Page 26 of One More Time
CHAPTER TWELVE
NICKY
1990-Whatever
Lucy pointed at the house, a small, gray-shingled thing with a screened-in front porch so big that it seemed to swallow the rest of the place.
Nicky parked the Jeep all the way down the driveway, near the detached garage that had a long string of lightbulbs coming off it, zigzagging back and forth from the house and the fence so that the whole backyard was lit up.
‘Nice place,’ Nicky said as he held the car door open for Lucy and watched her hop down to the drive.
‘Yeah,’ she replied. ‘It’s Kim’s dad’s. His bachelor beach shack after her parents got divorced.’
‘You’ve got it for the summer?’
‘It was his graduation present to us. Free rent in Rehoboth.’
‘Sweet.’
‘Yeah,’ she said, gazing up past the lights to the sky. ‘It really is.’
Lucy dug inside the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a key as she stepped up a couple of stairs to the back door.
Nicky followed her, close but careful not to get too close. He didn’t want to pressure her, or for her to feel like he was only there to get in her pants. Of course, he did want to get her right out of those jeans and peel off the leather jacket that was making it impossible to see her tits. But he thought it was important not to be completely obvious about it.
The back door opened right into the kitchen. Lucy shucked her jacket and hung it over the back of a chair.
‘Want a beer?’ she asked, opening up the fridge.
‘Sure.’
‘I’ve got Rolling Rock or Yuengling,’ she offered.
‘Yuengling’s good.’
She popped the tops off two bottles with one of those old-fashioned opener thingies that was bolted to the heavy white cabinets.
Nicky took a long guzzle. To settle his nerves. To keep him from saying something stupid like ‘where’s your bedroom?’
Instead, he blurted, ‘Where’s your stereo?’
Lucy just chuckled and nodded her head toward the front of the house. ‘My CDs are on the porch.’
She led the way through a little living room crammed with oversized furniture that looked like it came from a much fancier house. A lot of leather and dark wood.
Lucy flipped on a lamp behind the sofa as she passed it, then went straight for the front door.
They walked out onto the deep front porch that stretched across the width of the whole house. The porch seemed much more lived in than the rest of the place, with ashtrays and empty soda cans. Bottles of nail polish and a stack of fashion magazines.
Lucy stopped at the coffee table and lit a couple of candles with a nearby lighter. Then she went over to the corner and grabbed a massive binder with a zipper all the way around it. She hit play on a boom box and handed the heavy binder to Nicky. He plopped onto the sofa, the fabric slightly damp from the humid beach air.
‘Speedy Marie’ kicked up in the background, and it made him smile.
‘Frank Black?’ he asked, busying himself with the CD case so he didn’t come off like a damn grinning goob.
‘Yeah, it’s a mix,’ she said as she sat next to him and looked down at the CDs on his lap.
Thank God for the binder, because the heat of her next to him against the cold ocean air blowing through the porch screens gave him a raging fucking boner. The light from the candles and the glow coming in from a streetlamp down the block made her look like a damn dream. A good one that he’d had before.
