Rock N Soul (14 page)

I crossed my arms behind my back so the guest couldn’t see my hands, then flipped Chris off, which just made him laugh. Ignoring him, I smiled at the woman again, still pretty brightly although I turned down the warmth a bit, and did what I usually did in these situations. “Well, I can send room service up for you if you want. Or I can have the concierge make you reservations for dinner or a show. I can also have housekeeping bring up extra pillows or towels if you need them.”
You’ll notice how none of that involved me taking off my pants.

She kept eyeing me for a moment, then opened her door and stepped inside. “I expect you want a tip, right? Come in and let me get my purse.”

It took a massive effort for me not to stare pointedly at the purse hanging off her shoulder. “No, thank you, that’s not necessary,” I told her, even though it kind of was. But I didn’t need her lousy dollar enough to risk a hospitalization to get her tongue surgically removed from my throat, so it was probably best to just let that one go. “Have a good night.” I gave her one more smile and then walked away toward the stairwell.

“You’re not going for the elevator?” Chris asked me as he trotted along behind me.

I hadn’t heard the door to the room close, so I assumed that the woman was still standing there watching me. I spoke low so she couldn’t hear. “I’d have to stand there in the hall and wait for it, and she’d be leering at me the whole time. This way I get out of here quickly.”

“Fair enough. So how often does that happen?” He matched my speed, and our hands would have bumped if Chris were more solid, so I angled a little more away from him.

I opened the door to the stairwell and started trudging down the steps. “Not
that
often. I mean, maybe once every couple of months? It’s always the businesswomen in their forties, too. I guess they’re bored.”

“No business
men
?” Chris said. He raised an eyebrow at me, and I rolled my eyes at him.

“Sometimes,” I admitted. “I turn them down too.”

“So you’ve never porked a guest. Not once.”

“Nope,” I said, then decided to be honest for whatever reason. “Well, not while they were guests. There was this one girl who was here for a bachelorette party who gave me her number. After she was safely not a guest anymore I called her up.”

“You devil, you,” Chris said, chuckling.

I smiled. “Well, it didn’t amount to anything, anyway. And then I hooked up with Carmen. And that concludes my dating history for the past two years.” I paused with my hand on the door to the lobby. “That sounded more pathetic than I meant it to.”

“I applaud your moral standards,” Chris said. “I won’t rag you too much about it.”

“Thanks,” I said, rolling my eyes again. “But really it doesn’t have as much to do with moral standards as it does with my deep fear of unemployment.”

“So would you have porked Horny Lady back there if you knew you wouldn’t get fired for it?”

“
Please
stop saying ‘porked.’” I wrinkled my nose. “And my girlfriend dumped me the night you died and I’ve only had myself for company since then, so . . . I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Carmen dumped you the night I died?” he asked, and judging by the way his eyes widened, he must have been pretty surprised by that.

“Yeah,” I told him. “It was sort of a shitty day for me all-around.”

“Before or after?” he pressed.

“After.” I opened the door and walked back into the lobby. Mark was outside watching the cars go by and nobody seemed to need help at the moment, so I headed into the lounge area and started straightening pillows on the couches so that Richard would think I was busy.

“She dumped you after you’d had to deal with finding a dead body in a hotel room?” Chris asked.

I almost ignored him, but he would probably keep harassing me until I answered. “I told you, she’s not very nice. And besides, it was pretty much over anyway. She was just sticking around in case I did manage to get your autograph.”

“I honestly don’t know if I would have given you one.” Chris flopped down on the couch and smirked at me. “I was kind of an asshole that night.”

I laughed. “Dude, you’re
still
an asshole.” Then, because I didn’t want to come off as a dick myself: “But I guess you’re a cool asshole.”

He gave a half smirk at that. “Thanks. You’re a cool asshole yourself.”

And there it was, that edge we’d been sneaking closer to. “Dude, are we . . .
friends
?”

He tilted his head and looked up at the ceiling. “I think we are, yeah.”

“Wow,” I said, and it did seem pretty amazing, especially since I hadn’t made any friends since I dropped out of college. I still had some friends from a long time ago who I kept up with loosely on social media, but nobody I could call or go hang out with. Which was even more pathetic than my sexual dry spell, so I didn’t mention it. “Shame nobody would believe me. I could get so many chicks if I claimed I was friends with the ITM bassist.”

“Well, once we go out to LA you can tell them you know the ITM front man, and that will probably get you even
more
chicks, so you can thank me for that later.”

He smiled, and I smiled, and it occurred to me that maybe friendship wasn’t the edge we’d been approaching after all.

“No,” I said emphatically as I locked the door behind us. We’d just gotten back from having lunch with Gemma, and Chris had been bothering me about watching TV for the whole walk home. “I’m sorry, Chris, but in the past two weeks we have watched
four seasons
of
Supernatural
and I am frankly really, really fucking tired of it.”

“Sucks to be you, then,” he said. “Because season five is going to be
awesome
.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’ll watch to the end of season five, but if you think I’m watching past that, then you can go fuck yourself.”

“Well, fine,” he said. “You’re such a spoilsport.”

“And anyway . . . I needed to talk to you. So no TV right now.” I sat down on the couch and turned to look at him.

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Is this the Relationship Talk?”

“No, you idiot,” I said, then thought better of it. “Well, sort of. It’s the ‘I have to go home for Christmas and hang out with my stupid family and since your soul is weirdly attached to my aura, then that means you have to come too so please don’t be an asshole about it’ talk.”

“Christmas, huh?” He rubbed his chin. “It’s been a long time since I had a Christmas that didn’t involve hookers and blow.”

“Well, my family gets pretty crazy, so I wouldn’t rule that out,” I said, laughing.

“This sounds like my kind of event, then.” He grinned at me.

I found myself grinning back, which irritated me. “Seriously, it’s probably not going to be very exciting. We’ll go, I’ll eat, Aunt Greta will tell me I’ve gained weight even though I haven’t, Crazy Cousin Chad will pace around the living room, we’ll watch some football, and then I’ll leave again and maybe we can find us a hooker.” I paused. “Well, not really. I can’t afford that shit. But we can come back to Boston and I’ll eat a scone for you and we can watch a documentary about the real Saint Nicholas or something.”

“I guess that sounds not completely terrible,” he allowed. “It will be fun to meet your family without having to make small talk with them.”

“That’s the spirit,” I said, then smirked. “Get it? Spirit? Because you’re a ghost.”

He tried to pick up a pillow and throw it at me before he remembered he couldn’t. I laughed, and he joined in.

“So you’ll come?” I asked him after the laughter faded.

He shrugged. “I’ll come. I don’t have much of a choice, though, do I?”

“Not really,” I admitted. “But if you actually
agree
to go, then maybe you’ll be nicer about it than if I just dragged you along without your consent.”

“I’ll go. It might be fun to meet your family. See why it is that you are—” he gestured up and down me “—the way that you are.”

“I don’t know how enlightening it will be for you,” I warned him. “I have your run-of-the-mill family.”

“No family is really run of the mill,” he said. “Every family is weird and dysfunctional in its own special and unique way.”

I thought for a moment. “Well, there
is
Crazy Cousin Chad.”

“Oh yeah, Crazy Cousin Chad. You mentioned him a minute ago. What’s his story?”

“He’s crazy. And not just normal ‘my family is soooo craaazy’ crazy. Like literally mentally unbalanced. He’s on antipsychotic meds.”

Chris raised his eyebrows. “What brand of crazy? Like hearing-voices crazy or like homicidal-rage crazy?”

“Why? Are you afraid he’ll kill you deader?” I let the corner of my mouth quirk up into a tiny half smile.

“I’m afraid he’ll kill
you
,” he retorted. “And then who knows what would happen to me? I’d rather keep you alive than take my chances.”

“That’s very heartwarming,” I said, rolling my eyes again. “But I guess he’s more hearing-voices crazy. I don’t really know. We’re not super close. I mean, he’s around my age, so we played together at family events when we were younger, but we haven’t been buddies as adults. But to the best of my knowledge he’s never tried to murder anyone.”

“It must be terrible for him to see and hear something that no one else can see and hear.” He cocked an eyebrow at me.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It must make him feel like a major nutjob. I can certainly relate.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” Chris said, sounding oddly serious about it.

I smiled again, and it wasn’t even a sarcastic smile. “That sounds like something that my psychotic hallucination would say if I
was
crazy.”

He chuckled. “Very true.”

The fucker had dimples.
Dimples
. What the hell was he doing with dimples like that? And why the hell was I noticing them at all, much less thinking about how they made him look like a genuinely nice guy? I doubted Eric had dimples, so I don’t know why Carmen wouldn’t have liked Chris more. But maybe she was into bad boys. I don’t know. I don’t care. That whole line of thought was stupid.

The silence had apparently stretched on a little too long, because Chris awkwardly cleared his throat and continued. “So tell me about your family. There’s Crazy Cousin Chad and some aunt who’s obsessed with your weight. Who else?”

I swallowed hard, pulling my eyes away from his stupid cheeks. “Well.” I drew out the word to give myself some time to regroup. “There’s my grandma. I call her Grandma. Because I’m creative like that.”

“Cool. Grandmas are pretty nice, from what I hear.”

“You don’t have any?”

“No, my parents sprang forth from the foam of the sea,” he deadpanned.

I threw a pillow back at him—or, more accurately, through him—and he ducked, grinning. I smirked at getting a reaction out of him. “Jerk. You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean. And no, I don’t have any. They were still around when I was a kid, but they’ve been gone for a while. And before you apologize, it’s cool. Made my peace with that a long time ago.”

It was pretty hard not to apologize anyway. Basic human reaction. But since he’d told me not to, I suppressed the urge. “Well, I hope Grandma makes it for a few more decades. She’s basically my mom. She was the one who raised me.”

He opened his mouth to speak, then looked uncertain.

I took pity on him. “My mother didn’t want kids. She was pretty young. Not
16 and Pregnant
young, but young enough that she didn’t think she’d be a good mom. So when I was born, she foisted me off on Grandma and hit the road.”

Chris frowned. “So you don’t have contact with her?”

I shrugged. “I don’t really know where she is at any given time. But she sends postcards every once in a while. And she sends me a birthday card when she remembers to, which has been about five times in my life. And sometimes—very rarely, but sometimes—she shows up to family functions.”

“Will she be at Christmas?”

“I sincerely doubt it,” I said. “The last time she came to a family holiday was the Thanksgiving when I was nine. She called Aunt Greta an insufferable, nosy know-it-all right there at the dinner table and Grandma threw her out of the house and it was
awesome
. But only in retrospect. At the time, Aunt Greta was crying and Crazy Cousin Chad was crying and Grandma was beet red and furious and Mom was waving a turkey leg in the air and telling Grandma she couldn’t throw her out because she was
leaving of her own accord
and then she tripped over her chair and started cussing a blue streak and I was pretty sure that nobody was going to get dessert, which to a nine-year-old was the worst possible outcome.”

Chris was laughing, a hearty genuine-sounding laugh. “Did you get dessert?”

“Yeah,” I said, grinning. “And I think Grandma let us have extra because she felt bad that Mom had caused a scene. So it turned out okay in the end.”

“I almost hope I get to see something like that.”

“Well, don’t get your hopes up,” I warned him. “Seriously, every other holiday has been pretty low-key.”

“Still,” he said. “I’m actually looking forward to this.”