Reckless Abandon(68)

This is a song about someone leaving. It can’t be to me, because I never left him. To the contrary. He left me. This song isn’t about me.

It’s about him.



Scanning the page, I run my fingers over the words, over the smoothness of the page. There is no song title. There is no author. It’s a song I’ve never heard of before yet I feel like I know it by heart.

He said I should be taking notes and I am. But what if I’m taking the wrong notes? Songs can be interpreted in so many ways. What if I’m reading this all wrong?

When the song is over, the crowd erupts in applause. People shout admiration for Asher’s playing and some of the students ask him to play something else. He obliges and asks them if they have any requests.

I take this as my cue to leave and let him wow his audience. I suppose that really was what this was all about. A lesson for the students.

I turn around and make my way through the crowd that has subsided. I walk through the lobby and am on my way back up the stairs when the stairwell door opens and Asher calls my name.

“Emma.”

I stop and turn around, looking at the man who went from ruining me to asking me to save him to making me want to fall in love with him. I know I should say something about the performance but I don’t know what to say. Instead I clutch the notebook to my side and stare at him, giving him the control because right now, I don’t know what I should do.

“I never got a chance to ask you. What happened to the shoes?”

I stare at him for a second before realizing he’s talking about the bouquet of Top-Siders he bought me. I consider lying, more for the fact I don’t want to appear crazy, then decide against it. “I burned them.”

Asher tilts his head, his face contorted as he tries to decide if I’m lying.

I answer him matter-of-factly. “Leah and I had a bonfire when we got back to Ohio. We doused them in limoncello and lit them up.”

His lips curl up on both sides as he shakes his head. “Well, that seems like a perfectly good waste of limoncello.”

I laugh at his response and let my shoulders release the tension I was carrying so tightly. I’m a wreck. He ruined me. But by God he owns me.





“I’m getting marrriieeedddd!”

Leah squeals from her place on a white bed in the middle of a Manhattan male strip club that caters to celebrations just like this. Instead of tables, there are several white beds big enough for ten girls to sit in and enjoy the show on display.

After the last few weeks—hell, the last few months—I’ve been having, Leah’s bachelorette party is a welcome reprieve.

“Your sister is crazy!” Crystal screams in my ear over the loud music. A man wearing a piece of dental floss and what can only be described as a banana hammock has Leah’s friend Suzanne in the air, wrapped around his waist as he simulates thrusting into her. Leah is throwing money at the stripper to give all her friends a lap dance.

It’s all in good fun. Leah is fully clothed in jeans and a silky halter-top. She has on her favorite black Stetson with a veil we taped to the inside. She wanted a Magic Mike–themed bachelorette party so Crystal and Lisa helped me orchestrate tonight’s event.

And from the looks of it, Leah approves.

Despite her outward persona, Leah likes to look but she’d never touch. She says Adam is enough for her. Instead, she’ll spend a week’s salary making sure each of her friends – Jessica, Suzanne and Kimberly - who traveled with her from Cedar Ridge has the time of her life.

“She’s a class act, that one,” I say to Crystal, then back up when I see the naked man is heading my way.

I place my hands up in the air and push the man away from me. “Oh no. No way, no way, no way!” My efforts are in vain as Leah and her friends Suzanne, Kimberly, and Jessica push the stripper toward me.

“Oh, come on, do it for your sister!” Crystal places her hand on my back and pushes me forward into the arms of a very oily, very sweaty man. He is attractive—dark hair and dark eyes. He looks like Eric Bana. Earlier he was dressed in a doctor’s costume and did a performance on stage where he cured one of the bachelorettes by stripping and then dry humping her up and down the stage.

I look over to Lisa for help but she just shakes her head from the corner.

The doctor-slash-stripper has his hands around my waist and I squeal when he slides them around to grab my ass lifting me up so my legs dangle as he whirls me around and slams me onto the bed Leah and her friends are sitting on.

“I’m going to kill you!” I say, with a laugh, when I catch Leah’s eye.

She howls and waves her hands in the air. “Enjoy it Emma!”

I start to smile and laugh at her happiness when the stripper, who was standing on the ground in front of me, leaps from the floor, up in the air and lands on the bed with his knees on each side of my waist and he is straddling me.

Oh, dear God. I hope he doesn’t . . .

Yeah, he is.

The stripper dances and moves up my body, gyrating his pelvis. I raise my hands to cover my face, blocking out the sight of what he’s doing and the awful smell of stale oil and stinky boy that he is dripping all over me.

The girls love every minute of it. Lisa is the only one who looks slightly uncomfortable for my sake. I’m starting to question my judgment of asking my work friends to come out.