Page 20 of A Real Goode Time
I snorted. “You need glasses.”
He crinkled his brow. “No, I have perfect eyesight. Had it tested. Better than normal, actually—I’ve got twenty-ten.”
“What’s that?”
“Twenty-twenty is normal eyesight where you can see something twenty feet away with perfect clarity. I can see perfectly clearly at twenty feet what someone with twenty-twenty can at ten feet.” He laughed. “According to the eye doctor, I shoulda been a pilot or a sniper or something. But I just like working on engines.”
I cackled. “Dude, you are so stoned. What does your better than perfect vision have to do with how I look in your shirt?”
He seemed to be puzzling that through. “Oh. Well, it means I can see very well how sexy you are in my shirt, so I don’t need glasses. Your boobs look fantastic in it. The little holes make me crazy, like I just wanna see more.”
I blushed, covered my chest by crossing my arms. “I…”
He put his face in his hands. “Wow. That was some really unfiltered bullshit, wasn’t it? Sorry.” A bob of his head to one side. “I mean, it’s true, but I didn’t mean to be forward, or to embarrass you.”
I was blushing so hard it hurt. “I’m just…not shy, I just…” I struggled for words. “I don’t normally wear a bra, because my boobies are small enough I don’t need the support, and I don’t work out so I don’t need to contain them, and I don’t really give a shit if my nipples poking into my shirt makes people uncomfortable. But I’m not, like, looking for attention.” I groaned, putting my face in my hands. Now we were sitting in matching positions. “Wow, I’m not sure why I said that either. We’ve both got stoned diarrhea of the mouth, I guess.”
Another jaw-cracking yawn, another back-arching stretch, another sideways stare from Rhys. And then he thumped his forehead. “I have a really bad habit of not thinking about what you need, don’t I? You’ve got to be exhausted. You’ve yawned like, three times in the last twenty minutes.”
“I am pretty tired. But, could I throw my stuff into your dryer?”
“Shit. I forgot that too. The thing with the pot sort of distracted me.” He stood up. “I’ll do it. You go crash. I’ll wait until your stuff is in the dryer. That way you can fall asleep without me puttering around.”
The thought of Rhys puttering around while I tried to sleep was equal parts inviting and worrying. His presence did weird things to me. Made me feel wired, yet soothed me. Made me agonizingly aware of him, and myself, yet utterly comfortable. Turned on and sexually fraught, but comfortable just…existing near him.
It was a lot to feel from having known him for a handful of hours.
We went back inside, and I handed Rhys my bundle of wet clothes—which was everything, since my backpack had gotten soaked through. I’d tried to bundle it in such a way that my underwear was inside and he’d just have to toss the whole pile in but, of course, as I handed over pile, what should fall out but a lacy pink thong and my favorite stretchy gray romper underwear thing, which I often wore as loungewear—it wasn’t something I’d wear out, as it was definitely meant as underwear, and was clearly what you might call an “intimate” garment.
I looked at my undergarments now sitting on the floor, and Rhys looked at them, and I could see him wondering if he should pick them up, or if I should…
I picked them up, held them. “I, uhhh. Maybe just show me where the laundry is?”
He smiled, not quite a smirk, not quite a kind dismissal of my further embarrassment, but somewhere in between. “It’s just underwear, you know. We all wear it.” He frowned. “Except, I don’t, always. These coveralls tend to fit weird, and they’re more comfortable like this, but commando. I wear underwear with jeans, though. ’Cause of the zippers.”
I felt my cheeks heat again. “You’re…not wearing underwear.”
“Nope. Free-ballin’ it.”
I laughed, and took my laundry. “Well, it’s still weird for you to be handling my unmentionables. We just met. Just show me to the washer.”
He led the way back downstairs to the garage—an industrial-sized, Laundromat-style washer and dryer were up against the back wall; I tossed my stuff into the washer, he added detergent, closed the front-loader washer, adjusted the settings, and pushed the empty quarter tray in to start it.
“It’s a thong, not a dildo,” he said, once the washer was filling with water. “No reason for it to be weird.”
I choked on a gasp of embarrassed indignance. “I don’t have a dildo.”
Another shrug. “Be fine if you did—you’re an adult. May even be a little weird if you didn’t. Girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”
“This girl doesn’t do dildos.”
I didn’t mention that I did do vibrators, and clitoral stimulators, and that I had one of each in my toiletries bag, which, thank sweet baby Jesus, was waterproof-treated leather and thus had survived being soaked and was, more importantly, opaque, and so he couldn’t see what was in it.
He, however, being stoned out of his head because the pot was exactly that strong, kept talking. “No? Do you masturbate?”
“Rhys, I think that’s a little personal for having just met.”
He blinked at me again, and I saw the normal Rhys poking through in his eyes. “Sheeeit. Maybe this stuff isn’t so good for me. I don’t seem to have a filter at all, huh? I’m sorry. I’m not normally so unfiltered about what’s going through my mind.”