Tattoos and TaTas (Chocoholics #2.5) (5 page)

“Carter, stop diddling the applesauce cups and come help us fill out this form,” Drew tells him, waving the piece of paper up in the air. “I have more yummy goodness in my pants and pudding cups to fill.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Jim mutters next to me. Still, it doesn’t deter him from going over to Drew, grabbing one of the pudding cups and an offered mini bottle of vodka that Drew just pulled out of his back pocket.

I watch as Carter goes over to Claire’s side, leans down and whispers something in her ear before kissing her on the head and disappearing out the door with Jim and Drew. This is the first time the two of us have been alone since we all got the news. It’s also the first time I have no idea what to say to my best friend. Everything that runs through my mind right now is completely stupid.

“So, this kind of sucks, huh?”

“At least your oncologist is cute.”

“Would it be wrong to ask if they have some extra morphine I can use?”

“Sorry if I can’t stop staring at your boobs.”

“Stop staring at my boobs,” Claire deadpans, her eyes still closed on the pillow.

“How the hell did you know I was staring at your boobs?”

She opens her eyes and raises one brow at me. “Because the lump in there has a special homing beacon that can sense boob ogling.”

I cross my arms over my chest and roll my eyes. “You are being entirely too flippant about all of this.”

“What do you expect me to do, Liz? Scream and cry about the unfairness of it all? What good will that do me? Do you think the cancer will be like ‘Well, shit. If she thinks it’s unfair then we obviously need to skedaddle.’”

“Did you just say
skedaddle
?”

Claire nods her head. “Yes, yes I did. Now quit being a pussy, come over here and sit by me.”

She pats the bed next to her. “It’s not contagious.”

“I know it’s not contagious, asshole,” I tell her as I gently climb into her bed and lean back against the pillows next to her.

We don’t say anything, each of us staring up at the ceiling. I want to tell her how sorry I am, but that’s so fucking cliché that I can’t even form the words. I want to reassure her that whatever she needs, I’ll be here for her, but what the hell could I give her right now to make this all better? I don’t have a magic wand that will take this stupid fucking disease out of her body. In less than an hour, she’s going into an operating room to have a double mastectomy for stage 2 breast cancer. I have nothing that will make any of this go away.

A half hour later, the boys walk back into the room, snickering and shoving each other, clearly a little tipsy from pudding shots.

“What did you guys do? How many of those cups of pudding did you have?” Claire questions.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Zoltron,” Jim replies with a laugh.

Drew chokes on his own laugh, bending over at the waist.

“Zoltron? Do I even want to know what you three idiots are talking about?” I ask as Jim walks over and hands me the questionnaire the nurse asked Claire to fill out.

I grab it from his hand and scroll through the questions, along with the answers the boys filled in.

“Question number one: Do you have any nicknames?” I read aloud.

Claire leans forward to look over my shoulder, reading the answer that they wrote down. “My full name is Sheba, Princess of the Night, but I will only answer to Zoltron.”

The boys start giggling like fools from the doorway.

“Keep going,” Drew says in between laughs.

I sigh, moving on to question number two. “Do you have any hobbies?”

I feel Claire’s rumble of laughter next to me as she reads the answer. “My hobbies include running a meth lab in my basement, throwing down gang signs, mailing underwear to members of Congress and breeding ferrets.”

I quickly scan the rest of the questions and answers.

• What is your favorite color?
  Clitoris. A combination of clear, teal, orange and island blue.
  

• What is your favorite song?
  The Silent Song. I could sing it for you, but you wouldn’t be able to hear it. Only alpacas and very rare mice have the ability to hear The Silent Song.
  

• Do you have any children?
  rufus, joseephus, artie choke, woody bush, pat may wiener, meowy, boopsie and bob.
  

• What’s your favorite movie?
  It’s a tie between “The Anal girls of tobacco road: vagina slimes” and “sex starved fuck sluts #22: stinky white women.” The well-developed plot and range of emotions portrayed in vagina slimes far outweighs that of stinky white women, but at the same time, the complexity in the cinematic quality of stinky white women should not be overlooked.
  

The questionnaire goes on for two pages, each answer they wrote down worse than the last. The only thing stopping me from throttling the idiot men we married is the fact that Claire thinks it’s funny and it’s taken her mind off of the fact that her boobs are killing her. Those little bumps of fat sitting on her chest are literally sucking the life out of her. I keep running through every single memory of the two of us together. Every time we’ve made each other laugh, cry, snort, puke, trip down stairs or scream in frustration. Thirty years of going through everything together. I can’t imagine living the rest of my life without her and I have no idea how to find the humor in any of this bullshit. We have so much more living to do, she and I. We have a business to run together, the wedding of our children to plan and future grandchildren to corrupt.

The nurse walks back in to grab the form, clearly irritated that there are three drunk men giggling like little girls in the room, trying on hospital masks that they drew smiley faces on the front of.

“There’s no drinking of alcohol allowed on hospital premises,” she tells them haughtily.

“Pudding shots do not equal drinking alcohol,” Drew informs her, his voice muffled through the hospital mask that has a porn stache drawn on the front of it. “Pudding shots equal awesome. Can I call you ‘Puddin’?”

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” she tells him.

He throws his arm around her shoulders. “Awwww, don’t be like that, Puddin. We’ll share some with you.”

As I wrangle the guys and get them out of the room to give Claire some peace and quiet and get Nurse Ratched off our backs, I suddenly wish I could turn back time. I’d go back to something better than this. A time when my best friend wasn’t getting ready to go into surgery so they could try and cut out the part of her body that’s killing her. A time when I was young and dumb. Those were the good old days…

HERE’S A LITTLE
secret that not too many people know: Claire wasn’t the only one who had a one-night stand that one time at a frat party. Unlike my dumbass friend, at least I remembered the birth control and didn’t get knocked up. Well, birth control that works. I guess it isn’t her fault condoms break every once in a while.

That one time, at a frat party…

CLAIRE HAD DISAPPEARED
with some really cute guy about twenty minutes ago and honestly, I was glad she walked out of the room. The two of them were trading lines from
Heathers
while they played a thousand games of beer pong and it had started making me feel stabby.
Heathers
was our thing. OURS. Now that whore decided to finally listen to me about losing her virginity with a dude who was going to steal her away from me. Some pretty boy with a sweet smile who was going to pop her cherry, ask her to marry him and then they would move away and I’d never see her again. Okay, I know I’m being dramatic, fuck your face. I’m a good friend, though. I stood watch over the guy all night long and made sure he wasn’t some pompous frat boy who would slip a roofie in her drink and take advantage of her. The fact that he was actually
nice
made it harder to hate him for stealing my best friend. Thank God Claire strapped on a set of balls and took the lead, otherwise that guy would have just stared at her with those stupid googly eyes all night long and never manned up. That guy was two seconds away from kissing the ground she walked on. Really, I’m happy for her. If she’s going to lose her virginity, at least it’s with someone like that and not some douche who will hit it and quit it and she’ll never see him again. I hope she at least remembers to get his damn name.

“You look bored. How can you possibly be bored at a frat party?”

I turned around so fast when I heard a voice close to my ear that my full cup of beer sloshed all down the front of the guy’s clothes.

He let out a yell when the cold liquid hit his junk and I growled when I realized I’d just wasted a full cup of perfectly good beer. As he attempted to pull his wet shirt away from his body, I looked over at the keg that now had a red Solo cup covering the tap indicating it was empty.

Super. Just perfect. I have to stand here and wait for my best friend to finish doing the deed sober.

I started to move towards the kitchen in the hopes of finding something,
anything
to drink when a hand grabbed onto my arm. I had really good intentions, I swear. My mouth opened and I prepared to let a string of curse words fly, telling this asshole to get his hands off me before I kicked him in the balls, but my eyes met his and I forgot how to swear. I don’t forget how to swear. I NEVER forget how to swear. Swearing is my favorite thing in the world and I always have some good ones on the tip of my tongue ready to fly just in case. Hazel eyes with a ring of green around them stared down at me and I swear to fuck they sparkled as he looked at me. Gorgeous eyes aside, the guy had the nerve to smile at me. Not smirk like a douche, but a full, showing all his teeth and the dimples in his cheeks
smile.

“I promise I won’t say something stupid like ‘How about you help me get out of these wet clothes,’ but… I really need to get out of these wet clothes,” he told me.

I just stood there staring at his lips as he spoke.

“I have an extra t-shirt and jeans out in my car, but I’m afraid if I go out and get them, you won’t be here when I get back.”

Finally, I tore my eyes away from his mouth and shook the cobwebs from my brain. I took a step back from him, putting some distance between us before I did something stupid like kiss the guy.

“What do you care if I’m not here when you get back? There are a hundred girls at this party,” I replied lamely.

He shrugged. “You’re the only one who looks like she doesn’t want to be here and that intrigues me. It also doesn’t hurt that you’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.”

My mouth dropped open unattractively and I’m pretty sure he wanted to take that statement back immediately. I’ve been called hot, sexy, gorgeous and a bunch of other adjectives that I couldn’t have cared less about, but no one had ever told me I was pretty. That word indicates sweet and nice and innocent—something I had never been. It also made my heart melt, which pissed me off. My heart never melts.

“My name is Jim,” he told me with that fucking smile again.

He held his hand out in front of him and there was nothing I could do but take it. I mean, I didn’t want the poor guy looking like a schmuck with his hand hanging there while I stared him down.

You know in all those romance novels how people feel ‘sparks’ the first time they touch? Yeah, totally stupid. And no, I didn’t feel fucking sparks. Jim isn’t a lightning rod and last time I checked I didn’t have an electrical plug coming out of my ass connected to an outlet in the wall. I felt soft, warm skin and a hand that engulfed my small one and held on tight. I felt his handshake all the way up my arms and somewhere in my vagina. He held my hand and didn’t let go even after the two second time limit for proper handshakes ended.

“I’m not having sex with you tonight,” I blurted.

He squeezed my hand and leaned in close, his cheek brushing against mine until his lips were right by my ear.

“What makes you think I
want
to have sex with you?”

I should have been offended by his words, but I wasn’t because I actually believed him. He seriously did NOT want to have sex with me. It was an anomaly and it made me want to know more about him. He pulled away from me and dropped my hand, sticking his own hands into the front pockets of his jeans.

“Look, I’m not into one-night stands. Sure, they’re fun at the time but the next morning, you always wake up feeling used.”

He started backing away from me, pushing his way through crowds of drunk college students.

“Besides, I don’t even know your name!” he shouted before disappearing behind two drunk girls dry humping each other while a group of equally drunk guys cheered them on.

I looked behind me down the hall where Claire had disappeared, and then I stared off in the general direction of where Jim had been swallowed up by the group of idiots. Back and forth I looked, trying to decide which way to go. I know I should have ran down the hall and stood guard outside of the room Claire entered with Mr. Cherry Popper, but the thought of
listening
to what was going on behind that closed door made me want to throw up all the beer I’d consumed tonight. If I followed Jim out to his car while he got his change of clothes, I’d have to give him my name and actually
talk
to him. What he said about one-night stands was obviously true, but at least they were quick and painless. You found a guy, you had sex and then you went on your merry way and didn’t have to deal with all the baggage and bullshit. In the end, I made the only choice I
could
make. I tossed my empty beer cup onto the ground and pushed the dry-humpers out of the way, running outside to try and find Jim and see what his deal was.