Page 17 of One More Time
Lucy couldn’t figure it out, so she grabbed her beer from the table and took a slow sip to cover her face and work out exactly how Nicky Broome looking at her hit in such a way that she could physically feel it. In her stomach. And maybe somewhere a bit lower.
‘Here,’ Nicky said. He pushed the stop button on the stereo, then the eject button. ‘Better switch to the radio for a minute,’ he instructed her.
Lucy fiddled with the radio dial until it read 102.7 and The Cranberries floated from the speakers.
‘Ah-ha!’ Nicky exclaimed. He showed Lucy the back of the Snoop Dogg CD. A streak of something (hopefully mustard?) was stuck to the surface.
He rubbed the back of the disc unceremoniously on the leg of his jeans. Then scraped at a stubborn spot with his thumbnail. He held it up to the light to check it, before carefully polishing the CD with the inside of his shirt.
As he worked on the disc, his shirt slipped up. And up. Lucy stopped breathing for a moment as she glimpsed the honeyed skin of his abdomen and the barest suggestion of a happy trail that disappeared beneath his waistband.
Tasty.
While Lucy tried to restart her heart, Nicky plopped the CD in the tray and it closed with a whoosh. He cued up track eight and hit play.
The first notes of ‘Who Am I? (What’s My Name?)’ filled the house and Nicky grinned at his own success.
Cheers erupted from all over the house. Leave it to Nicky Broome to get a standing-o for hitting play.
‘You get that reaction to everything you do, don’t you?’ Lucy teased.
‘You don’t?’ he asked, feigning confusion.
Nicky Broome flashed Lucy that devastating smile of his and focused his green eyes right on hers. And, because Lucy was a heterosexual female with a pulse, she had little choice but to smile right back. There may even have been some egregious eyelash fluttering, to her eternal shame.
Lucy said, ‘I’m going out on the deck.’ She produced a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and held it up. ‘You wanna?’
‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘Sure.’
Lucy led the way, scooting sideways through the crowd in the living room, which was now on its feet drunkenly grinding to Snoop. She raised the arm with her beer to avoid spilling.
Nicky took the beer from her hand in mid-air. ‘I got it,’ he said.
They stepped through the sliding door into the cool night air. He handed her beer back.
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome.’
Lucy made brief but eventful eye contact with Kim, who was across the deck chatting with Mike Pellegrini and the Melissas. Kim’s eyes widened to saucers and then blinked in a way that Lucy easily interpreted as ‘what the fuck? Oh my God! Nicky-fucking-Broome!’ Lucy gave her best friend one long blink in reply, then focused her attention back on Nicky.
Lucy offered him her pack of smokes. He declined, producing his own from his back pocket.
They each lit their cigarettes. Lucy blew a puff of smoke up in the air toward the thin sliver of a moon that hung over Rehoboth Bay.
‘So, not a fan of European bands?’ Nicky asked.
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Lucy said, leaning back against the porch railing. ‘I mean, that would have to include Led Zeppelin and The Beatles, right? So—’
‘But it would also include Milli Vanilli and Wham!,’ Nicky responded with a wry grin.
‘Any category that could include both The Beatles and Milli Vanilli is obviously so broad it’s useless.’
‘You may have a point there,’ Nicky conceded.
‘I mean, U2?’ Lucy added.
‘UB40?’
