We Are Made of Stardust - Peaches Monroe #1 (6 page)

He nodded. “Good weather for it.”

The petite, muddy woman before us reached her hand up to get some help up, then yanked the driver’s arm and pulled him to the ground again. Throughout all this, Dalton was dumbstruck, just watching. She was reaching for the hem of my dress just as the driver brought her under control, both of them grunting near my feet.

I felt conflicted, because this woman Alexis was the aggressor, but seeing her get held down by a man struck something in me. A deep, girl-power something. I grabbed the driver and tossed him into a hedge.

Everyone got really quiet, including Mr. Galloway on his porch.

Dalton helped extricate his driver from the hedge, Alexis got quietly to her feet, and everyone turned to stare at me.

“You are one bad ass girl,” Dalton said.

“Thanks.” I attempted to smooth down my hair and look demure.

The door of my house opened and my roommate and best friend, Shayla, burst out in a sleeveless T-shirt and boxer shorts. “What the fuck are you all doing on my lawn?” She spotted me and her expression became more confused. “Peaches! You look so good in that dress. I don't know what those other girls were complaining about.”

Cold water blasted me. I yelped and started running for cover. Everyone was yelling and colliding with me, and I basically ran blindly in a circle until somebody tackled me. We fell to the ground, and the hose-blasting stopped.

Wiping the water from my eyes, I said, “That was refreshing.”

The sound of shoes slapping against the pavement echoed through the night air as Alexis made her getaway down the street.

I couldn't get up from the muddy lawn, pinned as I was by a body. At least it wasn’t the driver with the ponytail, but Dalton.

I’d wanted to get him on top of me, but not like this. Not in the mud on my front lawn. Or maybe in the mud, sure, but not with all my neighbors watching.

Dalton got up and helped me to my feet. “I am so sorry about all of this. That Alexis!” He shook his head, and in the dim light, I couldn't tell if he looked guilty, or embarrassed.

Shayla stepped down from the porch and stood on the round, cement paving stones, staring at us. Unlike the older generation at the wedding, she knew exactly who Dalton Deangelo was.

I looked up at his gorgeous face. So much for sneaking him into my place, unnoticed, for the one-night tryst of a lifetime—the type you hint about to your children after a couple of drinks, much to their horror.

“I apologize for all this,” he said.

“This kerfuffle?” I looked down at my muddy bridesmaid dress. “So much for wearing this dress again.”

“I’ll pay to have it cleaned. No, I’ll buy you a new dress. Unfortunately, if you hang out with me, this is the sort of thing that happens.”

“Your life must be very interesting,” I said.

He pursed his lips, his eyes twinkling at me. “Let's trade lives. Give me the keys and I'll go open the bookstore tomorrow.”

As I stared up at Dalton, the rest of the world disappeared. I was dimly aware of Mr. Galloway calling his cat and going back into his house, and of the driver apologizing to Shayla and explaining what was happening, but all that chaos was happening outside of a world-dampening bubble surrounding the two of us.

“You would muck everything up,” I said. “In the bookstore. I have everything just how I like it.”

He brushed his warm hands along my upper arms, sweeping away the beads of water on my skin. I shivered at his touch.

“Is that a metaphor?” he murmured. “Are you afraid I'm going to muck up your life?” He kept running his warm hands up and down my arms, heating me up in more ways than one. Apparently getting sprayed with a garden hose doesn’t put you out of the mood for sex, which explains why it rarely works with stray cats.

He continued, “Is your life too perfect without me?”

“Thank you for being my date for the wedding, and for the ride in your car.” I bit my lower lip, embarrassed at the memory of him touching me so deliciously in the back seat, just moments earlier.

“You say that like we're saying goodbye.” He reached behind my back, pressing the chilly, soaked fabric of my bridesmaid dress as he pulled me to him. “If this is goodbye, give me a kiss to remember.”

He didn't have to ask twice. I stood up on my tiptoes in the wet grass, mud on my feet, and kissed him with all the pent-up passion I had in me, from all the guys I should have kissed but didn't. I should have kissed tall, scrawny Adrian Storm in twelfth grade, when we were working on the yearbook together. He owned an obnoxiously loud, gas-guzzling muscle car, and we had the exact opposite taste in movies and music. We seemed to have nothing in common, but he did have a lip ring, and I had an interest in his lips.

Back then, Adrian’s lip ring clicked against his teeth sometimes, and he'd flick at the metal hoop with his tongue when he was waiting for the slow computers in the library to load up photos. We had little to talk about, and he always looked bored when he talked to me, but I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to kiss him so bad, and I never did, because I wasn't the fun girl.

That night after my cousin’s wedding, as I stood in the mud of my front lawn, with a sexy actor, I kissed him with all the passion my lips could handle, and then some. My hands slid up along his chest, feeling the hard muscles just beneath his shirt.

He broke away just long enough to say, “This doesn't feel like goodbye.”

My hands roved down, over the ridges of his lean stomach, then around to his back so I could hold on to him for balance.

“I can't invite you in,” I said. “That's my house, and my life, and—”

He stopped me with a finger to my lips, while saying, “Shh.”

Was he actually shushing me?

Dalton Deangelo seemed to be shushing me. Which I do not like, not even from someone with a face so handsome you want to crush it up and eat it.

I continued, around his fingers mashing my lips, “But thanks for the nice evening and the r—”

“Shush.”

I shoved his hand away and stepped back. “Don't shush me. You're not the boss of me. Feel free to interrupt me, like a regular person, but don't you dare put your hand on my mouth.”

Dalton grinned like a kid being caught with his hand up a vending machine, his fingers wrapped around a stolen chocolate bar.

“Whoops,” he said.

“Uh, whoops?”

The moment of romance was gone, and my passion morphed into something else—something defensive. His arms around me no longer felt like heaven, but like a mousetrap. I shoved against his chest and wriggled myself free.

“I'm sorry you're offended,” he said.

“I'm sorry you think shushing a woman is appealing in some way.”

“You're cute when you're mad.”

“You're not,” I lied.

He stepped back, taking an audible breath. “It was nice to know you.”

And then began the speedy getaway I’d been anticipating all day.

He backed away over the hedge and onto the sidewalk. The driver was already circling around to open the car door for him. I could sense Shayla's presence on the porch behind me, but she was staying quiet for now.

Something about the way Dalton was grinning and backing away from me set me off even more. He was treating me the same way he had that girl Alexis, who probably had good reason to be angry at him.
What a smarmy creepazoid!

“Good to know you,” he repeated awkwardly.

My head started to move from side to side with all the attitude that had to go somewhere. “Oh, you don't know me,” I said.

Shayla chimed in, “That's right. You don't know her.”

He glanced up at her and shrugged. “Your loss.”

Shayla murmured behind me, “Oh, no, he didn’t.” Louder, she called out to him, “More like your loss.”

“Yeah!” I added. “Your loss, mister. I would have rocked your world.”

Dalton shot me one last smirk, then he climbed into the back of his fancy car with the tinted windows and shut the door.

Getaway complete.

As the red taillights disappeared down the street, Shayla traipsed down the front steps and slipped her arm around my back. “Let's get you out of these wet clothes and into a shot of tequila. Or wine. We don’t have tequila, but we do have wine.”

“Oh, Shay. What did I just do? What's wrong with me?”

“You have too much pride,” she said, matter-of-factly. “You could have had your meatflaps moistened by Mr. Smoldering Eyeballs himself, but I can loan you Drake for the night if you run him through the dishwasher.”

I patted her hand. “No thanks, but I appreciate the sentiment.”

“He was taller than I expected. A lot of actors are quite short, you know.”

I followed her into the house and back to the kitchen, where she found the big bottle of red we'd started the night before. We’d planned to make sangria, and bought the cheapest red in the store, but then we decided it was okay on its own, and nobody needs extra fruit juice calories in their drink.

We raised our glasses in a toast, standing by the fridge.

“You're perfect,” Shayla said. “Guys like him think you'll be so impressed he’s even talking to you, that you won't say shit if you have a mouth full of it. But you sure showed him.”

I swirled the wine and started drinking as Shayla unzipped the back of my dress and peeled the damp fabric away. I felt warmer already in just my underwear plus the wobble-taming waist shaper. I took a seat at the walnut pedestal table in the kitchen.

She’d heard a few details from the driver, and I filled her in on the rest, from our odd bookstore meeting to him accompanying me to the wedding.

Giggling, I said, “And tonight, I was going to sleep with him. Dalton Deangelo. With his penis right up in my vagina and everything.”

“And you would have rocked his world. You would have spoiled him for all other women.”

I finished the red wine and got my glass refilled.

“Who are we kidding? I would have turned out all the lights, then lay there with my bra still on, holding absolutely still to reduce jiggling, and faked an orgasm so it could be over.”

Shayla giggled into her glass. “And you would have been so good, so convincing.” She rolled her eyes up, fluttering her eyelashes. “Oh, Dalton, you're an animal! I don't know if I'll be able to walk tomorrow!”

“Gross!”

We laughed for a bit, and when the giggles died down, she said, “Too bad you didn't saddle that one up. Would have made for great stories. He’s bumpy all up and down his front. They don't make 'em like that around here in Beaverdale.”

“No, they do not.” The wine was warming me up, and I thought about getting a robe or something to throw on over my underwear and Spanx, but my room was up the stairs, which was too far. “You know, I forgot to ask him why he was even in town.”

Why had Dalton Deangelo been in little Beaverdale, Washington, population 14,041?

I guess I haven't told you much about Beaverdale, also known as The Beav or B-dale to locals. The town was incorporated in 1898, and the main street was named after the father of the town, Mr. Leonodis Veiner. In 1942, the street was accidentally renamed Leonardo Street when City Hall contracted out the new street signs to a sign maker up in Seattle. A copper-haired city clerk by the name of Donovan Monroe (my great-grandfather), rushed his paperwork that day so he could get to the pub and await the news of his first child's birth, surrounded by his friends. The pub was on the opposite side of town as the hospital, and the bartender kept the telephone line clear for the news, because that was how they did things in those days.

My grandfather, Arthur Monroe, came into the world at three in the morning on January 7, 1942, and the pub never closed that night. My great-grandfather did, however, disappear for a few hours that evening to find some trouble. The kind of trouble who hangs a red light in her window.

Nine months later, my grandfather's yet-to-be-named half-sister was born at the town’s only bawdy house.

On the very same day, the sign installers got their packages and did their installation, renaming the following streets:

Leonodis Veiner Street became Leonardo Street

Orchid Drive became O Drive

Euripides Avenue became Spider Avenue

and

Larch Street became Lurch Street

People in town were cross at my great-grandfather for celebrating the birth of his first child by siring an illegitimate child with one of the town's loose women, but they were generally happy about the renamed streets, save the good people who now lived on Lurch Street.

The little brown-haired baby was left at my great-grandmother's door step. According to family stories, my great-grandmother Petra Monroe (yes, I was named after her) opened the door, took one look at the squalling infant in a basket, and shut the door again. It was October now, gray and rainy, and she shut the door.

She crossed the house to the back pantry, poured a mug full of dandelion wine, and quaffed it back in one swallow. She was unbuttoning her blouse already when she opened the door again, and a moment later she held the baby to her bare breast, heavy with milk for the baby boy asleep in the crib upstairs. The girl baby latched on even easier than the firstborn, and my grandmother cooed at her, “You're a clever baby.” Their eyes met and they fell in love at first sight.

The baby was named Clever Monroe, and she grew up sharing the same classrooms and toys as my grandfather, Arthur Monroe. They were joined in 1952 by plump-cheeked Beatrice, who enjoyed being the baby of the family until 1962, when my great-grandmother gave birth to Icy, twenty years to the day after her first child, Arthur. My great-grandfather waited in the hospital for news of that delivery, because that was how things were done in Beaverdale in 1962.

They smoked five cigars, two packs of cigarettes, and one “marijuana cigarette” between him and his friends. My great-grandfather had the night of his life, and woke up in a clean hospital bed next to my great-grandmother, an ice pack between his legs from the vasectomy he didn't remember agreeing to.

~

The next morning, I did that thing where you wake up and you
know
you’re awake, but you’re afraid to open your eyes or do any movement beyond breathing because you’re not sure exactly
how
hungover you ought to be.