Darkness at the Edge of Town (Iris Ballard #2)(47)

“Does that happen often?”

“Me wanting to kick men in the balls? Every day and twice on Sundays,” she said with a smile. “Thank the universe Paul was there. He convinced the asshole to leave and even calmed me down.”

Jesus, did they send a memo out to the whole group about the initiative to hook up the new girl and Paul? I thought as I ascended the stairs. Next I’m going to hear he worked with AIDS babies in Africa or something.

Actually it was worse than I thought. Megan led me upstairs to the second door on the right, opening the door and instantly treating me to the sight of Paul’s very nice, perfectly rounded ass. I gasped loudly, and he began to turn around. My eyes immediately jutted to the celling. “Oh, hey,” Paul said.



“Sorry. Sorry,” I said.

“Why? I’m just naked. No big deal.”

“You’d better get in the shower before I jump the line,” Megan chided as if nothing were out of the ordinary. As if there weren’t a naked strange man two feet away. “Go on.”

My eyes didn’t leave the water-damaged ceiling as he brushed past us. I didn’t lower them until he was behind me. I felt dirty, almost used, as if I’d been flashed in a park. Yet I still followed Megan into the bedroom. The room was small, or at least seemed that way with two sets of bunk beds, a dresser, and a desk against the wall with one lone window. It was practically a cell. Megan picked up Paul’s clothes from the floor with a sigh. “It isn’t like the hamper is right there, Paul,” she said to herself. She tossed his clothes in the hamper by the dresser before sitting on one of the beds and pulling a plastic bin from under it. “I have to get these clothes off. I’m gonna get naked. Do you mind?”

At least she asked that time. “Uh, not really.”

Megan rose again, moving the fan on the desk toward herself before removing her shirt and shorts. She wasn’t wearing any underwear. Ugh…The first thing I noticed was the rose tattoo on her hip and butterfly tramp stamp. I tried to stop there, but I couldn’t. She was beautiful, with perfectly round breasts and hips, and no cellulite that I saw as I quickly assessed her before peering away again. I suddenly felt like Humpty Dumpty. “You can sit down if you want,” Megan said as she lay on her bunk. “Just don’t block the fan. I’m seriously about to get heatstroke.”



I sat on the bottom bunk directly across from her. “Uh, do your tattoos mean anything?”

“Besides wastes of money and poor decisions while high?” she chuckled. “No, Rose was my grandmother’s name. She took care of me off and on when I was younger. Then she died and…cue horror story.”

“I’m sorry. My grandmother helped raise me too.”

“Another member of the shitty parent club. Knew it. The fucking evil government regulates everything but that. You need a permit to drive, to get married, to catch a fucking fish, but any moron can have a child. The world is so fucked.” She flipped on her side to face me, giving me the full Monty treatment. You want to look away, you do, but how can you not look when it’s right there? “You lied to me.”

And my heart flew into my throat. “Wh-What?”

“Me being naked is making you uncomfortable,” she said with a smirk.

Oh, thank God. “Uh, I just barely know you, and I’m not a…nude person.”

“What? You’ve never slept in the nude? Walked around your house naked? Went skinny-dipping?”

“Not really.”

“You’re not big on vulnerability, are you?” she asked.

Oh goody, another test. “It’s not that,” I lied, eyes down. “I was just raised to be modest. You don’t boast. You don’t show too much skin. You know.”

“Well, with a body like yours, it’s almost a crime not to show it off. You take care of yourself. It’s obvious. You work hard on your body; that should be appreciated. All that modesty crap, it’s just to make you feel uncomfortable in your own skin. To keep you down and depressed so you’re miserable, you have no energy to fight back, and need to buy shit to feel even a fraction better.”



“Is that what Mathias taught you?”

“Is he wrong?” she parried.

“There is…some logic to it,” I said.

“At our base we’re still just animals who have gotten too damn smart for our own good. We think too much. We place layer after layer of bullshit to suppress our instincts. But at our core…” She began to trace a circle around her belly button and bit her lower lip. “We just want to fuck. And eat. And then fuck some more.” She laid her head on her pillow and smiled seductively, still caressing her perfect body as if it were her lover. “Wouldn’t we all be better off if we just gave in to our base natures?”

Fucking hell, I thought. She was good. Besides one drunken make-out session in college I’d never had any sexual contact with another woman before, but damned if I wasn’t a little turned on by the gorgeous creature fondling herself mere feet away. I pushed that down—hurrah for repression—and half-smiled. “Of course if we went back to our caveman roots, you and I would have been raped seventy times over and all disagreements would result in a stone to the head.”

“Do you watch the news? As if neither of those aren’t happening in the modern world twenty times over right now,” she pointed out.