Unexpected Arrivals(17)
And the following week, the four of us took off on the road trip of a lifetime meandering our way up the East Coast and into New York. The trip included every stop we could find from the capital to the largest ball of yarn and the tiniest rocking chair. If there was a place of interest, we pulled over. We weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere and had a blast on the open road—even when Neil got lost in a corn maze and scared in the World’s Largest House of Mirrors. I had no idea a grown man could have such an aversion to clowns. It had taken us well over an hour to retrieve him from the tangled web of reflections. Although our strangest stop had been one closest to home at the Cryptozoology & Paranormal Museum. We’d gotten thrown out for making fun of the Bigfoot and Loch Ness paraphernalia. Apparently, there were people who believed the displays were scientific artifacts.
“Oh look, The Awakening!” Cora cooed as if she’d just uncovered some fantastical exhibit we had to see.
“Isn’t that a Robin Williams movie?” Hannah asked from the back seat.
“This is a sculpture that comes out of the sand. It’s a giant hand.”
“And why do we need to see a huge hand?” Neil jabbed at Cora.
“For the same reason you insisted on seeing proof of Bigfoot, you oaf.” She turned to me in the driver’s seat for the final call. “Come on, we’ve stopped at way stupider things.” Cora wagged her eyebrows and bounced in the seat next to me.
“Fair’s fair, guys.”
The groans from the back seat weren’t really in opposition. Cora was right; we had stopped at some inane places, and every one of them, even the most basic, had ended up being fun because we made them that way.
It hadn’t taken Cora long to bound out of the car and down the beach toward the sculpture. It was more than a big hand—it was an entire man trapped in the sand as though he were grasping for life while being sucked down. It was magnificent in itself, but the photo ops were even better. We’d gotten there late in the afternoon as most of the kids and their parents were leaving, and soon, Cora hung upside down, suspended from a finger, while Hannah had jumped into the palm of the hand. People probably thought the four of us were drunk when Neil and I started making inappropriate gestures to the dude’s mouth but whatever—it made for good Facebook fun before we called it a night and hung out in D.C.
Thus far, we’d turned an eight-hour drive into three days with zero desire to hurry along. “Anyone down for The Tattoo Museum in Baltimore tomorrow?” We all sat in the hotel room on our iPads searching for places to stop the following day. “They do tattoos and piercings.”
Neil high-fived me expressing his vote. However, the girls weren’t as easy to convince. “You two realize if we stop, we’ll end up spending the entire day there and only make it forty-five minutes farther than we are right now?” Hannah seemed to think she made a valid point, yet Neil and I just shrugged and started looking for designs to get inked.
“I could go for a piercing.”
My head whipped toward Cora, leaving me dumbfounded by her pronouncement. I gave her the stink eye and forgot anyone else was in the room. “Yeah? How about your nipples? Or better yet, your clit.”
She threw a pillow at me. “How about I’ll pierce whatever you do?”
I shrugged. “I’ll get my nipples pierced.”
She didn’t say I had to keep them; she just said I had to have it done. I could endure a little pain to see bars through her perfect peaks that would give me something to suck on while I teased her. Fuck, yes. That I could do.
“Deal. You get yours done, and I’ll do mine. Still want that clit ring?” The humor in her voice left me wondering if she was playing or not.
“Hate to tell you, girly, your man doesn’t have a clit.” Hannah giggled thinking Cora had misunderstood.
“No, but he does have a penis. And from what I’ve read, a Prince Albert is quite the treat.”
Before I could object, she and Hannah had launched into a discussion of their own. “So you’d let someone stick a needle through your clit if Carp got a ring in his dick?”
“Hell, yes. In the long run, it’d be worth the pain.”
“I’m not piercing my dick, Cora. Forget it,” I interjected.
“I’ll pierce mine.” Neil was a moron.
“You realize you can’t have sex for like six weeks while that shit heals. And have you ever seen pictures of what that looks like infected?” Nope, nope, nope. Not me. Dick rot was a hard limit.
“I’m not going for six weeks without sex, Neil. Not going to happen.” Hannah laughed at her boyfriend.
“Cora, I think you and I got mix matched.”
“Eww, gross, Neil.” Cora had as much sexual attraction to Neil as I did Hannah. We were like family, and the two of them were like siblings to each of us. The notion itself was repulsive.
He hadn’t even realized what he’d said when the pillow came flying at the side of his head, nearly knocking him over.
“Can you not think about Cora’s vagina and your penis in unison?” Hannah couldn’t get the words out without cackling.
The next day, we got to the museum an hour before it opened, hoping to beat the rush. We bypassed the actual history of tattooing in favor of the tattoo parlor itself. All four of us managed to get in, although we spent the entire day sitting around waiting between people who had appointments and those who’d gotten there before we had.