Just A Small Town Girl: A New Adult Romantic Comedy (8 page)

 Lacie sighed. "I...really didn't. I thought for a while I'd like to go to grad school - Masters, Doctorate. Full-on academia, but that takes money we don't have and quite frankly if my head is this far up my ass after a Bachelors can you imagine what I'd be like after a Masters? I'd be wearing my gall-bladder as a hat."

 I was surprised by the speed she thawed. "You're not. You're cool. You're good."

 "I'm not. I'm an idiot. It wasn't a year since the ass had fallen clean out of the entire economy and I took an Arts degree? That's a special kind of stupid all on its own. Come on - that's an eye watering lack of foresight right there."

 "But were you good at it?" I said.

 "I was," she said, with another sigh. "I was. I translated the Battle of Maldon and knew all the historical contexts to the poems of W.B. Yeats and where to find the dick jokes in Shakespeare. I even learned to read
The Scarlet Letter
without throwing it across the room; do you know how difficult that is? And it's all completely useless. I have a degree that basically says I'm better at reading books than other people."

 "So what? You're smart. You can do whatever you want. What do you want to do?"

 She was fiddling with the little paper tube that had once held brown sugar for her coffee. She had rolled it into a tiny strip and was now trying to tie it in a knot.

 "Your Aunt said you wanted to write," I said.

 Lacie arched an eyebrow. "Fuck her."

 I backed off.

 "No, really. Fuck her. Every time I see her lately she's like Stewie from
Family Guy
- 'How you coming on with that novel, huh?' She's not a bad person as such, but deep down she's kind of bitch. She's always been like that, ever since she was little, Dad says. Constantly comparing herself to other people. If I ever managed to write a book Aunt Cassandra would be green - pea green."

 "So do it. Do it to piss her off."

 "I don't know," she said. "I would, but I get so far and then it's like there's this little voice breathing down my neck." She made a puppet mouth out of her hand and snapped it open and shut just below her ear. "And it says 'You suck, you suck, you suck.' Then sometimes I get it in the other ear too, so it's in stereo. Like those shoulder devils and angels in old cartoons - you know the ones? Except mine are both evil and they both hate me. So I hit the delete key and go back to price tags and inventory."

 I could feel her foot against mine under the table. "I guess you could say I don't exactly have my life together," she said.

 "We're quite a pair, huh?"

 "We are, yes."

 She leaned forward on her elbows, her foot slipping between my ankles. Her eyes were the color of brown sugar and she squinted a little as she drew closer; I wondered if those glasses were to correct long sight or short. I could tell her mind was going interesting places - her lips were slightly parted and her foot stroked up and down the back of my calf. It was hard to make her out, but she was right - we were quite a pair.

 "Do you want to get out of here?" she said.

 "I thought we were on a date?"

 "We are," she said, the tip of her tongue flickering briefly over her upper lip. "Isn't that the point of a date?"

 "The point?" I said. "What do you mean?"

 "Don't play dumb," she said. "You know what I mean. We can sit here and pretend it's 1955 or we can act like adults and cut to the chase."

 "Cut to the chase?"

 "Fuck," she said. "We can fuck. That's why you asked me here, right? Because you're sick of trying to play grab-ass in the office and to be honest I'm sick of you trying. Maybe we just need to get it out of our system."

 At this point I think I was supposed to say something like 'No, I'm here because I like you', or tell her I was deeply into her as a human being, but instead I said 'Okay' and picked up the check before her huge raw-boned uncle Jerry or whoever he was spotted the lump in my jeans and correctly guessed my intentions towards his sweet little girl.

 "Can we go back to your place?" she said.

 I shook my head. There was no way I was ready to admit that I lived in a trailer, and besides that there was a good chance of being murdered by an enormous, angry biker. "It's kind of complicated right now," I said.

 "It's cool," she said. "I get it. You live with your parents, don't you?"

 She was halfway across the street before I could even think of a reply. The wind caught the hem of her polka-dot skirt and for a second I thought I saw white skin and black lace. No panty hose to tear this time. I hurried after her.

 She snuck down the alleyway at the side of the shop and took out her key to the workshop. "In here?" I said. "What happens if your Dad comes down?"

 "He won't," she said. "Once he locks up for the night this place may as well not exist to him. It's like Schrödinger’s box or something."

 I followed her inside. It was quiet and warm, and the air smelled of stain and pine shavings. I caught up with her as she hit the light-switch and for a moment I had her against the wall, her mouth tasting of sugar and coffee. My hand bunched up her skirt behind her, but she covered it with hers. "Nuh uh," she said. "I want to see the master stripper in action."

 "I told you," I said, nuzzling down into her neckline. "I'm not that kind of stripper."

 "So learn."

 She pushed me away and settled on a fainting couch that was due for reupholstery. There she swung her legs up and lay there like a Roman Empress, awaiting entertainment.

 "You're not kidding, are you?" I said. Part of me wanted to do it - humor her and give her a good old school bump and grind right there in the middle of the workshop.

 "It's not the usual kind of Chippendale action we see around these parts," she said. "But you see what I have to work with; I'm starved for entertainment."

 "No music," I said.

 "I guess one of us will have to sing," she said. "And I should warn you, it would better if it were you."

 "So you want me to sing?"

 "Yes."

 "And take my clothes off?"

 "Yes please."

 "For your entertainment?"

 She nodded. "That's about the size of it, yup."

 It was a good thing she was cute. "You are not even ready for the size of it," I said. I wished I'd at least had a drink before she dragged me into this, but she giggled and somehow that made it easier to strike a pose. I started humming the old 'Stripper' tune as I moved towards her with an exaggerated, hippy stride. She laughed too loud and I shushed her, before starting over at lower volume, waving my ass around like a lunatic as I fumbled with my shirt buttons.

 When I got it off I sent it flying across the workshop into her lap. I'd never done this before and when it came to my jeans and t-shirt I knew why strippers had those special Velcro pants they could just tear off in one go; there is no easy way to get out of a pair of jeans and there is simply no sexy way for a man to remove his socks. Not one.

 I tossed my jeans at her feet.

 "And the rest," she said, when I was down to my underwear.

 "No," I said, walking towards her. "You take 'em off."

 She knelt up on the couch in front of me, her hands on my waistband. "What happened to the music?" she asked.

 I sang a couple of bars of that old Bobby Darin tune -
If I Were A Carpenter
- but my voice cracked as her fingers curled around me. It was a low couch and her face was far enough below me for my heart to beat faster when she licked her lips. "You're wearing way too many clothes," I said.

 She grinned. "Not where it counts," she whispered, and raised the hem of her skirt.

 Chapter Five

Lacie

There were frogs singing down by the water and the sky was darkening from mood indigo to deep blue-black. We were lying on the top of an old car, side by side, slightly buzzed. When there's nothing much else to do it's funny how you fall back on the Tom Sawyerish places of your youth; the pond where you learned to swim, the bramble paths where the best blackberries grew, or the field that bordered on the junk yard, where the wrecks that peered over the tops of the long grass used to play the roles of dinosaurs and sleeping dragons, in an imaginary land that time forgot.

 "So peaceful," said Clayton. I could feel the warmth of his hip against mine.

 "For now. Before tourist hell comes to town."

 "It's not so bad," he said. "Once a year. And they spend money."

 "I guess."

 "You shouldn't begrudge them a few leaves and a look at the sky. Some of these poor city pricks probably never even seen a sky like this."

 "The sky is the sky; what's to see?" I said. I wanted to look at him but the roof of the car was slightly curved, so that I lay concave to the sky like Prometheus on the rocks. I vaguely recalled something they called a sky burial - the body draped face up to the air, left to the elements and the birds.

 "Everything," he said. "I never saw a sky like this until we moved to Vermont."

 "Wait, I thought you were from here?"

 I felt his head move. "Nope. Chicago."

 "Ah. That's the accent."

 "I have an accent?"

 "Not much. I guess I just have an ear for these things. When did you move here?"

 He took a deep, satisfied breath, as if he could inhale the stars. "We were eight - me and Bryan. My Mom used to buy me these coloring books of the planets - galaxies, alien suns, space stuff." I saw his hand move above us as he gestured. "I made all these mobiles of the solar system. Wanted to be an astronaut. I never really believed in it, though. All those stars and planets and constellations and maps - it was never real to me, because every time I looked up all I fucking saw was just...light pollution. It was never really dark enough in Chicago to see the stars."

 "And then you moved to Vermont," I said.

 "Yep. Then it was real. Huge. Big enough to make you crazy. And there it all was. Pegasus. Andromeda. The Pleiades. Mars. Venus. Jupiter. Orion. Red giants, novas, the Milky Way - so clear and so crisp."

 "So why did you give up wanting to be an astronaut?" I asked.

 The car creaked gently underneath us as he laughed. "Are you kidding me? I could have studied until I was eighty and never made the grades. You could, though."

 "Me? Don't be ridiculous."

 "You could. You're smart."

 I remembered what Courtney had said, when she was trying to explain her world to people for whom the New York fashion scene was as remote and alien as the surface of Mars. I hadn't quite grasped her meaning then but now it made perfect sense to me.

 "There's more than one type of intelligence," I said. "And I'm not that type. They're like engineers and physicists, not to mention scary fit. Anyway, the view's good enough from Earth."

 "Right," he said. "Why would you bother inventing the telescope?"

 I didn't care for his tone - it smacked of Aunt Cassandra's - so I said nothing for a while. At least, I thought, I knew who invented the telescope. Hooke? Halley? Wren? Someone like that - a bunch of men in heavy-bottomed periwigs poking apart the natural world, kicking over the traces of superstition. I wanted to say something, but everything I thought through sounded sour, or like an excuse. This was so fucking ridiculous - all this lying around on junked cars like we were children, sneaking around in the workshop.

 "Why can't we go to your place?" My words came out irritable and to my further annoyance he laughed.

 "There's a sweet nothing if ever one was whispered," he said.

 "I don't care if you live with your parents. Are they super-religious or something?"

 "God no. They're Catholic." He sighed. "And I don't live with them."

 My stomach turned to ice. "Oh my God - you're married." I tried to sit up, but the roof of the car was narrow. He caught me before I fell and for a moment it was like I hung there in mid-air, torn between the desire to fight him off and knowing that I was about to hit the ground like a sack of potatoes. As soon as my feet touched the earth I yanked my hand loose from his.

 "Lacie!"

 I kept walking. How could I have been so stupid? I heard him coming and broke into a run, but he was too fast.

 "Will you listen?" he said, catching hold of my arm. "I don't live with my parents and I'm not married. Jesus, what is it with you and leaping to conclusions?"

 "Then why did you lie to me?"

 "I didn't," he said. "You assumed I lived with my parents. I didn't get to answer one way or the other."

 I knew he was right. I was glad of the dark because I was probably the color of a beet right now. "You're splitting hairs," I said.

 "I'm not and you know it." He squeezed both my hands and ducked a little to touch his forehead to mine. "The reason I didn't take you home is because I live in a trailer," he said. "In a trailer park. That's where I am in life right now."

 I worked one hand loose and slapped him across his upper arm. "You dick! What kind of snob do you think I am?"

 "I don't. It's just not something I like to admit. People have prejudices."

 "Thanks for including me among those people," I said. What kind of shallow, stuck-up princess did he think I was?

 "I'm sorry. I guess it was just force of habit. Look, we can totally go there if you want."

 I shook my head and carried on walking. A little part of me was ashamed of myself for ruining the evening. I'd been like this all day - raw, edgy and close to tears. It was late in the month and while I knew why I was behaving in this ridiculous way it was as if I lacked the faculties to pull myself back. It was like my skin was too thin and I felt like Byron used to look, like the workings of me were on show - veins, tendons, bone.

 By some titanic effort I managed not to cry. "I just want to sleep," I said, when we reached his car. "I think I'm tired."

 His mouth refused to slant in its usual smile and I knew I'd upset him. I wanted to tell him it didn't matter to me where he lived but I could tell somehow that I'd only make things worse. His unspoken misjudgment of me had hurt me more than I wanted to admit and right now it felt too big and tugged at the frayed ends of all my anxieties. "I'll see you tomorrow," he said, and kissed me on the side of the mouth. He kept his lips closed and they felt hard, perfunctory. He thought I was stupid. He thought I was a flake, a princess, a drama queen.