Page 27 of Dahlia Made A List

Dahlia sat on the far side, facing me. She had her hair down again, soft waves framing her face and feathering over her shoulders to the tops of her breasts. She wore a short dress that swished when she walked, playing across the tops of her thighs. In the truck, she’d worn a white sweater, but it was laying over the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink bag beside her, leaving her shoulders bare. The dress, bright yellow to draw the eye, fitted snug over her tits. Anything would fit snug over those tits of hers.

The number of times I thought about Dahlia’s tits embarrassed me. Not because I had the thoughts. But the fuckin’ quantity. When was the last time I obsessed over a woman’s tits? Ava Martinez going braless drove me and my cousins crazy through high school. But even that hormone-fueled teenage idiocy didn’t touch my growing fixation on Dahlia’s breasts.

“What surprised you about that scene, Dahlia?”

I perked up a little, gazing around the people sitting on one of Grams’s huge sofas to see one of the male members of the group sitting on the floor. He looked up at Dahlia with an arched brow.

“Well, I’ve read plenty of romances, of course. Sometimes the sex feels a little ridiculous, you know? Like, real people don’t feel like that. Don’t do that. Sex for a hundred hours, a million orgasms. And men aren’t that . . . um . . . ” Her voice trailed off and even across the thirty feet between us, I could see the blush fill her cheeks.

“You see something different about the hallway scene?”

She fiddled with the ends of her hair, a habit I’d noticed she slipped into when she was taking a minute to figure out what to say. Most times she said whatever was on her mind, no filter, no inhibitions. Where I measured every word before I spoke, usually using the least number I could get away with, she overflowed with words, showering them down about any and every topic.

“The hallway scene was so hot, but I think it was so hot because I believed in Jonas. I believed in his urgency. When Cassie walked in the door, I believed he couldn’t wait. He needed her. Needed to touch her, to make her feel, to give everything to her. I could feel his intensity through the words.”

She laughed, tossed her hair, and took a long swallow of red wine.

“He was intense. All that broody intensity built up and bubbled over like hot lava out of a volcano,” one of the other women said.

“Can you imagine being wanted like that?” Dahlia spoke again. The wistful note in her voice raised the tiny hairs along the backs of my arms.

“He couldn’t even wait, couldn’t walk as far as the bedroom. She came in, barely had a chance to drop her bag on the hall table and he grabbed her. Up on the table—”

“Did he even remove her panties? Or did he just pull them aside? Part of me hates when they do that, but there is something about the passion of it all that makes taking them off take too long . . . ”

“They were off. She picked them up later, remember?”

Dahlia spoke again when one of the other women prompted her. “The way the author described the feel of his clothes against her bare skin, too. I liked the details. I could imagine myself in that hallway. Not with any of my ex’s, but you know what I mean.”

The group laughed, but my gaze fixed on Dahlia. On the downturn of her chin, the way she slid her finger along the stem of the wineglass. The group in there took her words as a joke, her being silly as she so often could be. People heard the quantity of her words, the light and fun words, but missed when she dropped the little truthful bits.

I imagined Pretty Boy hauling Dahlia up against the wall in the hallway of 26 Redbud. The picture refused to form in my mind.

“How’re the driving lessons coming, Dahlia?”

The group started to disperse, picking up empty glasses, turning my way as they moved toward the kitchen. I stepped to the side to let them pass with a polite nod.

“Oh, Minerva, your grandson is a saint, I swear! He’s so patient with me.” She sighed, heavy and dramatic. “We haven’t figured out how I’m gonna make left hand turns yet, since I can’t go in the left lane since my best friend was killed that way and all.”

I closed my eyes at Grams’s gasp. As Dahlia chattered on about her love for her childhood friend, that little ember I’d been protecting sputtered in a flood of disappointment. Dahlia couldn’t help it. If a thought entered her mind, it left her mouth.

She hadn’t confided in me because she trusted me on some intimate level. Because she felt some unacknowledged spark between us. Because I took up some special place in her life.

She just chattered on. Because that’s just who Dahlia was.

Chapter Nine

Dahlia

TheRichlandKillbilliesheldtryouts once a year. According to the flier from their Christmas event, I didn’t need to know any of the roller derby rules or have any roller derby skills just yet. They would be testing my skating ability and getting an idea of my personality and potential place on the team in this first inspection. If I passed muster, I’d be invited back to a few weeks of training and if that went well, I’d earn my spot on the team.

I didn’t have any more room in my head for more rules between the driving and the Shameless Readers and recipes and the chaos of thoughts that zinged through my brain these days about a particularsomething.

A man-shaped something. A Wyatt-shaped something.

I slid my index finger over my phone to wake it up and check the time. He’d be here any minute now to drive me down to Richland.

An hour alone in the truck with him.

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