East Rising (Naive Mistakes #2) (6 page)

I sipped my coffee and said nothing.

"Although," continued Kayla, "with all these
creamy coffees you're drinking — what's that called?" She pointed
at my cup.

"Flat White," I said.

"Right, with all these 'Flat Whites' or
whatevers you're drinking, soon you'll be too round to get
any."

Dani made a raspberry
sound. "Yeah, right!"
Righ'!
"Men like it round. Actually, men like anything
that can suck properly. It's all in the tongue, and the lips, and
the — "

"OK, OK, enough!" I put my hands up, looked
around. I was sure I was red as the devil right now. The lady of
earlier had since left. "I thought this was England, land of the
proper and all that shit."

"Fuck that," said Dani.

The two of them — Dani and Kayla — looked
like a toned-down version of Laurel and Hardy, only sexier. Much
sexier. Damn, if I'd been a guy, I know I would've done both of
them, no problem. Both licked the cream off their drinks like,
well, you know...

"I taught young Leora here how to give a
blowjob," said Kayla.

My palm went to my face with a slapping
sounding. My skin flushed red-hot. And then Kayla told her how —
about the bananas and all of it. I was so embarrassed that I
laughed myself to the point of forgetting all my problems,
forgetting everything else except the three of us sitting here,
drinking coffee, being obscene and obnoxious. I forgot all about
That Man, even.

Until my phone buzzed.

Conall: Tomorrow. London. Outside the Ritz.
Can you make it?

The phone felt like lead in my hands.
Burning, glowing, hot molten lead. A hurricane blew around me — a
tornado of coffee cups and English accents and giggles and chuckles
and Laurel and Hardy, only Laurel had green hair and Hardy was a
seductive blonde. They laughed. And they spun as well.

My phone fell.

When it hit the ground,
Laurel — no,
Kayla
— was at my side. She was saying something to me. Then Dani
spoke. Now they were both on my side. Fucked if I knew what the
words were that were coming out their mouths...

An old woman — very old,
skin haggard and wrinkly — laughed like the clown from
It
by Stephen King. A
bald-headed man looked at me menacingly.

I was hallucinating.

Before I knew it, I was outside, practically
carried out, hands under my armpits, by Dani and Kayla. My two best
friends in the world. My rocks. My anchors in this ocean. Drowning.
Drowning.

A voice.

And another.

My name?

Leo! Leo!

"Leora!"

Huh? What?

And then I snapped to. And
I was here. A charity store sat across the road.
Oxfam
. That was its name.
I usually got books from there. A
Café
Nero
stood next to it. A woman shouted at
her kid a few feet away, then slapped him.

Yip, I was here.

I breathed.

"He wants to meet me. Tomorrow. In
London."

I didn't need to explain to either of them
who "he" was.

After I'd agreed to meet him (what else was
I gonna do?) Conall had texted me back one message:

Conall: Come alone. 2PM. Not even Kayla can
come with you.

I didn't tell Kayla about that one. Because
the creepiest thing about the message was that he knew she was
here.

We hung out drinking coffee
and then, later, went to
Jolly
Roger
as paying customers (with a staff
discount) to get pissed. Kayla and Dani got pissed. Very pissed.
Floor-Lickingly hammered, in fact. By the end of the night they
were hugging and singing
The
Beatles
and
Coldplay
songs that Kayla didn't know
the words to. Eventually they settled on a
Cranberries
hit (who would've
thought!) which both of them knew by heart. Only, slurring and
babbling from all the booze, most of the lyrics simply came out as:
"gmmhtplffs shhuiffg (hiccup)!" The rest of the pub soon joined
them. One thing I'd learned in English pubs is that knowing the
words to songs had jack-shit to do with singing them. They all had
a lot of fun.

At eleven P.M. I was smiling, a bit.
Freckled Troy The Manager got the girls home safely. I had no
worries about either of them. Dani was about the hardest person to
take advantage of in the world, and Troy, for all his faults, was
actually a decent guy about that kind of stuff. He never flirted
with the staff.

I walked home.
Jolly Roger
was only a
few blocks from the hole-under-the-roof I was staying in. I really
liked where I stayed, really did. It was warm at least (quite an
achievement for an English house in winter!) and it was small,
cozy. I'd taken to reading — a lot! — since coming to England, and
most of the already cramped space was filled with paperbacks of
anything and everything I could find that had to do with love. They
had almost zero New Adult novels at the places I bought books from,
so I ended up reading mostly authors like Nora Roberts or even
Sandra Brown (not bad), a ton of English authors, copious love
stories where they dim out the lights before any steam... But when
I did find a hot book I normally got through it in an
evening.

It hadn't been good for keeping my mind off
You-Know-Who...

Many of the books were tragic (God, what a
downer), much more were wistful and hopeful.

A sea gull squawked as I turned the corner
to where my little home was situated. It amazed me that some of
these things — tenacious as hell! — actually stayed the winter in
Seaford. Most flew away, but there was never a night without a caw
or a call of a gull somewhere, even if only in the distance. Part
of me believed that it was a family of gulls that had found a
little place with central heating near my house and which stayed
the winter only to irritate the crap out of me every morning as
they landed on the roof just inches above my head and started their
incessant alarm clock, just to remind me that "yes, it's six A.M.
and, yes, you promised you'd run every day!"

My eyes focused on the ground. Wind whipped
my hair every which way. It was warmer than usual, not that bitter,
crisp cold we'd been having ever since I'd arrived. Maybe that's
why the gull was so loud tonight. Maybe some of them were already
returning from the south, or wherever they went...

I was thinking about all of
this, when I heard Dorian's manly baritone: "Hey there."
(
'ey there.
) I
looked up and saw him leaning against the brick-face pillar of my
gate, his fingers in his tight denim pockets, nothing else but a
skin-hugging tee and a smile on him.

"Shouldn't you be asleep?" I asked. I wasn't
even flirting with him. I wasn't.

He shrugged, looked to the street. My key
was already in my hand.

"Wanna walk?" he asked.

Walk
? What did that mean? Last time he asked me if I'd like a
drink and he ended up fingering me on the ocean wall... What could
"walk" mean?

I looked at my key...

"It's warm out," he said, looking up ahead
at the road, and that same wall we'd kissed at the night before,
just like two kids in high school.

I put the key in my pocket. "Sure, why
not?"

"Had a good day?" he asked
as we strolled over to the beach wall —
that
wall, and, yes, I was thinking
about the night before as we approached it.

"I guess," I said.

Dorian wasn't much of a
talker. We eventually got to the famous wall and sat down, our
backs to the ocean. Dorian pulled out a pack of
Lucky Strikes
and my heart cringed at
the thought of their flavor on my tongue. Not my thing. He lit it,
puffed out some smoke.

I know what the right thing
to say would've been, if I'd been flirting:
You know, if you're looking to score with me, you'd better
make sure you don't taste like ash...
But I
wasn't flirting.

Dorian dropped the
half-smoked cigarette on the ground, squashed it with his
cream
CAT
boots.
He pulled out a pack of
Fisherman's
Friend
and threw one in his mouth, offered
me one. I took it.
Damn! That was
strong!

So, ash-breath handled...

"Wanna go to my place?" he asked.

I knew what it meant. And when I answered, I
hadn't been thinking. The answer just dropped off my lips.
"Sure."

His place was small, very small. But that
didn't say much for England. Every place was small except for the
occasional Manor House or Country Estate — but those didn't exist
in the city.

There were only two rooms and a tiny bedroom
in his apartment from what I could see. The kitchenette half-merged
with the dining-room-slash-TV-room. The walls were off-cream,
desperately in need of paint. His drapes were brown. Just brown,
not even an interesting shade of it.

His refrigerator buzzed. A silver microwave
sat next to it. A tube-TV rested on a table in front of a
two-seater tweed couch in that living-room-slash-TV-room. Some sort
of lawn table lay unceremoniously in the center of the kitchenette,
covered by an oilcloth with a few cigarette burns in it. I didn't
know if they were his. He'd hardly arrived in town after all.

"It's not much," he said. But there was no
embarrassment in his voice. Just a statement of fact.

"Your place?" I asked.

He scoffed. "No ways. This is only for the
job. I have a place up north. Newcastle."

Ahhh, so that's where the over-the-top
accent was from.

"It's bigger than this, of course," he said.
"At least twice the size." It was a joke, because this place wasn't
much larger than the tiny room I was sleeping in. I smiled. It was
funny. Dorian clearly had no beef about pretending to have more
than he did, and he seemed proud of what he did have.

"Beer?" he asked.

I shook my head,
momentarily unable to answer because of some weird, warm feeling
I'd felt at his humor. Finally, I said, "I don't really drink." And
I didn't really, except for tonight. And one more beer might put me
over an edge I wasn't willing to go over with big-chested Dorian in
the same room — the same
claustrophobic
room.

"You don't?" He pulled out
a
Beck's
from the
refrigerator, opened it with a butter-knife.

"No, but you clearly do!" For a moment he
was confused, until he saw me looking at the knife in his hand.

"Oh, that? That's an old trick. Everyone
knows how to do it over here." He threw the butter knife back in a
drawer.

I perched lightly on the table in the
kitchenette, knowing it would crash if I actually rested any weight
on it. I looked around, waiting for what would come next...

What
would
come next?

I didn't feel odd here. I
didn't feel hot or turned on in any way. But I wasn't turned off,
either. What
was
I? Was I using him? Was he a substitute? A crutch? In a way, I
felt kind of...
bored
. As if I needed something to do... Or maybe I was just
inebriated.

"Leora?" he asked, pulling me from my
internal debate.

"Uh, sorry... I do that sometimes."

"What, phase out?"

"Uh..."
Phase out... Right. My Dream Guy had also once noticed
that...
Suddenly I was on a rooftop, in New
York, That Dream Guy sitting in front of me, his hand up my skirt
and tugging at my panties —

I stood up! "Um, where is your
bathroom?"

Dorian pointed it out and I went and
splashed my face in the too-tight bathroom. I eyed myself over,
pulled my shoulder-length hair behind me and tied it up. I still
looked OK, I figured. I'd never bothered to dye my hair mahogany as
I'd once thought of doing. Mahogany's a sexy color, light-brown
isn't. But I hadn't felt like being sexy for so long.

There was something else in that
simple-but-not-sexy light-brown hair of mine, and my not-sexy brown
eyes, and in my barely-sexy Mediterranean skin, all over me:

Oldness.

I shook my head. Where
the
fuck
had it
all gone so wrong?

I ran my hand through my hair (untying it
and messing it up again), splashed my face once more, wiped it, and
walked back out.

Dorian was at the lawn-slash-kitchen table.
His beer half-empty.

"Sit," he said.

I sat. The chair was hard,
uncomfortable.

We looked at each other a bit. He seemed
very relaxed. Wasn't the idea that we'd be at his place, feel each
other off until we came and then went our separate ways? I
desperately wanted to feel needed.

I cleared my throat.

"So," he said, leaning forward.

I breathed in, suddenly acutely aware of the
nearby walls, the smudge on the floor in the corner...

"So," I said.

"What brings you to England?"

And then something crashed. A wall. A
mountain. Something. In my mind. It fell down the chalk Seaford
cliffs and started a Tsunami, smashing into me and hitting me
against a wall...

"Uh, um, excuse me?"

"I asked what brought you to England."

Right, that's what he'd asked. And that's
why I'd panicked:

Dorian was getting to know me. Which meant,
by the end of the night, we'd be closer. Which meant I'd probably
like him more than I should.