Accounting for Cole (Natural Beauty) (7 page)

He scanned the dark room, and I thought he had missed my supine form huddled under all the covers, but then his face jerked back to center and his eyes narrowed. “Whoa whoa whoa.” He stepped into the room with Beth on his arm. “Didn’t know you had company, man.”

Cole flicked a strip of condom packets at him. “Now you know, so leave.”

Dom caught them handily and tore off one, holding the rest out to Cole. “Sure you don’t need that?”

“Oh my
God
!” Beth shrieked. My dear old friend un-looped her arm from around Dom’s elbow, and tottered close to the bed to stand over me. “You really did come upstairs to take your hose off! Wink wink!”

Her giggles put her blood alcohol level at around a point oh-seven, if past experience was any indicator. She was likely still capable of reciting her address and phone number in case of emergency. Good enough.

I clamped my teeth and turned my gaze to the new man in the room. Dom was okay-looking as far as men-dressed-as-women went, I guess, but he damn sure was no
Cole.
Dom was sort of scrawny in comparison and reminded me a bit of Jon Cryer.

“I don’t want that. Keep it,” Cole said, pushing the offending strip back to Dom and guiding the smaller man out of the room by the shoulders.

Beth looked back and forth as if she were uncertain whether she should stay or go, and it wasn’t until Dom said, “Come on, babe,” that she shuffled toward the door.

Her footsteps sounded a bit odd, so I sat up to survey her feet. One of her heels had broken off.

I furrowed my forehead. “What happened to your shoe?”

Beth giggled again. “Okay, see, what happened was me and Gretch got into a widdle biddy fight. No big deal.
Totally
NBD.”

“She was
awesome
!” Dom said from the door, gesticulating wildly.

Italian. I knew it without even learning his last name.

“She jumped up on that bitch and wrapped her legs around her waist while pounding on her face. Best fight I’ve seen in ages. And that other chick, Gretchen, man, I wouldn’t want to meet her in a dark alley. She has a spot-on aim throwing shoes.”

“Sorry I missed it,” Cole mumbled disinterestedly, following them both out.

I had a thought. “Wait, Beth—where’s Gretchen?”

“I dunno,” she called from the hallway. “She said something about scrapbooking something for Marko. She’ll show up. She always does.”

Cole closed the door, locked it, and slid the chain into place. Then he turned to me and took a deep breath. “Sorry. That was mildly embarrassing. Normally I deal with Dom without an audience.”

“Embarrassing friends seem to be par for the course tonight.”

“Yeah.” He chuckled and took his previous spot on the bed, leaning back against the headboard. “Me and the little guy go way back to my Air Force days. He introduced me to this shit. He’s the guy they’re trying to team me up for that reality show with. They’re going to have to call it
Hot Mess
if he signs on.” He smiled and shook his head.

When he reached down to pull his blanket up a voice said, “It’s okay if you want to get under the covers.” Took me a few ticks to realize the voice was mine.

“Really?”

I nodded. “I don’t have cooties. At least, I don’t think.”

He studied my face for a moment, and then said, “Good to know. Cooties make things harder.”

I picked up the blanket edge, and he worked himself beneath, putting about a foot of space between the two of us. It wasn’t nearly enough. I could feel his heat. Smell his cologne.

He turned off the television and the room darkened to pitch black. “Goodnight,” he said.

“‘Night.”

“Oh, just so you know, I move around a lot in my sleep. I might accidentally smother you.”

“I drool in my sleep, so I suppose we’re even.”

“You’re cute.”

“Like a puppy, right? Or a Cabbage Patch doll?”

“Quit it.” He draped an arm over my waist, and chuckled.

* * *

When the alarm clock bleated in the morning, the sun was barely up and the room still dim.

Cole hadn’t mentioned that in addition to moving in his sleep, he also went as deaf as the dead. Although the alarm was howling at a pretty loud volume, he slept right through it, and a part of me was really okay with that. The brazen hornball part of me I never knew I had. It must have been passed to me through some airborne contagion via Beth.

Sometime during the night, Cole had snuggled up against me. I guess I had been moving around a fair amount, too, because my borrowed shirt was hiked up around my waist. His knee nestled between my thighs, and I had an acute reminder that my panties were still in his tub. I guess I shouldn’t have felt embarrassed, because his crotch was nestled against the side of my leg. He was either really happy to be there, or was having one hell of a dream.

I didn’t want to shift, but at the same time didn’t want there to be any sort of awkward conversation about our positioning when he did wake. I mean, what could I say?
Please don’t move, I like bumping bits with you
? I tried to roll myself away a bit, but in the process grazed against the tent in his shorts, prompting his olive eyes open.

He rolled over slowly, groaning, and rubbed his eyes before slapping the alarm clock off. “Sorry. Hope that didn’t disturb you. Been a long time since I’ve shared a bed with anyone. I think my body went into autopilot.”

I pondered that for a moment, but didn’t see fit to question his celibacy. I mean, if he had initiated sex, I would have had my legs wrapped around his waist in three seconds flat. Intelligent, mature, and sexy as all get-out? Cut me some slack. Even accountants need to get laid.

“It’s okay,” I lied. If it’d been up to me, we would have woken naturally, perhaps with him sliding a hand under my shirt or pressing some of those soft kisses against my neck. I sighed and looked at the goddamned alarm clock. Six thirty.

He must have saw where my gaze fell, because he offered a preemptive explanation. “We’ve got one more show in Greenville tonight, but since it’s Father’s Day and I’m so close, Bradley wanted to take me to lunch. I’m going to get a rental car and drive to Winston-Salem. He’s got a concert at a church this morning I’ll go see and then we’ll hang out until I need to head back this way.”

I nodded. It seemed like a pretty decent reason to be kicked out of a guy’s bed at the crack of dawn. My sense of shame ebbed, but not my jealousy. “His English teacher going to be there?”

Cole raised one of those perfect brows and before he could say anything I put up my hands in a conciliatory gesture.

He gave me a forgiving smile before I walked to the bathroom. When I re-emerged, wearing my undergarments, skirt, hose, shoes, and Cole’s T-shirt and carrying my still-damp blouse and drink-splattered jacket over my arm, he gave me an assessing look. He’d had the good sense to pull on a pair of sweatpants and was sifting through items in a hanging garment bag.

I cleared my throat. “If you give me an address I can send your shirt back to you.”

He pulled out a pair of black flat-front dress slacks and a very tame Oxford shirt and closed the closet door. “Don’t worry about it.” He winked. “Keep it as a souvenir.”

“Thanks.” I found my purse and keycard on the dresser and headed toward the door.

Cole followed behind me. “If you want to come to come back for tonight’s show,” he started, holding the door open for me, “I can leave your name at the entrance. It’d be nice to see a sober friendly face.”

I smiled and shook my head
no
, and it pained me to do it. I wanted to see him again. Maybe more than once. I just couldn’t relive the club nightmare to do it. Further, I didn’t need to have Beth’s worldliness to guess that if I came back, when he left—my heart would break. I couldn’t do that to myself. Better to just be grateful for the one special night, and move on.

“I don’t think so, but thank you.”

His smile drooped at the corners, but he recovered and held out his hand to shake. “Thank you for keeping me company, Miss Macy.”

I put my hand in his and let him give it a gentle caress. “Thank you for being a gentleman.”

“I’m always a gentleman. Except when I’m a lady.” He pressed soft, warm lips to mine so briefly I hardly had time to respond. Then he closed the door.

CHAPTER SIX

The drive home that morning was rather sobering for all three of us ladies, although for me in a different way than my still-inebriated companions. I couldn’t stop thinking about Cole’s wish for a real date, and the smell of him on his shirt was a constant reminder of what wasn’t going to happen. Further, what he’d said about me changing my style was haunting me. He’d meant my hair, but I couldn’t help but to feel like it was a metaphor for other things in my life, too. Hadn’t I asked
him
why he’d given up on pursuing an acting career as if it was the most natural and obvious thing in the world for him? What was natural for
me
? I wasn’t even sure anymore.

Well, sometimes uncertainty is enough. It’s all you need to make a change, even if you don’t know where you’re going to end up. I knew I was unhappy with my day-to-day monotony, even if I couldn’t pinpoint why. I figured it was time for a shake-up.

So, several weeks later, I stood in my office packing up files and shoving long stretches of computer cords into open cardboard boxes.

Mercedes stood in the doorway scowling with her arms crossed over her chest, glowering at me. “You sure you won’t change your mind?”

“Positive.” I shoved the old lady cardigan I usually kept on my chair back into one of the boxes. That cardigan had probably been acting as the strongest form of birth control available over the years. Nobody would touch me with a twenty-foot pole when I was wearing it.

“I don’t like that Ryan guy,” she said, watching me toss my nameplate into the trashcan.

“He’s annoying, I’ll give you that, but he’ll pay his rent on time. He’s the only drug-prescribing psychiatrist in the county. He’s probably rolling in the dough.”

“I don’t like the way he looks at me.”

“Yeah, he’s probably judging you.”

We stood in silence staring at each other for a while. Mercedes broke first and flicked her hair towel at me. “You know, your forehead looks really big without the bang.”

My hand automatically went to the headband I wore to keep my hair out of my eyes. No one warned me how much growing out bangs sucked.

Mercedes reached across the desk and pushed my hand away. “No, it’s good. You should feel lucky. Some people think a high forehead is a sign of wisdom.”

“Really? And what do
you
think?”

“I think you get wise by falling on your ass and fucking up a lot, but the forehead can’t hurt.”

She gave me one last wave and then left me alone to tend to whomever it was up front calling out her name.

I sighed in relief that there wasn’t going to be a tearful goodbye and picked up one of the boxes to carry out to my car. Apparently I was staring down into the box instead of out to the parking lot, because immediately after I pushed the door out, I walked smack into a column of man whose frozen drink, which had been held at chest-height, smashed into the bit of my chest exposed above the box’s rim.

“You’re a bit sticky, sweetheart,” Cole said, extricating the cup of remaining slushy drink from my box and flicking the bits of sugary slush off his hand.

I put down my box, and shook out the front of my tee shirt. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” I said.

“True enough. That was once my favorite shirt, by the way.”

“Mine now. Not to sound rude,” I said, taking the cup from him and tossing it into the trash can inside my office, “but, what are you doing here?”

He didn’t look offended. He just bent down to pick up my box and made a “Where’s this go?” shrug. “Would you believe I need tax advice?”

I shook my head, smiled, and gestured to my open car trunk.

He set the carton in and helped himself to a few sheets from the roll of paper towels I kept in the emergency box in my trunk. He kept one for himself to wipe his hands and handed the rest to me.

“We had a show in Norfolk. Dom must have been really taken with your friend Beth because he got her number last month before you left. Called her last night and they met up in Elizabeth City.”

I dabbed at the red drink dye on my shirt and chewed my lip pensively. “Beth must have been pretty taken with Dom, too, because she never gives out her real number. Odd for her. He’s not really her type.”

“Well, Dom doesn’t have a type.”

“That I could guess.”

He chuckled. “Uh. Anyway, when he stumbled back into our hotel at breakfast this morning I interrogated him on his whereabouts and he told me where he’d been. You see, our stage manager quit so when he left I took his job. I still put on a mini-skirt a few times per week, but I have a bit more free time now. I didn’t know you were so close or I would have tried to see you.”

I stopped dabbing my shirt and looked up at him with a bit of suspicion and probably a lot of hopefulness. “Why?”

“Well, I forgot to finish something before you left my room.”

I must have looked confused, because Cole lifted my chin and crushed my lips beneath his. I felt my eyes go a bit wide with shock, but he pulled me closer, sticky shirt and all, and kissed me harder, sliding his tongue between my lips and urging me to kiss back. I didn’t need more prompting. I just gave myself over to him and chewed at his lips, pulling his polo shirt out of the waist of his shorts and slipping my hands up to feel his familiar back.

When the back door slammed we both pulled apart and turned to look at Mercedes holding a bag of trash from the shop and poised to throw it into the dumpster. “Shit, that why you quitting? I’d quit, too. I’d stay home barefoot with no panties on all the time, just waiting.” She went back in, mumbling something in Spanish I couldn’t quite translate but with my high school-level language education I thought it sounded a lot like “fine-ass motherfucker” although I may have just been projecting.