Power Drilled (Roommates, #8)(5)

He cocked his head to the side. “And that makes a difference?”

“I guess not.”

“So, since I’m a friend of a teacher friend, would you like to come sit in my truck while we wait?”

My muscles tensed. “I’m fine here, thanks.”

He sighed. “I thought you’d say that.”

“Then why’d you ask?”

“Because I’m getting tired of crouching down next to your car.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I told him. “You can wait in your car. Or you don’t have to wait at all.”

“Yes, I do.” He straightened up, and his voice came from above me. “And chatting with you sounds like more fun than standing out here on the side of the road. So can I sit with you?”

Every instinct I had screamed no. It was just so ingrained. As he said, women on their own had to be careful, especially at night.

But on the other hand, he was Carl’s friend. I’d seen that for myself in the way they’d interacted with each other. It was one of the few memories I had of Jackson with his clothes on.

I reached over to the passenger side and unlocked the door.

“Thank you,” he said as he slid inside a moment later. “Now can I see your sketch of me?”

“What?” My voice was practically a shriek.

He shrugged, and the headlights from a passing car illuminated the grin on his face. “I figured I should ask while I was on a roll.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or groan. “Why do you want to see it so badly? You already know what you look like naked.”

“So do you.” His tone was teasing, and it made him feel less like a stranger. Or maybe it was the fact that we were sitting so close together in the dark. That wasn’t the kind of thing I usually did with someone I didn’t know.

“What do you do when you aren’t at art class, Penny?”

Uh-oh. That was an even touchier topic than his nude modeling. “I’m kind of between jobs at the moment.”

He nodded, seeming to understand. “What do you want to do?”

I sighed. “Not sure.” All I knew was that I needed to find something fast.

“Okay, then what did you do before?” Clearly, he was carrying all the weight in this conversation, so I tried to answer thoroughly.

“I took videos for my friend. She’s a social media influencer. Or, she was.”

Jackson put his ankle up on his knee, angling his body toward me. “Was?”

“Yeah.” I told him about what I’d done when I worked for Lila, how I’d filmed her, edited the videos, and posted them online. “But now, well, now she met someone, and she’s shifted her business model a bit.” I didn’t tell him that her new career involved the three men she was in love with. That wasn’t general knowledge, but I wished it could be. She and her guys were so good for each other.

“Did you ever want to be the one in front of the camera?” Jackson asked.

“Heck, no,” I said instantly, and he chuckled.

“Heck?”

I blushed. Cussing wasn’t something that came naturally to me. Maybe it was because I was frequently around my cousins’ kids. When I’d worked for Lila, I’d occasionally uttered things like “damn straight” for her benefit, but that kind of thing didn’t roll easily off my tongue. Which was too bad, because Jackson probably thought I had the vocabulary of a kindergartener. Time to change the subject. “What do you do?”

“I design things.” He said that as if that explained everything. “Though I’ve heard that nude modeling is where the big bucks are.”

“You got paid for that?” The words were out before I realized he’d probably been joking.

“Paid in beer. Carl and I went to a bar last weekend to catch up. He kept buying rounds—that’s how he got me to agree to come to your class in the first place.”

My mind was still on payment. Maybe if the class—or the female members of it—took up a collection, we could get him to come back. “What was it like?”

“What was what like?”

I shifted in my seat. “Laying there all exposed like that.”

“Exposed?”

Even though I couldn’t see his face too clearly, I could imagine him raising one of his expressive eyebrows.

“I didn’t think of it as being exposed. I was just naked. It’s our natural state, you know. It’s how we’re born. In some cases, it’s how we’ll die.”

I frowned. “Die?”

“My younger brother says he wants to be taken out by a heart attack when he’s ninety-nine, preferably right after sleeping with a woman sixty years his junior.” He chuckled. “I suppose that’s something to aspire to.”

“I hope he reaches his goal.” My voice rose at the end of my somewhat questionable statement.

“Anyway, to answer your question, I wasn’t self-conscious. I just did my best to hold still. Halfway through, I got this terrible itch on my calf, but I soldiered through.”

“On behalf of the class, I appreciate your bravery.” There, that was the kind of thing Lila would say. Unlike me, she wasn’t a shy dormouse most of the time.