Page 81 of The Auction
“They get jobs as waitresses?”
“They get jobs as strippers,” I corrected him. “Next thing you know, my name is Starlight and I’m hanging upside down from a pole in a honkey-tonk in Missoula.”
His lips twisted like he was fighting a smile. He came over, moved my coffee mug and sat on the coffee table. The pads he set behind him.
“What happens at night?”
I lifted my shoulders to my ears. “I don’t know. You’re still mad at me.”
“You still mad at me?”
“Not as much. I take responsibility for being the instigator in that whole thing.”
He reached out then to cup my cheek in his palm. Like he was deciding if he was going to pet me or crush my skull. It was a toss-up.
Then he bent down and kissed me on the lips. “Morning, babe.”
Ah. I understood what he was doing here. Establishing norms and routines again.
I reached for and squeezed the wrist of the hand holding my face. “Morning.”
He stood then and it felt like something had shifted back into place between us.
“Oh, and if you’re wondering,” he pointed out. “Your tits are nowhere big enough to work in a strip club.”
I reached for the box of pads and chucked it at his back as he left the room to get his own coffee.
“I thinkwe should go out on another date.”
I was standing underneath the doorway to the barn while he was on the ladder next to me. He was fixing the framing around the barn door as some of the two by fours had started to rot. The more frail Herb got, the less and less he took care of this kind of stuff and it certainly never hit my radar.
My goal had been to dump the place, not improve it.
But Creed was getting serious about returning the barn to its once former glory and that meant shoring up the current structure.
“What makes you think I want to date you?” he asked, then made a motion for me to hand him up one of the pieces he’d already pre-cut.
I picked up the piece he pointed to and lifted it up to him.
“Ha. You should be so lucky. No, I’m serious. Last time it was all the pressure of my birthday and my first real, serious date. We should try something a little looser. Something to get me in the mood.”
He snorted as he hammered the wood into place. “In the mood for what?”
“Bow, chica wow-wow,” I said, thrusting my hips. Which, given his opinion of my non-stripper tits, might not have been the most seductive move.
He continued to hammer.
“I’m just saying, this blowup between us started with the fact that I’d made the conscious decision to get busy with you. But now neither of us are in the mood, so we need to do something to jump start it.”
He climbed down from the ladder and looked up at his handiwork.
“I asked you out last time,” he said, pulling his ball cap down lower over his forehead.
As we’d crept into the summer months I’d gotten on him more and more about protecting, at least his face, from the sun. I didn’t care what his mother’s ethnicity was, his father was at least partly Irish so the dude needed to worry about skin cancer.
I wore a ball cap every day, rain or shine, and I still had a face filled with freckles.
Did strippers have freckles?
