The Leftover Club (10 page)

But she wasn't through with me. Not by a long shot. She thrust and swirled, teased and titillated as she fucked me slowly, all the while using her tongue to set off a thousand tiny explosions throughout my body, one right after the other. I had barely come down from the first one before she used the vibrator to make me come hard a second time. I convulsed against her as tears welled in my eyes from the most intense pleasure I had ever known. She knew just what spot to hit and just how fast to go. I ground against her as I screamed out into the night with each stroke. I was incoherent as she made me come again for a third, mind-blowing time. By the time she climbed up my body, I could barely catch my breath, practically a puddle underneath her expert fingers.

I was still pretty high when I offered to reciprocate. But she shook her head. “This was for you, babe. To remind you what it’s like to be a woman. It’s more than being some asshole’s ex or some teenager’s mom.
You deserve to be treated like a queen.” She kissed me softly and I tasted myself against her lips. “Never settle for anyone who doesn’t see you as one.”

I nodded and she curled up against me, laying her head on my heaving breast as we finished watching the movie.

I was asleep before the credits rolled.

She was gone by morning.

July
26, 1986

I’m not sure what persuaded me to go to the beach party. These weren’t really my friends, and in fact were a couple of years older. Amber was leaving soon for college and had invited me to a going away party her best friends were hosting in a summer house at Huntington Beach.

If it hadn’
t been for Dylan insisting that I needed to go (and that I needed to take him as my ‘date’,) I probably wouldn’t have bothered.

We had finally gotten over the Olive incident by summer break, mostly because
there could be no battles brewing with our two meddlesome moms on the case. They decided we needed more time together instead of less, so they would find any and all excuses to thrust us together in hopes we’d work through our differences. Spring break we took a cruise to Mexico. Memorial Day we headed up to Pismo Beach. We were even shanghaied into painting my Aunt Daphne’s house in Whittier, a task that took us no less than three solid weekends.

Clearly we weren’t going to be able to avoid each other, so we relented and simply got along. This extended to the beach party the last Saturday in July.

And my reasons for doing so weren’t completely altruistic. I was intimidated to walk among Amber’s more popular friends. With Dylan on my arm, sorta, I felt like I had every right to be there.

Or at the very least
one really good excuse.

I followed his lead among his people. He drank beer, so I drank beer, even though it was disgusting and made me want to vomit. He smoked pot, so I ended up smoking a joint, and nearly coughed up a lung in the process. He finally got to first base with Amber, which left me shit out of luck since there were no guys standing in line to get me upstairs into one of the private rooms.

Instead I walked out onto the darkened beach, as far as the light from the house extended. I plopped down onto my fanny and watched, or rather listened, to the tide roll in. That was where Todd Reardon, a senior, found me. “What are you doing out here all by yourself?” he asked, his speech slurred a bit from the alcohol we’d all been slugging all night.

Avoiding people I don’t know
. “Listening to the ocean,” I said.

“Cool,” he said as he plopped down in the sand next to me. He handed me a half empty plastic cup of beer, but I shook my head.

Todd wasn’t a bad guy. He was big, playing defense for Hermosa Vista’s Fighting Jaguars for the past three years. His hair was blond, his eyes were blue and he was as dumb as a box of rocks. But he was nice enough, and had never made fun of my weight. At two-hundred-fifty pounds himself, he probably felt no need to throw any stones.             

He knew me through Dylan, as did most of the jocks. “
Roni, right?” he asked. I nodded. “What grade are you now?”

“Junior,” I answered.

“Cool,” he said again.

“College?”
I asked.

He nodded. “Ole Miss,” he answered.

“That’s a long way from home,” I remarked.

“As long as I get to play ball,” he shrugged. “Got a boyfriend?”

I laughed. “No.”

“Why’s that funny?”

It was my turn to shrug. “It just is.”

“I’m hungry,” Todd suddenly announced. “Let’s go grab something to eat.
A burger or something. I’ve got my car right out front.”

“You’ve been drinking,” I pointed out.

“I drive better drunk,” he assured. “I’m more careful.”

He lumbered to his feet and then held out a hand. I glanced back at the house, where no doubt Dylan was up in one of the upstairs bedrooms with Amber at last.

I was resigned as I put my hand in Todd’s and let him pull me to my feet. Just as we reached the front door, Dylan caught up with me. “Where are you going?”

“To get a burger or something,” I mumbled.

“Yeah, I want something to eat,” Todd winked. “A big,
juicy
burger,” he emphasized with a smile.

Dylan pulled me back. “
You go on then. I’ll take her.”

“You’re busy with Amber,” Todd reminded as he pulled me back.

“Seriously, it’s no big deal. I brought Roni, I’ll just take her home.”

Todd glanced down at me, before spotting
Amber milling with her friends about fifteen feet away. He shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said before lumbering off.

Dylan grabbed my arm and propelled me out toward his car. He said nothing as he unlocked the door and thrust me in the passenger seat. He revved the engine once he got in,
and then screeched around in an illegal U-turn as he pointed the car towards home.

“That was stupid,
Roni,” he finally muttered once we hit the Pacific Coast Highway. “You can’t go alone with guys like that. They’re only after one thing.”

“Not from me,” I said softly.

“From anyone,” he corrected. “All those guys want is an easy lay.”

“I’m not an easy lay,” I snapped. “I’m a virgin.”

He stole a brief glance. “For now.”

I was starting to get angry. “What is that supposed to mean?”

He sighed. “Insecure virgins are a number one target.”

“You’d know,” I snapped.

He pulled off the main road and headed down toward the beach, pulling into the parking lot and killing the engine. He swiveled to face me from his bucket seat. “Is that the kind of guy you think I am?”

I held his gaze for as long as I dared. Finally I looked away. “I don’t know what kind of guy you are.”

“I’m a guy who cares about you,” he said softly, which forced me to look at him again. “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

It was hollow comfort. I had been hopelessly
infatuated with Dylan Fenn since I saw him ace a spelling bee in the first grade. A lot of good that had done me over the years.

Silence stretched on indeterminately between us until finally he said, “Truth or dare?”

My eyes met his. “What?”

“Truth or dare?” he repeated.

“There are no merry-go-rounds here,” I pointed out.

He conceded that point with a nod of his head. Then he reached across me to pull a joint from the glove box. He lit it up, inhaled deep,
and then handed it to me. I took it begrudgingly and gingerly took a hit. “Hold it in,” he instructed, and I did. “Good. Give it a few minutes and you’ll feel like you’re right back on that merry-go-round.”

After I finished coughing and sputtering,
I leaned back against my seat and closed my eyes. Just like he said, within minutes I felt like I was flying.

“Truth or dare?” he repeated softly.

I didn’t bother to open my eyes. “Truth.”

“Would you have slept with Todd if he had asked?”

I exhaled slowly. “I don’t know,” I finally said. And that was the God’s honest truth. “It’s not like anyone has ever asked.”

“Would you have kissed him?” Dylan persisted.

“I don’t know. Probably. I mean look at me, Dylan. I’m a cliché. Sweet sixteen and never been kissed.”

“I think you’re forgetting something,” he said softly.

I glared at him. “That wasn’t a real kiss.”

A long moment passed before either of us spoke.
“You’re right,” he finally conceded. “It wasn’t. We were just kids and it was just a silly dare.”

Though I long suspected it, it hurt to hear him say so. I started to look away but his hand curled around the back of my neck and pulled me back. “This is a real kiss,” he said before he leaned toward me and his mouth landed on mine.

I was in shock. I gasped, which parted my lips, a clear invitation for him to deepen the kiss. I tasted the alcohol on his tongue as it slid between my lips and meshed with mine. Inside I went up just like a roman candle. A rush of emotion flooded over me and I had no clue what to do with it. I sat rigid in my seat, as if I moved, or even breathed, I’d wake up lip-to-lip once again with my pillow.

His fingers tangled in my hair as he deepened the kiss, a moan of his own locked in his throat.
His breathing was ragged as he broke the kiss. I knew my eyes were big and wide as I stared at him, unsure what to do next. He sighed as his eyes scanned my face. Gently he brushed my hair from my face before planting a long, lingering peck on my lips.

Without another word, he scooted back to his seat, started the car and pulled out of the lot towards home.

September 24, 2007

I sat with my chin on my palm, staring at the computer screen in front of me. I couldn’t focus on any of the information there, though I was being paid rather
well to do just that. All I could think about was the weird weekend and unusual reunion with Olive Young.

I
had called Bryan the next day to tell him what happened. I got a victorious, “You go, girl,” from my boisterous best friend, but I wasn’t sure if I should be elated or concerned. It had been singularly the wildest thing I had ever done, and I wasn’t sure what to do with that particular insight into myself.

Bryan
talked me down from the ledge. “Calm down, butch,” he quipped. “An orgasm does not an identity make. Sexuality is more fluid than people realize. You just had your experimentation ten years later than most people, that’s all.”

“I do everything later than most people,” was my wry reply.

It was true. I got my first real kiss at age sixteen. I lost my virginity after I was legally able to vote. And Olive Young brought my list of sexual partners up to a whopping three, the only one of whom that included exotic oral sex.

Or at least, oral sex performed on me.

How I got so repressed remained a mystery. This was probably why I was such a dating disaster.

“Maybe you
should
switch teams,” he chided. “I’m having a dry spell. Maybe I should, too. We’ll go to Eleete this weekend and scam on all the chicks.”

The t
hought of kissing another woman didn’t exactly trip my trigger. Olive was my friend, someone I knew and trusted. We had a relationship and we had an understanding. Meeting someone new and starting from scratch didn’t seem worth the effort, almost as though it was a substitute for something else. “Thanks, but I’ll pass. Girls don’t really turn me on.”

“Me either,” he announced happily. “Long live the peen.”

I laughed and that was that.

But there was no question that my b
ody had now been awakened from its deep, deep sleep. I tingled every single time I thought about the flurry of orgasms I had experienced at the hands of a seasoned lover, one who happened to give a shit that I experienced the height of pleasure. I was an exposed nerve as I awkwardly navigated through my workday. When I saw the script on my desk with “Dylan?” scribbled across the top, I knew it wasn’t bound to get any better.

The last thing I needed or wanted to do was see Dylan Fenn.

But as I read through the pages, I knew that this was a part tailor-made for Dylan. A single dad, in the wake of a devastating loss, returning home from war to children he had no idea how to relate to, until an old high school flame shows him the way. He could play the subtle vulnerability needed for such a role, and though I was in no condition whatsoever to see him, I ended up texting him anyway to let him know that we had a script for him to consider.

He was in my office by two o’clock that afternoon.

After he perused the first five pages, he looked back up at me. “You sure they have the right guy?”

“They asked for you specifically,” I shrugged. “Remember Emma Sterling?”

He nodded. How could he forget? Though their show was canceled after only four episodes in 2000, she landed in a centerfold and rode that runaway train of sensationalism all the way to a bit part in an award-winning ensemble feature that had been independently produced.

There
she made the association with the quirky director who wrote the script currently in Dylan’s hands, the same one who wanted a fresh face for the part to enhance its believability. Emma suggested Dylan, and now they wanted him to audition.

I suggested he take the script with him and give it a read,
to see if it was something he wanted to tackle.  Two hours later he was back in my office, his face stained with tears and the script coiled in his hand. We scheduled him to meet the director by the end of the week.

“I feel like celebrating,” he announced suddenly. He perched on the corner of my glass-topped desk. “Join me for dinner.”

“Can’t,” I dismissed easily.

His eyebrow arched.
“Hot date?”

“Yeah.
With my daughter,” I added.

“Bring her along. We grew up in t
he same house yet I’ve only seen your kid once. That’s crazy.”

I laughed as I turned off my computer. “You make it sound like we were related or something. We were roommates at best. We weren’t even friends.”

His eyes narrowed as he stared at me. “We weren’t?”

I gathered my things into my bag before I stood. “Come on, Dylan. You were a jock. I was a
geek. And never the t’wain shall meet.”

“I’m not a jock anymore,” he pointed out. “And you were never really a
geek. In fact, the way I see it, we have more in common than most. We come from exactly the same place and we’ve ended in the same place. If that’s not a basis for friendship, I don’t know what is. So let’s start over,” he suggested with an outstretched hand. “My name is Dylan Fenn. It’s nice to meet you.”

I giggled but he was serious. “As nice as it is to meet you, Dylan, I do have a daughter at home and I need to go.
Rain check, though.”

He grinned. “I’ll hold you to it.”

By the time I got home, however, I faced an empty house. When I texted Meghan, she took her sweet time responding. “
Eating at Erin’s
,
see you at 11
,” was all she wrote.

It was another test. She routinely
pushed the rules to the limit just to see if I would enforce them. Whether I did or didn’t, she’d hate me either way. So I usually did, and it would spark yet another war between us as she punished me for the life she didn’t have.

“Me either, princess,” I muttered to myself as I looked around the empty condo. It wasn’t much, but it wasn’t a shack
. And I would have rather lived in a shack than put up with Wade.

With a scowl, I decided to postpone the next battle. I was in no mood for it.

I sighed as I walked into the kitchen to figure out what to eat. I hadn’t been shopping in a few days, and it appeared that Meghan and her friends had blown through what food Olive and I hadn’t decimated during our nom-fest. The only things left were the healthy snacks I usually tried to intersperse among normal teen chow like chips, cookies and various frozen, microwave samplings that held no real nutritional value. There were two cucumbers, a bag of carrots and a fruit bowl full of bright red apples.

The
only thing more depressing than my over-abundance of rabbit food was eating these meager offerings in my quiet, and messy, apartment. Clothes were strewn everywhere, along with empty wrappers and scattered books and papers, and all the other miscellaneous debris one runs across when living on the Planet Teenager.

The thought of cleaning the house, cutting and preparing a fresh meal and eating alone by the TV with no one but the revolving door cast of
Dancing With the Stars
to keep me company wasn’t exactly my idea of a fun time.

So I did what any self-respecting gal with a gay BFF would do. I called
Bryan.

“Sorry, babe,” he said.
“Working late tonight. On a deadline. Rain check, though!”

Rain check
. It made me think of what I had said to Dylan earlier.

What the hell
, I decided with a shrug. After more than thirty years, maybe it was time for a change in the programming.

Dylan arrived within the hour
. I was just throwing the last of Meghan’s clothes into her room when he knocked on the door. He entered with a smile as he looked around. “Nice digs,” he said with a grin. “Feels like you.”

I mercifully stopped myself before I asked what I was supposed to feel like. After the weekend, I wasn’t ready to walk into any more sexual buzz saws.

Dylan stopped in front of my bookshelf, where Meghan’s most recent school picture sat in a bedazzled frame. “This your daughter?”

I nodded. “That’s Meghan.”

“She’s gorgeous,” he said with genuine praise.

Of course he thought she was gorgeous. She was exactly the same kind of girl he woul
d have chased at the age of 15, mostly because I had done everything possible to make sure she hadn’t ended up an outcast or wallflower like me. He gave me that winning smile. “Looks just like her mother.”

I rolled my eyes and
I grabbed my purse. “Let’s go.”

We finally settled on a casual beachfront café on the pier in Redondo Beach.
Nothing fancy, a chain restaurant known for its Mexican cuisine. We got a table right away and Dylan talked me into ordering a margarita as we snacked on chips and salsa, waiting for our shared order of fajitas.

“So how’s your mom?” I asked.

“How do you know my mom if we just met?” he wanted to know, his dangerously sexy smirk cocked, loaded and ready to fire.

“Dylan,” I began, but he was committed to the premise.

“And your name again was…?”

“Fine,” I relented at last. “
My name is Roni Lawless. What else do you want to know?”

“Everything,” he said.

“There’s not a lot to tell,” I shrugged.

“Bullshit. You are an iceberg, Miss Lawless.”

“Meaning I’m some ginormous piece of ice just lying in wait to sink a ship and drown Leonardo DiCaprio?”

He gave me a stern but playful look. “Meaning that most of what is going on with
you happens under the surface.”

I shook my head. “You romanticize me, Mr. Fenn
. I’m just your run-of-the-mill, cliché divorcee with a teenager I routinely want to hug and smack. All ordinary stuff, I assure you. Seriously, if you didn’t come with me to dinner, I’d be overdosing on reality TV right about now.”

And the smirk exploded in all its glory. “Sounds like I came along just in time.” He motioned to order two more margaritas.

“And what about you, Dylan Fenn? What is something I need to know about you?”

He thought for a moment and then said, “The rumors are all true.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” I muttered as I toasted him with my second drink.

We spent the rest of our dinner reacquainting ourselves. He still loved classic heavy metal and cheesy hair bands, but had discovered bands like Tool and Muse into the 1990s, in the wake
of the Grunge movement. His favorite shows included male-centered sitcoms like
Two and a Half Men
,
The Big Bang Theory
and
How I Met Your Mother
.  His favorite movies were action flicks, and he had even begun studying martial arts to learn how to do his own stunt work.

I loved
Lost
and most chick flicks, and had recently discovered Pink thanks to my daughter, who passionately loved pop music.

Finally it was time for dessert and we shared a dish of deep fried ice cream. “Where do you see yourself in ten years?” he asked as he dipped his spoon in the decadent confection.

“I hadn’t really given it much thought,” I answered honestly. After three margaritas, my tongue had definitely come loose from its hinges. “In ten years I’ll be 47, and that’s a scary age for a woman. Too old to be young, too young to be old. A lot of women find themselves invisible past a certain age. Thankfully I’ve been invisible all along. I’m used to it.”

“
So young and so bitter,” he observed wryly.

“I’m not,” I answered with a carefree shrug. “It’s the way things are, the way they’ve always been. Honestly, I’d be scared shitless if they changed.”

“Why?” he asked softly.

I stared into the dish of melting ice cream. “No more excuses, I guess. I’d be one-hundred-percent responsible for my own mediocrity.”

He laughed. “You couldn’t be mediocre if you tried.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know me.”

His eyes softened. “Yeah, I do.”

He stared so long and so directly I had to turn away. He was the one who spoke first.

“You and I are not so different. I wrestle with mediocrity on a daily basis. I’m ten years into my career and I’m still on the D-List.”

“With a possible game-changing movie role,” I reminded.

“Yeah, and how many times have we heard that before? The shows, the movies, the auditions, the rejections… the disappointments. Every night I go to sleep in my overpriced Hollywood apartment thinking maybe I peaked in high school.” He looked genuinely depressed by the idea.

“You know that’s not true,” I corrected immediately. “It’s taking some time to get there, but haven’t we always heard that if it’s worth having, it’s worth waiting for?”

He looked around. “You know… I hear someone speaking but I don’t see anyone. It’s like I’m eating dinner with some invisible girl or something.”

I giggled and threw a chip in his direct
ion. “Touché,” I said. “So what do you want to be in ten years, Dylan?”