Page 39

Scorpions and Sex

Declan

I stepped onto the elevator and hit the button for the twelfth floor, a candy bar in each hand, knowing I’d become a ridiculous cartoon version of myself. Go on a chocolate run because I’m catching feelings— yes, that was what a reasonable, grown-ass man did.

But somehow, her mention of spending a weekend binge-watching some random show I had no interest in watching nearly dropped me. Out of nowhere, I desperately wanted it.

We’d done a lot together in such a short time, parties and dinners and events—all in front of hundreds of people—but I was hungry for the Abi at home.

I wanted to see her curled up with a blanket because I knew she was always cold, and I wanted her to fall asleep on me again like she had in New York.

I’d thrown out the “gas station run” only because I knew a two-minute phone call downstairs wasn’t going to be enough time away from her to get my head straight.

Abi was here, this weekend, as a favor to me.

I knew there were feelings involved, but I also knew that when you added so much falsehood to a situation, it was nearly impossible to disseminate truth from fiction.

I felt like I knew her, but was that just the her she’d been giving to me through the course of our arrangement?

I wanted to unravel it all and figure it out, damn it.

I wanted to dig in and determine what was real and what wasn’t, who she really was and who she was pretending to be. Who she wanted to be. I wanted to pull apart every fucking thing and get lost in the truth.

If I were being honest, bringing her here to this party tonight was a lot more about that than the notion of wanting to make my dad happy on his birthday.

Yes, my parents liked her and it’d definitely make the weekend more fun if they saw us together, but I hadn’t needed to bring her along. I’d spent a year pretending my girlfriend was too busy to go to these things with me, so no one was going to lose their mind if I showed up sans Abi this time.

But I hadn’t wanted to.

I wanted to start to figure this out. I didn’t necessarily need to tell her that’s what I was doing, but I needed to start to unwind the knot that was Dex and Abi, all that was true and false, and see what was left when everything was undone.

And a very fucking interesting aspect of this thing was the fact that she hadn’t said a word about the hotel room. My mother reserved one room, assuming my girlfriend and I would be staying together, and I expected Abi would immediately demand I get a second room.

Which I’d planned to do. Happily.

But she hadn’t said anything.

I didn’t know what that meant.

Was she nervous to broach the subject, or was she okay with this arrangement?

Asking her would be the smart move, but I was a dipshit who wanted to wait and see what happened.

Because I wanted to stay in the same room as her more than I wanted to breathe.

I knew I should be considerate, but the selfish part of me wanted to be around her all the time. I wanted to know what sounds she made when she slept and if she tossed and turned. Did she leave the TV on, or was it perfectly dark and quiet?

I’d book the second room in a heartbeat if she wanted it, no question. But the idea of sharing a room—and a bed—was really fucking appealing.

The ding of the elevator startled the shit out of me, and I cleared my throat and stepped out as soon as the doors opened.

Get yourself together, jackass.

When I got to the room, I could hear the shower running.

“Dex?” she yelled, almost like she’d been listening for me.

I stepped closer to the closed bathroom door. “Yes?”

“Can you please come in here slowly and help me?” Her voice was loud but calm. “There is a scorpion blocking my exit from the shower.”

I slowly opened the door, thinking she was nuts because this was Kansas City, for God’s sake; there weren’t scorpions in the Midwest, were there?

But my eyes swept the room and holy shit , there was a brown scorpion on the floor right beside the walkout shower. That little fucker was resting right in front of the glass door that opened outward.

I had to suppress a shudder because that motherfucker gave me the creeps. Fuck. I had no idea how the hell you took out a scorpion. I desperately searched the steamy bathroom, looking for the best solution as I became very aware of how unprotected—and naked—Abi was.

She was standing frozen in the corner of the shower with a towel wrapped around her body.

She wasn’t under the spray of water—I was guessing she left the water on because she didn’t want to freak out that little monster by shutting it off—but she was pressing herself against the back wall as if trying to make it move farther from the scorpion.

Oh, God, that thing was creepy as fuck.

I was wearing shoes, so my best bet was to try to stomp that thing, but I was pretty sure scorpions were super poisonous. I briefly wondered how quickly I’d die after getting stung by it.

But I looked at Abi’s face, saw how terrified she was, and I knew I needed to act even though I had no clue what I was doing.

“Okay, honey,” I said slowly. “No matter what happens, you stay far away from the scorpion, got it?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to throw myself in front of it, but what is your plan?” she said without moving her lips.

“I’m going to stomp on it,” I said calmly, even though I had a hardcore case of the willies and kind of wanted to hide as well. “But I have no idea how the thing will react. So your eyes need to stay on the scorpion and the second he moves out of the way, you need to run out of here, got it?”

“But, Dex,” she said, sounding panicked. “Can the stinger pierce through your shoe? Do you even know?”

“No, it can’t,” I said, even though I had no fucking clue.

The shoes were good Italian leather so I was pretty confident no stinger was going to be able to penetrate the soles, but what the hell did I know about a scorpion’s range?

“Now, if I fail and it runs away, keep your bare feet clear of him and get up on that toilet, you got it?”

Thank God the seat cover was down.

“Got it,” she said, nodding. “Are you going to do a countdown or something?”

“Well, we don’t want it to know our plan, do we?”

“What?” she said, and then I could see it in her eyes when she got it. “Do you really think this is a great time for jokes?”

“I’m not sure there’s ever been a better time for jokes,” I said, my eyes moving to that thing .

“True,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “Well, if you’re about to die, and I’m sure you’re not, I just want you to know I had fun with you.”

“Wow, that’s really quite an amazingly vanilla proclamation. I’ve adequately filled your time.”

“I’m trying to be speedy in this perilous situation.”

“Okay, let’s do this,” I said. “You ready, Abs?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding again.

“One, two—”

“Oh, my God!” she yelled, and I let out a very embarrassing screech as the thing started moving across the bathroom floor.

In my direction.

“Shit!” I scanned the area, looking for something to drop on him. He wasn’t running, but the fact that he was moving felt like he had an armory of guns pointed at me and he was about to fucking take me out.

A vacuum was moving out in the hallway, so close to the door that I heard it bump, and I wondered if that was what triggered that fucking monster to move.

Shut the fuck up, housekeeping!

“Stay in the shower,” I yelled at Abi as I sidestepped over to the door and pulled it open, hoping that guy would leave on his own.

The little fucker was still moving in my direction, come on, buddy , but suddenly I realized that I was going to send a killer out into the hallway in the direction of an oblivious housekeeper.

“Damn it!”

Without thinking, or even looking at the woman, I wrenched the vacuum from her hand and rushed back into the hotel room.

It was a Dyson, so maybe it would work.

I drove that vacuum over it, and holy fucking shit—it sucked up the scorpion.

Or did something to it, by the sound of it.

My eyes frantically searched the floor, but it wasn’t there anymore.

“Did it work?” I heard Abi ask by the bathroom doorway.

“Was that a scorpion?” I heard from the housekeeper in the hallway.

“Did you get him?” Abi asked from where she was crouched.

I looked up and we stared at each other in disbelief, almost as if we each expected that thing to come creeping back out, even though the sound inside the vacuum made it clear that thing had been good and truly shredded.

I turned off the vacuum and literally threw it out into the hallway with both hands, yelling, “Sorry and thank you!”

And then I shut the door and locked it, as if that’d keep any future scorpions from coming into our room.

“Holy shit, you very effective man, did you seriously just utilize your brain and save our lives?” Abi asked, holding onto the top of her towel as she came closer.

“I did.” My heart was racing and I was still breathing heavily; that’d been fucking scary.

Abi came closer, grinning as she impressively secured the top of her towel.

“Did that seriously just happen?” she said, starting to laugh, and I couldn’t help it.

I joined her and we lost it over the whole ridiculous thing.

“Did you actually,” she cackled, “throw a scorpion-occupied vacuum at housekeeping? Do you not remember my vocation?”

“The twirling canister killed that thing,” I managed. “Probably.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, her smile dropping just a little. “What if it crawls out and stings her?”

God, could she be right?

I opened the hallway door and the maid, who was staring at her vacuum, looked over at me.

“You should call maintenance to double-check it’s dead,” I said. “And keep your shoes on.”

“Why would I take off my shoes?” the woman asked, looking at me like I was nuts.

“I have no idea. Sorry.”

I closed the door and turned around to find Abi was laughing again.

“Thank you,” she managed to say through her giggles.

“I didn’t do it for you, Mariano. I’d just never forgive myself if I killed a maid by throwing a scorpion-filled vacuum at her.”

She lost it again, her face tilted up to grin at me when she said, “Is that really a sentence we can use?”

“I can’t believe it, but yes,” I said, laughing.

That was the thing with Abi. We were both cry-laughing over something that should’ve been traumatic. But instead, it was refreshing and freeing.

As I looked down at her, wiping her teary eyes, I noticed everything. The smell of her wet hair, all that naked skin above and beneath her towel, the dip of that little bow on the center of her top lip.

I swallowed and tried to think of something else.

Anything else.

But my brain wasn’t budging. I was locked in on her and I couldn’t break free.

She blinked in awareness, our situation coming into focus.

I watched her throat move around a swallow, my eyes tracking her exposed neck like a predator looking for a vulnerability.

“You’ve got to help me, honey,” I said, leaning down toward her mouth, struggling to make my voice sound like anything other than a rasp of wanting as her big amber eyes looked up at me.

Those eyes.

Suddenly my hands were underneath the back of her wet hair and I wasn’t sure how they’d gotten there.

“Help you with what?” she asked, her voice a near whisper.

“To remember why this might be a bad idea,” I confessed, nipping at the full bottom lip that was suddenly the greatest temptation I’d ever encountered. I wanted to consume it, consume her, as the softness of her breath became my new oxygen.

“I can’t,” she said, her voice more air than sound as she nipped me back, electricity shocking through me at the feel of her teeth on my lip. “I can’t help you because I can’t remember, either.”