You know this house used to belong to the mayor,” he says. “Like back in the nineteen twenties when this town was founded. It served as city hall for a while, when the first one burned down. And during the Vietnam War, it was a sort of halfway house for returning soldiers. In the eighties, I heard it was a brothel or something.”
I shoot him a look. “Random.”
“Thought you were into houses and all that,” he says. “With your interior design major.”
He isn’t wrong.
“How did you know all of that?” I ask. “About the history of the house? Did you Google it when I wasn’t looking?”
“My stepdad owns the place,” he says. “He bought it back in the nineties when it was at auction. Fixed it up enough to turn it into a place he could rent to college kids. My mom wanted to do a full restore, make it look just like it did when it was first built. She’s kind of an interior design junkie herself. But Mark wouldn’t have it. He wanted to make a quick buck because that’s what he does.”
“Your family owns this house?”
“My stepdad does. Yeah.”
“Why don’t you live here?” I ask.
“You saw the current state of the inside, right? Would you live here?”
“No.”
“I rest my case,” he says.
“Doesn’t your stepdad care that this beautiful house is being completely destroyed?”
“As long as it’s padding his bank account, he couldn’t give a shit less.” He glances up at one of the lit windows on the second floor. The shadows of two people behind the sheer curtain leave very little to the imagination.
The last time I hooked up with anyone was almost a year ago, when I briefly dated this theater major who unironically turned out to be a bit too dramatic for my liking in the end. I’d never seen a man cry so much over everything. Sex with him was slow and meticulous, and I swear he tried to make it look the way it does in film and on television—like softcore porn. But it got to the point where it was distracting, and sometimes all I wanted was to fuck and to be fucked.
But those slow and sensual Oscar-worthy kisses …
I miss the hell out of those.
“So your mom is into interior design?” I ask, trying to keep the conversation neutral and non-sexual in any way possible.
“Yeah, she actually used to have her own design firm,” he says. “Back before she met Mark anyway. He’s a builder and real estate developer and after they got married, she closed her freelance firm and worked with him on all his projects.”
“Nice,” I say.
“I swear every time I go home the house looks different. Hell, she even changes up my bedroom at least once a year.”
I shrug. “I get it. Sometimes it gets old looking at the same things all the time. It’s fun to switch things up.”
“Yeah, but my room?”
“Maybe it reminds her of something she doesn’t want to be reminded of?”
“Such as?” he asks.
“I don’t know … maybe when she looks at it, she thinks about her baby boy who’s all grown up and maybe that makes her sad?”