Page 7 of Brewbies
This could not—should not—be happening.
For once in her life, Darby had done everything right. She had driven three hours away from the tiny coastal hamlet of Townsend Harbor. She had targeted a bar of the kind most Townsendites wouldn’t be caught dead in. She had selected her quarry carefully after hours of observation.
Of all her one-nighters, why did it have to be him? The man who’d had her recalibrating her walk for days afterward. The man who’d left her stretched, abraded, satiated, and in such a manically good mood that her colorist asked what kind of meds her psychiatrist had her on.
The man whose name she didn’t know despite the fact that he’d been inside her.
Deep, deep inside.
“He sees everything you do, even when I don’t,”Sister Mary Mildred whisper-hissed in her head.
Whack.
“His justice will be swift and sure.”
Crack.
Was that what this was?
Justice?
Some kind of karmic one-upmanship in her lifelong game of chicken with the universe?
One thing Darby knew for sure. She really had to stop inviting wood to come at her as hard as possible.
“To whomever it may concern,” she began, fastening her eyes shut. “I solemnly swear I will never have another one-night stand so long as I live if you could kindly make the lumbersnack-looking guy with the icy glare decide to leave in the next thirty seconds.” Her throat worked over a gritty swallow. “It doesn’t have to be anything super bad. Maybe a mild case of diarrhea? There’s a gas station just up the road, and they keep the bathrooms pretty clean, I hear. Thanks. Oh. Amen and stuff.”
Feeling completely foolish for hoping he might have magically evaporated, Darby gently widened the narrow slit between the fabric panels.
If anything, he looked more solid from this angle, his broad shoulders juxtaposed against the backdrop of pine trees across the interstate, the sunrise gilding the crown of his head like some kind of small-town avenging angel.
In flannel.
A shirt very much like the one he’d worn that night.
A shirt very much like the one she’d traded for her panties.
Because, unlike the others, she hadwantedto remember him.
Fondly, and preferably from a great distance.
Darby cast a guilty glance back to the living area of her vintage trailer, where, at that very second, in a cupboard above her bed, the souvenir in question whispered from the confines of a gallon-sized freezer bag. Not to preserve the scent of fabric softener, soap, and a cologne that reminded her of a meadow after a summer storm, but to protect it against the moths that held nightly mixers around the light on the outside her camper.
Or so she’d told herself every time she cracked the zipper to inhale a heady hit of eau d’ deep dicking.
Darby bit the pointed tip of her nail as the man who’d renovated her pelvic floor glared at a passing police cruiser.
Maybe he wouldn’t recognize her.
Right. Because it wasn’t like she had branded her entire business to her two most recognizable features or anything.
Brewbies.
Townsend Harbor’s first and only sex-positive, body-positive, bikini coffee camper.
For a cause.
She glanced in the full-length mirror mounted on the door leading to her tiny living area at the camper’s rear and let out an anguished groan.
