Random Acts of Fantasy Read online

  Amy was next. “Darla?” I couldn’t say nothin’. Couldn’t even croak out the word bomb.

  Not that I should!

  She went through the scanner real slow, looking back at me repeatedly, and then when she was done shot me a thumbs-up.

  What was I supposed to say? Yay you, Amy, for doing that because I can’t. I am dying, and fuck your thumb, you overly cheery chipmunk who got an iPhone caught in your twat.

  I get mean when I’m terrified, if you haven’t noticed.

  A new TSA agent waved me and Trevor over. Joe was talking to Amy in a super-controlled way, both of them talking out the sides of their mouths and sounding like they were Stephen Hawking. It made them both look lawyerly and mature, and I wanted to annihilate them with a flamethrower for having the audacity to be okay while I wasn’t.

  ’Cause I was dying.

  “You’re ice cold, too,” Trevor said in a voice of such compassion I would have wept if more than three brain cells were working.

  But all three of them rattling around in my head were devoted to making sure I didn’t say bomb!

  Finally, the TSA agent, a balding man who was built like my Uncle Mike but who had the cynical scowl of of a big-budget action movie villain, called out to me and Trevor.

  “You need to proceed,” he said with a sneer, like it was so easy, like I could just take a step forward.

  Trevor even kicked the backs of my heels a bit, as if I were Colin Mochrie or Brad Sherwood in an improv skit gone maniacally wrong, but all it did was injure my achilles heel and make me want to punch him.

  “Do something,” he hissed, no longer compassionate now that his tender ass was in jeopardy of being made sweet, sweet love to by an un-lubricated silicone glove covering the hand of a government worker who made $17 an hour.

  So I did. As Trevor went up to that big, Star Trek-like beast of a machine, I reached my hands behind my back and unhooked my bra.

  That’s right.

  My bra.

  Don’t ask me why, but the part of my mind that wasn’t screaming Don’t say bomb! was telling me Take off the underwire. My left hand snaked under my right shirtsleeve and slipped that arm out of the bra, then ditto with the left, the long string of bra coming out, unfastened, through my left sleeve.

  A distant set of catcalls from people in the security line reached my ears as blood pounded through me, my eyes now finding a gawking Joe, Trevor giving me a WTF look, and Amy shooting me that chipmunky thumbs-up.

  My legs decided to work again, and I got one of those bins and threw my bra in it, nipples free and rubbing against the thin cotton of my shirt, poking out hard and ready for a fight. Most people think you go into one of two states when you’re scared: fight or flight.

  But there’s a third. It’s freeze. Fight, flight, or freeze—and I’d frozen, all right. So had my nipples, because going around in a thin cotton t-shirt in mid-December in Boston would make any nipples stand at attention. The girls were tight.

  “Does that bra have a bomb in it?” Mr. Asshole Wolverine whispered to his wife, one scanner over, and then I watched three TSA agents to whisk him away, his wife pleading after them, saying, “Harold, I told you not to say bomb!”

  And then I was being beamed up to Planet Starlac as the second lieutenant in the Star Trek mission for this episode. Light flashed before my eyes and I saw my skin dissolve into the molecules in motion, neutrons and electrons floating fast in patterns of solid matter and then an amorphous, twisted realignment of the essence of Darla.

  Okay. Not really. The scanner did its job, some bureaucrat got to see a blobby image of my blobby nakedness and deem me not unfit for plane travel, and then they made me turn around and let me out to get my bra and stuff.

  It was sure as hell easier than I thought, and less invasive than having my locker searched back in high school during one of those “random” drug searches the principal was always organizing, until he was arrested for being the ringleader of a massive pill operation that stretched from Detroit to Miami.

  Joe gave me the hairy eyeball.

  “You took your bra off in public? Why?”

  If I opened my mouth I knew I would scream Don’t say bomb! so I just shook my head, gathered my things, and marched through the first door my half-blind eyes saw.

  To find a Wolverine getting a rectal exam.

  Okay, that didn’t happen either, but it would have been a weird kind of coincidence, huh?

  Instead, I walked into the men’s room. Just saw a few peens and a lot of guys with really bad aim. A rough hand pinched hard into a spot beneath my shoulder, and finally I found my voice.

  “Ow! That hurts!”

  “Get out of the men’s room,” Joe said through gritted teeth. Fuming. He was fuming, and all I could think was:

  Don’t say bomb!

  Trevor

  My shoe came untied and I’d bent down to fix it when a very warm, friendly palm settled on one ass cheek and squeezed.

  Because I was facing the men’s room Darla had mistakenly stumbled into and had seen Joe rush in after her, ice water ran through me at the touch. That wasn’t Darla’s hand. No woman had touched me like that since Darla, and it made me deeply uncomfortable.

  On its own, the discomfort was odd, because being handled by women had been part of my life for enough years that it shouldn’t feel so alien. The implications of finding a strange woman’s touch chilling, and not thrilling, would have to be processed and dissected later. While it was fine to look at other women, it absolutely was not fine to touch when I’d promised Darla that we were monogamous.

  Trinogamous? Is that even a word? Whatever Darla, Joe, and I were, it was just we three.

  So who the fuck was grabbing my ass in public?

  “Trevor!” squealed a familiar voice. An unpleasantly familiar voice. A what the fuck is she doing here? kind of voice.

  “Suzy?” Arms went around my neck, which was awkward because she was half standing, half squatting and I was still bent down, hands on my shoelaces. A mouthful of light brown hair that tasted like coconut and chemicals assaulted me.

  Joe’s ex.

  Joe’s rabid, stalker ex.

  The awkward “hug” ended when I stood abruptly, spitting hair out of my mouth and using my hands to draw a zone around me. A No Suzy Bergen Zone. Because Suzy was, well…

  You know the saying “Don’t dip your dick in crazy?”

  Joe hadn’t heard that one before he slept with Suzy, unfortunately. The wide, over-eager brown eyes that met mine with the full force of a woman who stumbles across an opportunity denied her through three court orders, made my gut ache.

  Suzy was all those chicks in those crazy bromance comedies who are over-the-top insane rolled into one tight package. With a heaping dose of borderline personality disorder and a voice that made fingernails on a chalkboard sound like Beethoven.

  She was hot. I had to give Joe that. And he’d met her during Intro to Sociology his sophomore year, her little model’s body all his slobbering cock could notice for the first year or so they dated.

  (My cock slobbered here and there for her, though it never dipped a toe in the Crazy Suzy love pool.)

  “Trevor! What on earth are you doing here?”

  “Flying.” Sticking to simple, short sentences was best with Crazy Suzy, because she wasn’t going to let you get a word in edgewise, and because she didn’t listen anyhow.

  Ever.

  “Haha, silly!” she squealed, hitting me across my abs with some kind of passport wallet thing. Her voice shot up into an octave only dogs and NSA agents could hear, the squeal making my jaw clench. “Of course you’re flying. You wouldn’t be at the airport if you weren’t!” Furtive glances all around me, and then she asked, “Is Joey with you?”

  Just then, Joe and Darla emerged from the men’s room, his arm around her shoulders, the two heads huddled together in a conspirators’ talk. It made me smile, and that was my mistake.

  Suzy turned around, her face
aglow with expectation and promise, like a big-game hunter who’s spotted an injured elephant.

  And then her expression morphed into that of an Orc. An Orc with perfectly applied makeup and a lovely, shimmery tan from a bottle.

  A tanned Orc with laser eyes that could kill Darla on sight.

  Joe’s head was still bent over as Darla giggled, the two walking toward us in that loopy way you walk when you’re entwined in another person, feet not quite in sync, hips jutting and jarring each other. It’s fun when you’re the one with your arm around your woman, her soft side boob catching your rib and making you hard.

  But it’s kind of like watching your best friend walk down to his own execution to see him doing it in front of Crazy Suzy, who now looked like she was calculating the tension of the wire she’d need to garrote Darla.

  “Joey!” Suzy exclaimed in the Voice of Death. How she dropped three octaves into Exorcist pea-soup-scene territory so quickly was a force of nature to admire.

  Joe’s head snapped up and he caught my eyes for a split second as it registered who was standing next to me.

  It was like watching hope die.

  “Suzy?” he choked out. Now it was Darla’s turn to change expression, those apple cheeks nice and shiny then going slack as Suzy stomped her way to Joe, long, slim, tanned legs in five-inch stilettos click-clacking across the buffed marble floor like gunshots.

  Aimed right for Darla’s heart.

  Joe’s pleading look as he let go of Darla and steered himself toward Suzy said—without words—that I needed to man up and help him in no uncertain terms.

  I’ve got your back, I wanted to tell him. That hand on my ass. Just the memory of it made me shudder. Once a man identifies crazy, his body stops responding to it.

  Except when drunk. Unfortunately, the dick shuts off in the presence of alcohol and turns into a golden retriever. It finds friends everywhere and loves to stick its nose in every woman’s crotch.

  (Actually, alcohol isn’t always required.)

  “Who is that?” Darla asked me, the twist of her neck dangerous and predatory. The hair on my arms stood up, a prickly sensation pouring over all my exposed skin. As Suzy and Darla locked eyes, it was like watching Magneto and Professor X square off, the electricity in the room taking on a taste.

  The taste of a cat fight that reached into electromagnetic fields.

  “I don’t like her,” Darla added, the words cold and dead, spoken with such conviction and clarity that I began to imagine random items in the airport levitating. Spinning out of control into a vortex of unimagined dimensions wasn’t on our list of things to do in the hour before our plane to Miami boarded.

  Sorry. No time for this.

  Joe looked like he’d just seen Elijah Wood from Maniac. Or wished he had. Maybe having Suzy scalped would be a kinder way to let her live out her remaining moments, because Darla turned away from where Suzy chatted with great animation and fervor as Joe really, truly turned green.

  “And who, exactly, is she?” Darla asked with an arch in her voice higher than a runway fashion model’s foot in Milan. Her hand shot out and brushed against her braless boob and I froze, completely engrossed by the beauty of her soft roundness, how that arm got to rub up against her breast whenever it wanted, with heedless insouciance, and I wanted to be that upper arm.

  Her elbow.

  I wanted to be anything but me, Trevor, standing in an airport watching this train wreck unfold before me. We were supposed to be having fun, dammit, and watching Joe get air humped by the words coming out of Suzy’s mouth while Darla prepared to turn Suzy into a one-woman human centipede wasn’t my idea of frolicking.

  Liam, Sam, and Amy walked up behind me, all gawking at Joe and—

  “Is that Suzy?” Sam gasped, starting to laugh and then pretending to cough.

  “Holy shit!” Liam burst out, letting his laughter come out. He clapped Sam on the shoulder and the two of them turned away, snickering.

  “Dude is so fucked,” Sam added as Amy looked at me, bewildered.

  “Suzy is…”

  “Joe’s ex.”

  Joe and I were no stranger to women fighting over us. Especially Joe. He’d been at the center of chick fights for all of college, and most of the band’s life.

  Maybe we should have named ourselves Hair Pull.

  Something about him drew women to him like moths to a flame. Babies to a breast. Middle-aged women to Benedict Cumberbatch. Sam to his sticks. Liam to pussy. A great dane to a woman’s crotch.

  You get the point.

  Darla hadn’t met any of our exes, though, and the look of confusion and pure revulsion as she and Suzy sized each other up and found the other deeply wanting made my hands clench.

  And then it hit me.

  Joe hadn’t told her.

  Every relationship has that awkward point where you have to tell each other your innermost thoughts and feelings, and all that touchy-feely crap.

  And then there’s your cock’s story. Oh, it has one. The cock has its own biography, and it can be a slim volume stapled and folded in half like a little pamphlet or a three-volume series complete with extensive footnotes. Some books even need to be read while wearing sterile gloves and an air-filter mask.

  But our cocks all have a history, and when we get into a new relationship, the dick’s dirty laundry has to be aired.

  Joe, though, had kept his stinkiest, most-stained nasty old cloth to himself. And now that old cloth was getting rubbed in his face in an airport terminal between a donut shop and an airport bookstore with a long line of Fifty Shades books the backdrop for his comeuppance.

  I groaned. Couldn’t help it. My time interpreting and explaining my dick’s adventures hadn’t been exactly fun, but Darla got it. Her pussy had some tales to tell as well, and her history was more Scheherazade than Pope Joan. I mean, my magic number was still larger than hers, but not by much. A finger or two, if we’re counting.

  Those stories, I knew, had been told to Joe, because Darla told me she’d told him.

  Turned out old Joe had been holding out on her.

  “Joe never told you about Suzy,” I said in a hiss of a sigh. My chest ached and my legs were filled with a tight energy that needed to be kicked out.

  On Joe’s ass.

  “Suzy.” Darla might as well have said, “Shit.”

  “Suzy is Joe’s ex,” I started to explain.

  “I heard Sam say that. She better be.” I looked at Darla—really looked at her. The anxiety she’d shown in the TSA line was gone. All her focus was on Suzy, which was good. Whatever the fuck had happened back in Government Grope Land was done, and now we had this mess to deal with.

  Her chest heaved and her eyes were so narrow and determined, so pinpoint smart, that my cock began to twitch, then slowly rise and make my pants tight.

  The power emanating off Darla as she held herself back from marching over to Joe and Suzy showed a possessive side to her, a deep loyalty I knew was there but hadn’t been tested yet.

  Groupies stayed the fuck away from us now, and all Darla had to do was glare at them.

  Suzy?

  Oh, my big blond beast had just met her match.

  “She’s his ex, all right. The third restraining order finally took.” I knew my words would have to be chosen carefully, but Darla’s spitfire made my blood pump through me so hard it all collected in my penis and threatened to be mistaken for the nose of a jet plane.

  “Restraining order? Did you say restraining order?”

  I nodded.

  “Cray cray?”

  “Yep.”

  Darla frowned, then rolled her eyes. “I bet she still got to meet Joe’s parents.”

  Ouch. I winced. Not that I could say much. My parents still hadn’t met Darla, either, but they at least knew she existed. That made me slightly less of an asshole than Joe, and I’d take it.

  I slipped my arm around her waist. Suzy’s eyes flicked up and caught the move, and the resulting smile made my
balls crawl up and tuck into my ribcage.

  She looked at Joe now like he was a plate of tiramisu and she was ten months pregnant.

  “The reunion is lovely,” Sam said in his slow, quiet, neutral way, “but we need to get to our gate and prepare for the ride.”

  “I’d miss a plane to watch this,” Liam whispered. “It’s like the best reality show ever. Wedding Crashers meets Fantasy Island.”

  “You should write screenplays,” I said. Liam pointed his finger at me like a gun and pretended to fire, then walked off with Sam and Amy toward the gate, the three of them looking back at Joe and Suzy.

  I’ve seen plenty of bored guys in my life. And I’ve seen Joe bored out of his mind, high as a kite, angry as fuck, terrified beyond belief, and filled with unrestrained glee.

  I have never, ever seen him manage eighty percent of those in one look.

  Until now.

  Darla stepped forward and I grabbed her arm, which she shook off with a terrifying level of anger. Fuck. I needed to step up my game.

  “The restraining order must have expired,” I explained, calculating the months in my head. Yup. About a month ago. “And it’s probably a coincidence—”

  “Riiiiiiiggghhht.” Amy had walked up behind us and now stood right next to Darla, shoulder to shoulder, her head held high and eyes narrowed, like a hawk’s. She and Darla traded a look that made my blood run cold and my cock tighten.

  Amy did that thing chicks do, where they suck in air through their teeth and then talk in a hushed, low voice while they act like they’re not talking. Major turn-on from anyone but Amy.

  “Her thighs can’t be real,” Amy said.

  I knew the answer to that one. “Liposuction.” Both women looked at me with raised eyebrows, not because they were surprised by my answer, but with twin looks of surprise that I was still there.

  Taking the hint, I grabbed my bag and walked over to the water fountain. Amy could pull Darla off Suzy before an ear got ripped off or a nipple bitten. She was tougher than she looked.

  But I was still in earshot. Joe needed backup.

  “She’s plastic. Mommy and Daddy paid a boatload to keep that body going. Spray-on tan and shoes that cost $300,” Amy stage whispered to Darla.