Rich Friends by Briskin Jacqueline;

Author:Briskin, Jacqueline;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media Romance

6

Laguna is forty miles south of Los Angeles, and the Nautical Motel is a mile and a half south of Laguna. The original ship-fronted building, circa 1938, is level with Pacific Coast Highway. The white cabins, which ramble down a cliff planted with pink Martha Washington geraniums, become newer and more expensive as they approach the beach. On every door hangs a life preserver with a red-painted name. Roger and Alix picked the First Mate’s Bunk, it was on the street, cheap, and had a kitchen area: Alix wanted to fix their meals—“Play house,” she said. As far as her family knew, she was in Ronni Bolt’s Hawaiian condominium. Roger had told his parents he was visiting a friend for the six days until he must fly back to Baltimore. Neither considered telling the truth. Couples their age lived together, God knows. But Roger and Alix were middle-of-the-roaders—imprinted by previous bourgeois generations, they were what their elders referred to as good kids. Their evasions were not hypocrisy but form to assuage parental mores.

They awoke at the same time, on their backs, naked, her left calf under his right, his arm across her stomach.

“Alix?”

“Mmmm?”

“You awake?”

“No-no.” She was stroking his shoulders. “You’ve got a bump.”

He felt. “Yes,” he said. He traced her collarbones. “You’re totally different.”

“From what? A zit?”

“You look tall and sort of … sort of.…”

“Horsy,” she supplied.

“Awe-inspiring. But you feel small. Soft. Like a little kid.”

“Ahh, flat-chested?”

“Let me—No, sweet, not at all.”

“Now you’d have a terrific bod if you could clear up that postadolescent acne.”

“My diagnosis is too many Hersheys,” he said. “What do you weigh?”

“One sixteen.”

“Five-seven?” he asked.

“Eight and a half. Why? Is this a complete physical?”

“I’m trying to understand you.”

“Maybe it’s best if you don’t,” she sighed.

“Hey, don’t shut me out.”

At the same moment they rolled toward one another.

“I never realized you’d be so fragile. Breakable.” He finger-walked her spine, cupping her shoulders. “Sweet, you did break there, sort of, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“The second time,” he said. “Not the first.”

She tugged his moustache.

“Right?” he asked.

“It’s embarrassing.”

“I’m the one with anxieties.”

“It never happened before.”

“That you didn’t?”

“You do have anxieties,” she said. “The other way round.”

“Seriously?” he asked.

“I have this major problem.”

“You don’t.”

“I can cross it off my list?”

“Yes.”

“Roger.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I like the sound of it. Roger. Roger.”

“When your mother told me you’d gone to Hawaii, I wanted to cry.”

“Did you?”

“Some.”

Her lips touched his eyelids in turn. “I’d never’ve guessed on the phone. You were very suave.”

“One thing you never can accuse me of.”

They chuckled into the darkness.

“Where’d you get the money?” he asked.

She rubbed her cheek in his neck.

“I want to know everything about you,” he said.

“My father. It’s a graduation gift.” Moving her palms down his sides, she whispered, “Was I okay?”

“A postmortem?”

“You know, on a scale of one to ten?”

“You’re really asking, aren’t you?”

“But you don’t have to answer,” she said.

“At the end I was sort of out of my head. I never imagined it could be like this.”

She whispered, “Me, either.”

“But being with you, holding you now, is as important.

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