Page 33 of Goode Vibrations
He held the wheel in both hands. “Glad we’re on the same page, then.”
“What’s your last name?” I asked.
He quirked an eyebrow at the non sequitur. “Sylvain.” He said it with a hint of a French accent—Sylv-ANH. “Errol Sylvain.”
“Kiwi mum, French dad.” He jutted his chin at me. “You? What’s your last name?”
“Goode,” I said. “Poppy Goode. G-O-O-D-E.”
“Let’s go one better. Full name.” He flicked his sunglasses down onto his face—I think he’d actually slept in them, or he’d slipped them on the moment he woke up, I wasn’t sure. “My full name is Errol Bastien Sylvain.”
“Poppy Estelle Goode.”
Silence. He glanced at me, and even though his Wayfarers were too darkly tinted to let me see his eyes, I could feel them on my breasts. “How long have you had your nipples pierced?”
I glanced down at the objects in question—the piercings visible as dimples against the white cotton of the shirt. “Oh, not long, actually. Three months, maybe.”
“What made you get them?”
I let my hand sidle upward on his thigh. “Well, it’s kind of a story.”
“You’ve heard plenty of mine. I’m keen for one of yours.”
I sighed. “It’s not really one with sad bits in it, but it goes something like this…once upon a time, I had a boyfriend, and things were super great. We dated for about six months, pretty low-key, nothing serious, but good times and what I thought was a standard unspoken agreement to fidelity, you know? Then, I had, in the words of Judith Viorst, a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Some clumsy moron in the art department spilled paint all over a nearly finished painting, totally ruining three weeks of work. And then I tripped on my own feet and spilled my mocha all over myself, ruining my favorite white button-downandthe white bra underneath, plus burning my neck and chest and arms all to hell. Then, on the way home to change, it started raining buckets, turning my brown-stained shirt totally see-through, and a taxi ran through a puddle and splashed me…andthenas I was almost back to the shitty apartment I shared with two other girls, I dropped my cell phone and it went down a storm drain.”
“Wow. Thatisa bad day.”
“That was just the cake. Ready for the icing, and the cherry on top?” I stared straight ahead and tried to relate the event without letting myself feel the memory of it. “I walk into my apartment. Started ripping off my wet, ruined clothes, needing a hot shower and a glass of winesofucking bad. By the time I get to my room, I’m down to my underwear and socks. Now, you need to understand one thing, first. I lived with my two best friends. We’d met day one at Columbia, at orientation. We all lived in university housing first semester and then moved out together and got an apartment, me and Shannyn and Yvonne. Shannyn was my real deal, best-best friend, and I was friends with Yvonne because she was childhood friends with Shannyn…anyway. Point is, we weren’t just roommates.”
Errol was already wincing. “No. You didn’t. He wasn’t.”
“Oh yes, he was. Fuckingbothof them. Inmybed. Not Shannyn’s bed, not Yvonne’s bed.MYmotherfucking bed. I’ll never forget that moment as long as I live, and fucking trust me; I’ve tried to forget it. Shannyn was riding him reverse cowgirl, and Yvonne was sitting on his face, and they were both making out while he ate out Yvonne and fucked Shannyn. It was like something out of a porno.”
“Noway. In your bed?”
“Yeah. My bed.”
“Like, why, though? Just to twist the knife even more?”
“I guess, I don’t know. I didn’t stop to ask. I marched into my room, all but buck-ass naked. Shannyn and Yvonne scrambled off Reed and they all started stammering fucking stupid-ass excuses, like it’s not what you think, blah-fucking blah. Reed sat up, and as soon as he was halfway vertical, I punched him in the nose as hard as I could. Broke that fucker’s nose, too. Still naked, mind you, I punched both of my ex-friends, and then dressed, packed my shit, and walked to a friend’s house. I got promptly shitfaced, and somehow we ended up at this piercing party in the Bronx. I was hammered, and it sounded like a good idea. Especially when the girl doing the piercing explained what it was like to have your nipples sucked on with piercings. So I got them pierced.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Like a sonofabitch,” I said, laughing, “and I was drunk at the time, and not really feeling much.”
His eyes flicked to my boobs again. “And? What’s it feel like to have them sucked on?”
My tongue compulsively traced the corner of my mouth, a nervous habit of mine. “I don’t know,” I muttered, my eyes on his, or where his would be if they weren’t hidden behind sunglasses. “No one has sucked my nipples since I got them pierced.”
He bit his lip. “What a fucking shame,” Errol whispered. “Can I fuckingpleasebe the first?”
I swallowed hard. “If Farmer Jebediah hadn’t shown up when he did, you’d be sucking on them right now.” I reached out, leaned over, slid his sunglasses up onto his head so I could see those wild, hot, Aegean-blue eyes of his.
“Fuck,” he growled under his breath. “I’m about ten seconds from pulling over and taking our chances of not getting got on the side of the road.”
I was so damn horny in that moment that I nearly agreed. Only a narrow thread of caution, in the form of a memory of my sister Lexi having once gotten a ticket for public indecency for doing exactly what Errol was proposing, stopped me.
“I’d rather not risk an encounter with the police while naked,” I said.