Random Acts of Hope (16 page)

That $10 bill she slipped in over my hip flexor muscle didn’t hurt any. I nuzzled up to her and gave her a loud,
juicy
kiss on the cheek.

“Liam, honey, you are just as fine now as you were five years ago,” she said.

“Dr. Trammel?” I
made the kind of sound
that comes from deep in your abs, the sound of incredulity that only giving a lap dance to the woman who gave you a C can produce.

“Glad to see you’re healthy and well and putting your fine undergraduate degree to good use.” She winked at me, then frowned. “You did graduate?”

“Yes,
m
a’am. The alumni office was awesome in helping me land this great job
using my major
.”

She paused, shot me a look of confusion, then brayed with laughter. Soft, manicured hands—not hers—slid up and down my back as the song ended. A new one with a faster beat, one that Sam and I had a routine for, started up.

“Take care, Dr. T.”

“You too.” Her eyes, though, were on Sam the Cop as he handcuffed the bride to his ankle and we began
to dance to the theme to the television show
Cops
.
 

We were bad boys, al
l
right.

Thinking about Charlotte and shaking my goods were two wholly incompatible things, so I gave
m
yself over to the sweet mercy of earning my living one bill, one stroke, one wink at a time.

At leas
t
this party didn’t include my mom. And, thankfully, no sex toy party, though the bride kept pulling out her new Sybian and talking about how she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with it. I’d seen one at the Eden island resort when we’d played there and knew
exactly
what a woman could do with it.

Give her enough booze and someone would find a way to get her on there.

But not me.

Sam glanced at me, conveying more than you’d think possible in a single look. Mostly, he was saying he was
done
. The stripping took its toll after a few months. Like working at an ice cream store: at first, it’s fun and sweet and you think you’ll never get tired of it.

Then after a while, the thought of it makes you gag.

The women, though, were nice and just wanted to have a little fun. Who could blame them? I wonder
ed
if
C
harlotte
did
sex toy parties for the same
re
ason I strip
ped
: easy money, privacy, and fun.

There I went again. Thinking about Charlotte.

I wondered if she was thinking about me.

Charlotte

“I just love this pearl necklace!” the hostess’s gra
nd
mother exclaimed, sliding a string of blue anal beads over her head, donning them at her throat. “What a lovely jewelry party.”
Jolie, the hostess, looked at her grandmother with a grimace but said nothing.
 

“But what kind of baseball bat is this?” Jolie’s mother, Ann
a,
asked. She was holding a seventeen-inch black dildo with a suction cup on the end.

Jolie’s expression turned from sheepishness to horror. A creeping dread filled me, and I pulled her into the kitchen. My regional manager at the sex toy company had warned me this might happen at least once in my career, and it looked like tonight was the night.

“Your mom and
gr
andma have no idea this is a sex toy party, do they?” I asked with as much compa
ss
ion as I could muster. In truth, if the people coming to the party didn’t know I’d be flashing
F
leshlights and vibrating cock rings and anal beads
like they were kitchen supplies and candles
, we were in for a shameful, long evening.

I
wouldn’t feel
a
shamed. But it looked like Jolie was about to melt into the floor and die from embarrassment.

“They weren’t supposed to be here, but my stupid sister-in-law Lisa told them about my ‘jewelry party’ and now Mom’s here.” We watched in horror as her grandmother rubbed the beads against her teeth and asked her mother whether this was a real pearl necklace.

“Pearl necklace,” Jolie giggled, then got serious.

“Jolie, I…it’s a raunchy, sex-positive party. I can’t do my presentation any other way. And your mom thinks a black dildo the size of my calf is a baseball bat.”

“Grandma looks like she’s about to turn that
F
leshlight into a
n oven mitt
,” Jolie sighed.

“I think you need to have a frank talk with your mom and grandma.”

She turned bright red,
brown eyes shaped like almonds and wild spiral-curled hair the same color framing her conflicted face
. “I don’t know what to do.”

I patted her shoulder sympathetically.
Note to self: text regional manager immediately.
 

“It’s better to give them some warning than to have them watch the sex wedge pil
l
ow demonstration DVD and freak out.”

“Demonstration videos?” she peeped.

“Remember how we talked about that? You saw them at your friend’s party.”
I kept the huge sigh in as much as possible, but a little bit leaked out.
 

Her mom called out across the room, “Jolie? Is this some kind of baby toy party, too? I keep seeing these little teething rings, except they vibrate.” Her mom held up a bright red jelly ring with a bullet vibrator attached. She turned it on and laughed as it buzzed against her finger.

I gave Jolie a look that I hoped conveyed the gravitas here.

She sighed. “Mom, that’s not a—well, can you and grandma come in the kitchen?”

While Jolie explained everything to her mother and grandmother, I finished setting up my display. No vibrator races on the kitchen floor tonight, though we would play Sex Bingo and Guess the Dildo Length. Free watermelon-flavored warming gels and tickler condoms for all in the goodie bags, and maybe I’d make $150 tonight and make the trip out here into the far edge of western Mass
achusetts
worth it.

“…and so he was one sweet piece of ass,” I overheard a voice in the dining room whisper to someone else. “And it was that guy from the video at the university. The rock star with the snake.”

My ears burned
red. Other parts of me turned a pale shade of green, too.
 

“I heard he fucks anything with two sets of lips,” the other voice said. I barely knew Jolie, much less any of the party guests.
These were complete strangers talking about Liam.
My
Liam.
 

“Heard? When we were in college that
hot
boy made the rounds like you wouldn’t believe.”

“You went to school with him?”

“Liam McCarthy was a sex legend in the freshman dorm. He tapped so many women they gave him the nickname ‘The Kegger.’”

My heart began to burn, too.

“And now he’s a stripper?”

“
H
ey, gotta pay student loans no matter what.”
A chorus of murmurs in assent made it seem okay.
 

“I don’t think he had any. He comes from a pretty solid family. His dad owns a car dealership.”

The two shared a snippy laugh. “He’s the perfect guy for that. Smooth and slick, ready to convince you he’s the real thing, and then the second you commit he’s on to the ne
x
t target.”

O
uch.

“
Yeah, and I’ll bet he knows every nook and cranny of a back seat.”
 

S
nickers abounded as my stomach flipped.

“Stripper, huh? Which company?”

“Don’t know. But wouldn’t it be fun to get a group of us together and see if he’s still tapping anything?”

More laughter.

Jolie’s mom came up to me, her face red with a mixture of outrage and embarrassment. “My mother put her mouth on those, those, those…”

“Anal beads.” I’d learned long ago that stating the facts was the best approach in the face of an overly emotional person at a sexapalooza.

“Yes. Were they ever—”

“No,
m
a’am. Never used, just for display. F
o
ndled by hands, but I always sanitize them before a party.”

“
B
ack in my twenties, a vibrator looked like a long, white, pointed tent stake. A little thicker.” She laughed shyly and picked up a pink jelly dildo, the kind with clit sti
m
ulators poking out. “This…this is a…I don’t even know.”

“That’s why you’re here,” I soothed. “To learn. Jolie came to a party and liked what we offered so much that she wanted to share with her friends.”
Speak of the devil, Jolie walked over to us at the tail end of my sentence.
 

“Why didn’t you tell me!” her mother
tsk
ed
at a very red Jolie.

“
B
ecause I knew you wouldn’t approve!”

“I don’t
not
approve! I just thought we were coming to buy grandma a nice pearl necklace. Not watch a video about how to help your husband give you one!”

“MOM!”

“Oh, you kids think you invented sex,” the grandma said with a dismissive wave. “Your grandfather would have loved playing with th
a
t pussy pocket. Give him a big tube of Vaseline and I’d be left alon
e
for a week.”

Jolie and her mother gaped at Grandma, who looked a lot more a
l
ert and with it.

And by the end of that party Mom bought $233 and Grandma $155
worth of products, leaving Jolie insanely curious
.
Hostesses, though, never knew what their guests ordered. It was part of what made sales spike nice and high. If no one knows you’re buying creampie DVDs and a set of tunnel butt plugs, you’re more likely to order with abandon.
 

And I came
h
ome with a huge headache and a troubling sense that the Liam I’d known five years ago had changed more than I realized.

Liam

There are very few things you can do at 3 a.m. after stripping for three different groups of people. You can go to the gym. You can go home and go to bed. You can find someone at an all-night diner and take them home and fuck them.

Or you can drive an hour west and sneak up on your ex-girlfriend’s window, pitching tiny pebbles at the glass in an effort to wake her up, but
also
to keep the other t
hree
hundred women in the dorm asleep, or fucking their boyfriends, or doing whatever you do on a Saturday night at three in the morning.

I’d driven here and sat in the back parking lot, far away from her building, and the two beers I chugged gave me a little liquid courage. Not much.

Absolutely zero, in fact.

We were supposed to meet for coffee on Tuesday and I couldn’t wait. Just couldn’t.

This time, I was going in there and telling her that it was all in the past and I wanted a future with her. Wa
nt
ed to kiss her, wanted to touch her, wanted to hear her call out my name in ecstasy. Wanted to be the only name on her lips when she fell asleep and the first word she thought when the sun peeked into her bedroom and woke her up.

That all sounded so great in my head when I thought about it, but when she opened her window a crack and hissed at me with outrage, the only words I could say were, “Watch out.”

Crawling out of the window last week had been a breeze.
C
rawling in was another fucking story. God damned window nearly tore my sac off as I climbed over the latch.

“I think I have a scrotum left after
all
that,” I joked when I was standing properly. She had wet hair and a look of utter incredulity on her face. I walked to her like she had me hypnotized.

“Liam, what the hell do you think you’re—”

The feeling of a woman in your arms, slammed up against a wall, the pressure of your body against hers, is one that you can’t imagine will feel as divine as it does when it’s a person so special you just want to bury yourself in her.

Her lips were hard with surprise, then yielding and urgent as I tasted her—really explored her. She tasted like berries and peaches, like
C
harlotte and surrender, and I wanted nothing but the taste of her—all of her—on my tongue and lips for the rest of my life.

But tonight would have to do. It would have to be enough, because by the time we talked—after we acted—I had a feeling we might not have more than tonight.

Which was why right now, acting, touching, tasting, grabbing, stroking—
senses
—were more importan
t
than words.

Words could be uttered in the harsh light of day, could be parried and exchanged, voll
eye
d and thrown like a weapon, a curse, a balm, and prayer.

But to
u
ch? There was really only one way to properly touch a woman.

And I needed so badly to show Charlotte exactly how I did it.

Her hand sank into my hair, roamed down my sweaty back, slid over my jeans-covered ass, making me clench and push into her, driving my hard self into her soft curves. My hands filled with her, the lean and the lush hills and valleys of that body that had changed so much in five years, yet felt exquisitely the same.

God, I’d missed her.

And then, with a massive shove, the col
d
air between us shocked me. Her eyes glittered in the security light that warped everything I saw in the dark room, and she wiped her lips with the back of her hand in a way that felt like I was being accused of something I didn’t intend.

And then:

“Is ‘
T
he Kegger’ looking for something to tap?”
Her eyes were wet steel.
 

Oh, fuck.

“
Because sorry, bud. I’m not here for you to hammer into and make me squirt.”
 

Aside from the fact that
that
image made me hard as fuck, her words cut like a knife into my heart. “It’s…I…stupid nickname.”