She woke up to the press of Victoria’s strawberry-flavored lips against her sour mouth.
“I have to go to work.” Bright-eyed and energetic, she was already dressed in a flirty little dress Dez had never seen before and high heels. “I’ll call you later.”
The fading echoes of her footsteps on the hardwood floors lulled Dez back to sleep. Hours later, the shrill ring of her house phone woke her up.
“Get your ass out of bed, Nichols,” Rémi growled in her ear. “We have a lunch date that you absolutely don’t want to miss.”
She could miss it. In fact she wanted to. Dez fixed her bleary eyes on the clock. Half-past one. Victoria still sang in her blood; shit, her scent still lingered on her sheets and she wanted to lay here and savor it.
“Hurry up, Nichols. Fine ass waits for no one.” She heard the sounds of jingling keys through the phone. “I’ll be there to pick you up in ten minutes.”
Fifteen minutes later, Rémi was at her gate and pressing the intercom button, demanding to be let in.
“Your chariot awaits, fair prince.” She stopped her Escalade in Dez’s circular driveway long enough for the still-sleepy woman to stumble in and buckle her seat belt.
“This shit better be the bomb,” Dez said, putting on her sunglasses.
“You have
no
idea.”
Rémi turned up the volume on the stereo and peeled out of the drive. The loud, bass-heavy Ragga music forced Dez out of her post-postcoital haze so by the time they made it to the restaurant, although she still looked half-asleep with her sandaled foot on the dashboard and her gaze passively taking in the scenery outside the truck’s window, she was ready to face whatever it was that Rémi was about to throw her into.
But to say that she wasn’t prepared was an understatement. When she walked into the restaurant, heading for their usual section on the patio with a view of the water and the passing boardwalk scenery, she immediately recognized Sage. Her friend sat at a table with three other women. She was even more animated than usual, emphasizing whatever point she was trying to make with broad, excited gestures. In deference to the warm spring day, she wore a tight white wife beater that left the muscled and tattooed arms bare. The woman on Sage’s left was gorgeous. Her terra-cotta skin glowed in the sun and her thick black hair lay in a graceful fall over her shoulder and breast. Next to her sat another woman with short spiky hair and an identical face and body. And next to her was a replica of the first woman complete with the full, fuckable mouth and tilted doe eyes.
“Holy mother . . .”
Rémi chuckled. “And you’re not even Catholic.”
By the time she got to the table, Dez had regained her cool. “Ladies.” She greeted the women with a civilized nod.
“Hey.” Sage’s laughing eyes met Dez’s. “I thought you guys were just going to abandon me to these tigresses for the day.”
“Not even in your dreams,” Rémi said sitting down next to the spike-haired triplet. “Nicoletta, Matsuko, Chance, this is our friend Dez. Nichols, meet the Nakamura sisters, recently relocated from Rome.”
“Georgia?”
“Not exactly,” the spike-haired one, Chance, murmured with a wry twist to her mouth. Her Italian accent and gravelly voice made the words sound like an indecent proposal.
Jesus.
Dez cleared her throat. “So what are we having for lunch?”
“Anything you want. We are—how you say?—treating for lunch. You’re the first interesting women we’ve met in this city.” Matsuko, who nicely filled out a pastel pink blouse and matching Capri pants, lightly touched Dez’s thigh.
“So we’ll bribe you into being our friends,” Nicoletta finished, turning her smile on Sage. Unlike her long-haired sister, she wore jeans and a scoop necked blouse that threatened to flash the entire restaurant.
Chance took out a cigarette and offered her pack around the table. Dez shook her head in polite refusal. Thanks to Victoria, she had better things to do with her mouth these days.
“No bribes necessary, ladies,” she said. “I think you’ll find the three of us to be
very
friendly.”
By the time the waitress came around with their meal they were all on friendly terms indeed, chatting about mutual acquaintances in Europe and the clubs they’d been to. If this had happened six months ago, Dez would be in hog heaven, lapping up the women’s attentions and trying to maneuver Sage and Rémi out of whatever plans the Nakamura sisters had for later that day.
From the first rasp of Chance’s gravelly voice, she knew where this lunch was leading. She didn’t need Matsuko’s coy touch on her thigh or the ravenous and ready look on Rémi’s face to tell her. But thoughts of Victoria swam to the surface of Dez’s mind and stayed there. She would never be able to touch this woman—or more accurately,
these women
—with the phantom of her lover practically sitting in her lap.
When her nose conjured the light, honey-laced scent of tangerines, she thought little of it. Then, minutes later, she heard the familiar low, carrying laugh and realized that that could not be her imagination, too. Dez turned around.
She sat three tables away with her friends, Mick and Kavi. A waiter moved efficiently around their table, serving drinks and flashing each woman a smile. He said something that made Victoria and her friends laugh. A high-pitched scream made Dez look away. A slim boy in beige Capri pants and a tight little blue shirt jerked his chair back from the table next to Dez’s and stood up. His flailing hand swept a champagne glass to the floor, splattering mimosa and shards of glass all over the patio. The boy screamed again and ran out of the restaurant, ignoring his friends’ raised voices and the chaos left in his wake.
“Talk about drama. Damn.” Rémi coolly appraised the mess then turned back to matters at their table. Someone else was focused on them. Victoria. She saw Dez and smiled. In the next second she noticed the Italian woman with her shoulders pressed against Dez’s, then the intimate arrangement of the table. Her smile froze. Dez’s stomach plunged to her knees at that look. She wanted to jump up and explain, to tell her that she wasn’t going to go through with it, but instead she just sat there and looked back at her. Caught. Victoria blinked and looked away.
“So, Dez . . .” Matsuko breathed an invitation in her ear.
Across the table, Sage and Nicoletta already had their heads bent together, whispering. Both sets of hands were under the table doing what Dez could very well imagine.
This is so fucking unfair
, the petulant part of her whined, knowing what her next words were going to be.
“As nice as that sounds, I can’t.”
Her friends broke off their conversation to stare at Dez.
“Are you crazy?” Rémi’s thick brows nearly met in her disbelief. “This is not like you.”
“Tell me about it.”
Rémi frowned. “Victoria?”
“Are you punking out of this certified good time because of a woman?” Sage looked at Dez as if she’d lost her mind. When she nodded, Sage stared. “Are you high?”
“You all can go ahead without me—”
“Damn right we will. You might be crazy but we aren’t.”
The triplets watched their byplay with amusement. Matsuko teased Dez with her smile, lightly bumping her shoulder with her own. “I understand. It is important to be faithful to a lover, especially if she is doing the right things in bed as well as out of it, yes?”
“After today we’ll see if she does anything at all.”
The triplets laughed, apparently taken with the idea that Dez was so infatuated with someone that she couldn’t take any or all of them to bed. Sage and Rémi fell into the spirit of the teasing, but kept sneaking strange looks at Dez. When Dez looked back over to Victoria’s table, her lover and her friends were gone.
“Don’t worry,” Chance murmured to Dez as they all walked out of the restaurant together. “If things don’t work out with your lady you can always come to us for comfort.”
Looking up from her cozy cuddle with Rémi, Matsuko purred, “You can, cara mia. Anytime.”
Dez drove Rémi’s truck home and told her friend to call her when she needed it again. She sat in the parking lot and called Victoria. No surprise when she didn’t answer her cell phone or her landline.
“I can’t fucking believe this. The one time I didn’t actually do anything . . .”
Dez left a message, then two. She waited until Monday night to call again. By Tuesday she was angry. Why the fuck was Victoria acting like this when their relationship was only based on sex, and not even monogamous sex? More than once, Dez lifted the phone to call Derrick and ask him if he’d seen Victoria. But she never made that call. Instead she waited. She went out with her friends as usual, drank, even watched a hot threesome with Rémi and two of their play-mates. None of it made her feel better, none of it made her forget Victoria and the gnawing something in her gut that was her need to see her, to tell her that she hadn’t slept with any of those women.
On Wednesday well after midnight, she took the truck and drove to Victoria’s house. High in a no-moon sky a few brave stars glowed through the tattered stream of clouds. The streetlights compensated for the lack of natural light, illuminating the well-kept lawns and pretty flower waterfalls of the quiet, middle-class neighborhood.
Dez parked the truck a little ways down the road from her lover’s house and, from behind the deeply tinted glass, watched the movement of light and shadow behind Victoria’s windows. The television’s blue-gray light flickered downstairs, then the harsh fluorescents in the kitchen. After less than half an hour, all the lights downstairs went out. Moments later, the faintest illumination on the upper level signaled Victoria’s presence in the bedroom. Dez called her then. The phone rang five times before dropping her into voice mail. There was no point in leaving a message. Victoria was already sending one of her own. She waited another hour until all the lights went off. Then she drove back home.
Her brother’s car sat idling outside the gates of her house as she pulled up. The truck cruised slowly past him and she glanced back to make sure that he noticed it was her. Not bothering to call out, she triggered the gate with her remote and rode up the drive. His silver convertible followed.
“What’s up?” Her voice sounded drained even to her own ears.
“This and that. Can we talk?”
“Sure. Just park right here and wait while I put the bike to bed.”
He looked tired but determined, not at all like she saw him last. “Is Mama okay?”
“Yeah, she’s good.”
She pulled around to the garage and he followed her inside, waiting patiently while she turned off the alarm. “You hungry?”
Although he said no, she led him to the kitchen anyway, walking tiredly past the stairs where Victoria had sat only a few days before, shyly asking to be topped and tied up, her legs sprawled in a little girl pose that made her too adorable to refuse.
She opened the fridge and took out the ingredients for an almond butter and grape jelly sandwich. Derrick watched silently as she made her meal, only leaned against the counter and looked curiously around at the chrome-fitted kitchen. She’d forgotten that this was his first time in her house.
Palming a long-handled knife, Dez cut the thick wheat bread sandwich in two neat triangles and put it in the microwave for fifteen seconds.
“So what’s on your mind?”
“You. And Victoria.”
You too, huh?
She nodded, took the sandwich out of the microwave, but said nothing. Victoria was not going to like this, especially since she apparently didn’t want to continue their association. Dez bit into the bread. Her inner pleasure hound woke up, groaning in pleasure at the combination of sweet, salt, and hot nutty goodness dancing across her tongue. She chewed blissfully for a few moments.
“Are you two involved?” Derrick asked.
“No.”
His look told her that he wasn’t a believer.
“We’re fucking. Not involved.” She peeled a wad of warm bread, butter, and jelly from the roof of her mouth with her tongue and slowly sucked on it. “At least we were. So you don’t have to worry about it. She’s not talking to me right now.”
“That should make me
not
worry?” Derrick pushed himself off the counter and opened a nearby cabinet. After a few seconds of fruitless searching he asked, “Got any liquor in this kitchen?”
Dez dug out her bottle of good whiskey and a glass, then passed them to him. He took a healthy swallow of the Glen before looking back at his sister. “She came over to see me last night. At one point I mentioned you and she clammed up all of a sudden, looking like she was going to cry. A few seconds later she was fine again. I never thought I’d see the day when she lost her composure like that. And I sure as hell never thought she’d lose it over you.”
Dez swallowed. “Is she all right?”
“What do you think?”
“What do I think?” She blew out a sigh. “I think that for the first time in my adult life I turned down some pussy for a woman. And look what that good deed cost me?” The savory bites of nuts from the almond butter slid deliciously between her tongue and teeth. Dez swept her tongue over her front teeth with appreciation of the small pleasure. This was all she was going to be getting for a while. “I could have slept with three very hot women on Sunday, Derrick. Three. Triplets built like Halle Berry with ‘come fuck me’ accents. And I said no for your precious Tori.”