Recklessly (11 page)

“They’re good, Lana.”

“Thanks. Those are old though. I hardly ever have time to do it anymore these days between my two jobs and how expensive
good
paint supplies can be.”

“That sucks ‘cause you should do it more if you paint like that.”

She smiled and her cheeks flushed. “Thanks. There’s a ton of stuff in my sketchbook that I need to put on canvas. I hope to.”

Wes leaned down to kiss her, but Lana covered his mouth and turned her head. He raised himself as she shifted her face back to him. “I can’t kiss you?”

She shook her head. “No…nope.”

“Why not?”

“I might still be on your face…” She was. He could taste her every time he licked his lips; he didn’t mind.

Wes made a show of running his arm across his mouth. “Happy?”

“You might like the taste of it, but I don’t…” She shook her head. “So…no…”

Wes pulled his boxers on then lay on the bed. “There’s a story here, huh?”

“Yeah, and you’re never going to get it, but my roommates are probably going to be up for a while, might as well bide our time with some actual conversation and delay your walk of shame,” she said, giggling. Lana walked into the bathroom and returned wearing underwear and a tiny t-shirt. Instead of taking the spot next to him, she straddled his stomach, her face bright with energy. And with her single braid resting on her shoulder, he thought she looked adorable. It was different; the woman on the bike had been strikingly beautiful. Mysterious. Cool. Combined with how Lana carried herself—like she thought the world was in her clutches—she could be intimidating, even for a guy like him. But he’d never admit that. Now she just looked sweet. Maybe
more beautiful
than the woman he’d met on the bike.

As a pensive look hardened her face, she ran her fingers softly down his chest and stroked the chiseled shape of his torso. “You really like touching me, don’t you?” he asked.

A shy smile—the first of its kind—settled on her lips. “Well, you’re pretty much built like you should be touched…all the time. But you’re…you’re walking art. You have a lot of words on your arm. I thought it was mostly images before, but you have so many lyrics and quotes…I was able to figure out a lot of them, but a few…” Lana said, pointing on his arm. “…Like this one, it sort of seems out of place. Life motto?”

Wes’ gaze went to where she pointed on his skin, to a vertical line of text in swirly lettering wedged between an array of colorful, maniacal skulls. It said, “Dirty As I Please.” He looked back to her with a frown. “Girl, I just put in
all
that work, and you were busy reading my arm?”

“I noticed it way earlier, Wes…” Lana said with an eye roll after she released a trill of giggles. “…Like at
Vices
when we got food from the food truck.”

“Oh. It’s a reference to a line in
Wuthering Heights
.”

She went wide-eyed. “The
Wuthering Heights
? Like by Emily Brontë,
Wuthering Heights
?”

“Yeah…” Wes said, nearing offense as her expression stayed frozen in surprise.

“Sexy, tattooed, blondie surfer reads.”

“He does.” He smiled tight and flat. “A lot. My parents hired a tutor for Abel and me so we could focus on surfing instead of going to school, and after we finished, she gave me a list of the one hundred best books to read in a lifetime. That’s my favorite one.”

“
Wuthering Heights
?”

“Can you believe it?” Wes said with acidic sarcasm. “All the water hasn’t affected my brain at all…”

Lana shifted her weight to the arms she suddenly positioned on either side of him, inching her face to his. “I wasn’t thinking that. Wes, I’ve read a ton of your interviews, and I know you’re not stupid. And trust me, I know a thing or two about misconceptions. I was just surprised that of all the novels in the world,
Wuthering Heights
is your favorite.”

“What was your guess?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Just not that one.” Lana eased to the empty side of the bed and sat with her legs folded.

“What’s
your
favorite book? And I know you have one, given that gigantic bookcase in your bathroom.” He had noticed the rows of weathered paperback copies behind him as he washed his hands. None of his friends were big on reading, but Wes could talk about books and words all day, really. What he loved most was that a person he’d never met, who may have lived several centuries before him, could still be relevant in their assessment of the human condition and could still accurately illustrate the consistency of human struggle and triumph; Wes thought that was amazing. There was no way he could ever be anything other than a surfer, but if past lives existed, he was certainly a writer in his.

“You want us to book club, too?” she said, winking.

“Just tell me.”

Without hesitation, Lana said, “Easy.
The Awakening
by Kate Chopin. I read it every single year around my birthday.” They both turned silent when her roommates’ conversation got louder and then one of them burst into excited laughter. “Jesus. Are those guys
ever
going to go to sleep? So much for my efforts to save you from the awkward stroll to the door.” She shook her head.

“Lana, are you
really
okay with this situation?”

“Oh God. You didn’t interrogate me enough beforehand?”

“I don’t want this to be something you’re just saying ‘cause you think I want to hear it. I want you to mean it. I’m not against attachments. You seem like a cool girl, so I want to get to know you, either way. But we just can’t get into any expectation of eventual exclusivity or anything like that, and I just can’t have another Kiera on my hands, truthfully.”

“You think sex will turn me into a Stage Five Clinger, Wes? Or I want to live in a chick flick? This isn’t some trick to get you to fall in love with me. I
like
no-frills. The bottom line is, I don’t think sex needs heart-shaped confetti”—Lana waved her hands above her head—“
exploding
into the air every time it happens. I meant it when I said I know what I’m getting into, but…I’m disappointed
truthfully
…”

              “Why?”

              “You promised me
Scrabble.
”

Although she had teased about kicking him out, they spent the rest of the early morning talking, like they had at
Vices.
And for someone who had chided him for talking a lot earlier, he discovered she was quite chatty herself. And every time they started to say good-bye, another topic would spring up.

He sleepily listened, but he
listened
…because it was hard not to. She talked about her family—“My parents have been living ‘in sin’ since they were eighteen. They never married” and “James is the coolest brother in the world”—which somehow led to her summation of the current social unrest and political atmosphere in Colombia since—“I’m a quarter Colombian on my mother’s side, so I read a lot about it. I hope to go someday”—because her grandfather still lived there but wasn’t really on speaking terms with her mom. Lana said that she wished she knew him because none of her family members shared her passion for the arts, and he had painted murals all over Medellín in his twenties. Painting was never something she would consider pursuing professionally, but she had thought once that ballet would be her life, and she had dreamed of studying Dance at NYU’s Tisch. 

It went on like that until the strings of sunlight stinging his eyes through the blinds woke him a few hours later with Lana curled into the crook of his arm. He slid out from under her and put on his jeans. He stepped out of her room to retrieve his shirt from wherever he had tossed it in the kitchen last night, but he found it slung over the arm of the sofa. The sofa Rick was currently sitting on playing video games, with the other roommates sitting around. Dead silence pierced the room when they noticed him. Clearly, he had been the topic of conversation before he walked out.

“Hey,” Wes said out of politeness, and they all responded with mumbled greetings in return, but Rick continued to mutter low under his breath.

“Do you have a problem, dude?” Wes asked.

“Hi. Hi!” one of the other guys said, as he leaped over and extended his hand to Wes. He was tall with jet-black hair and brown eyes. “Grayson. Sorry, we were being rude. It was my fault. I saw you at
Vices,
and I thought you were cute—”

“Thanks,” Wes said, smiling and shaking his hand. He was such a slut for compliments.

“I brought you up when I saw your shirt—”

“He sniffed it,” the other guy who wasn’t Rick said.

“…I might’ve sniffed it,” Grayson said, laughing. “So, he doesn’t have a problem with you—”

“Okay. What do you have then?” he asked Rick as he pulled his shirt on. Rick wasn’t getting a pass that easily.

“Pity.”

Wes’ annoyance was intense and swift the way it bubbled up. Who the hell did this guy think he was? “Pity?” He repeated it with spite.

“That’s not what he means,” Grayson said. He dropped a firm hand on Wes’ back and steered him toward the front door. “We were just…when you live with people it’s sort of interesting to see who’s leaving their room in the morning, you know? Maybe you poke a little fun at them…”

He did know; he lived with Abel Elliott, after all. And Wes could be a good sport. “So what’s the verdict on me?” He crossed his arms over his chest and waited with an exaggeratedly nervous look, but Grayson actually grew apprehensive. “C’mon, Grayson, we’ve shared so much already.”

              “Okay. Okay. And maybe I appreciate you for understanding that every man should wear something from Tom Ford, even if it’s just cologne. I really did sniff your shirt.” He held his hands up in surrender. “We were just trying to figure out if you’d be another guy who falls for the
easy breezy
, and then she
somehow
ends up being the worst thing to ever happen to you.” Grayson laughed, but Wes couldn’t tell if it was because he had said the statement in jest or because he was still so amused from seeing it happen in the past.

Wes gaped and got suspicious. Was this just some ploy to mess with him, set in place by Lana or something? Or was he being loyal to Rick, who was obviously more than a little prickly about Wes’ presence? He had seen a lot of creative techniques used by guys to keep other guys away from women
they
were interested in, but nothing like this. “That’s pretty dramatic, don’t you think? Aren’t you her friend?”

              “Yeah. Her
best
.” Grayson beamed. “I’m just saying what I see…
I
won’t be the one who says it when I fall for her.”

Wes smirked. “Who said anything about love?”

“Okay, we’ll see.” He spoke like a veteran of observation. Wes wondered how many times Rick, Grayson and Other Guy had seen a self-assured guy walk out of Lana’s bedroom only to return at some point as a sobbing, sappy mess of a person, mourning the remains of his former self. But none of those guys were him.

“Is that what happened to Rick?”

“He wishes. He still lives in What Coulda Been Land, but still pining away like the rest of them. He kinda avoided a tornado—”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m a tsunami,” Wes said in a challenging tone as he walked out of the apartment.

“I hope so, Wes Elliott, I hope so.”

He crashed to his bed in a daze once he was home, and slept for most of the day. He awoke to the sound of his ringing cell phone a few hours later when Charlotte called to ask if he wanted to share the Chinese takeout she and Abel were picking up. He slept again until they got home, and Wes finally stripped out of his clothes for a shower before dinner. He winced as the hard water fell to his tender back. It was only then that he remembered how deep Lana’s nails had gone. Once he got out, he glanced over his shoulder in the bathroom mirror.

“Shit.” Abrasions. Eight identical thin red lines. But other little scratches here and there,
nearly spanning the entire length of his back. Wes looked at them with a bit of amazement at first but then laughed to himself.

They felt
way
better than they hurt.

Chapter 4 Kings and Things

“Lana, that’s not a word,” Wes said as he glanced over at the
Scrabble
board when he left the bathroom naked. He pinched her bare butt as he walked by.

“How is it not?” Lana looked over at him with a frown. “Totally a word, Deuce.”

He leaned down and kissed her shoulder, then ran his lips up her neck. “Use it in a sentence, girl.”

“Can you define every word you put down?”

“Yup,” he said with confidence. When he lay next to her on the bed, her frown deepened and she pulled the letters off the board.

“Fine…I quit!”

“This means I win. By a lot. See? I told you putting your tits on the board wouldn’t distract me.”

“It was worth a try.” Lana growled playfully. “This is easier on our phones, you know.”

He shrugged. “I’m old school.”

“Look, I like naked
Scrabble
, but
my hands could be doing something far more useful…” Lana said as she shifted the board to the floor.

He gripped her thigh and pulled on it a little. “Come here.” She moved until she was supine on top of him, sliding one of her legs between his and gripping his ears when she kissed him. “Today was great...” he said. He ran one hand down the arc of her back and weaved his fingers through her hair with the other. “I haven’t just chilled out like this in a long time…just hanging out at the house without something actually happening here. And I
haven’t
wanted to do anything all day. Even Char looked happier after talking to you on her way out.”

“We had a little girl talk. The way she was pulling on her dress like that, and how she kept checking her makeup in every reflective surface she could find, I just knew there was a guy involved. Told her to quit worrying because she was beautiful and she seems really sweet. And he’d be stupid not to notice already. I promised to give her my passes to The Remedy
if
she took the initiative and asked him out. I’m going to give them to her anyway, but I want her to have the confidence to try.”