“Are you ready for our next adventure?”
I stared at the store in awe. It was the same damn one we used to shop at when we were young. As high school went on, I kind of forgot about the place, but here it was still ticking. From the smudged front window it looked dimly lit, like it wasn’t even open, but then again it had always looked that way.
I took off my sunglasses and slipped them in my purse. “Same deal as before?”
“Yup. I buy you an outfit and you buy me an outfit. And we have to wear it tonight. No matter what.”
“Tonight, huh? It would help if I knew what we were doing,” I teased. Camden was doling out our day one piece at a time. For all I knew, we could be going to one of the Fabulous Follies shows in Palm Springs, or harassing the camels at The Living Desert in Palm Desert.
“I can give you a hint…it involves dinner. But I haven’t quite figured out where yet. I was thinking maybe the restaurant at the top of the gondola.”
I grimaced. “The gondola that makes me want to vomit? Good choice.”
“Or,” he said, louder now, “we can do dinner at my place.”
My ears perked up. I smiled mischievously, brushing my hair back behind my ear. Dinner at his place meant I could properly scope out the joint. It also meant sex. I hoped it would at least mean one of those things.
His face went smoothly blank for a split-second and his jaw twitched. Then he smiled and was back to his vibrant self. “Dinner at my place it is then. Now let’s make sure we’re dressed well for the occasion.” He hopped out of the jeep and made his way toward the entrance. I sat there for a few moments, feeling strangely uneasy, then brushed it away and joined him.
The door was still one of those you couldn’t tell if you had to push or pull, and after a failed attempt, Camden was holding the door open for me. The shop smelled exactly as I remembered—like mothballs, potpourri, and brass. The woman behind the counter was younger than the one back in the day, but she was still in her sixties and wore thick glasses with an ugly beaded neck strap. She snapped her head up from her paperback novel as we came in and gave us a tepid smile. I knew that smile. It was the “oh crap, these kids are going to rob me, aren’t they?” kind of smile. She’d be watching our every move.
The shop was almost empty except for an old, hunched over lady in the housewares section, peering at chipped teacups. Camden and I made a beeline for the clothes, he to the women’s section and me to the men’s, and we started noisily flipping through the racks.
I was pretty giddy as I flung the hangers down, looking for the perfect outfit for him. In the past we were all about humiliating each other, which was only fair and fun since we’d both look like idiots. Now I wasn’t sure what the plan was. But making him look like a goof during dinner seemed like a great idea to me.
I came across an extremely loud pink and purple Hawaiian shirt that wouldn’t even look hip on him. It was tacky faux silk and two sizes too large. I’d make him wear it halfway unbuttoned, then I could stare at his chest (honestly, when had I become such a horndog?). After that winning find, I went to the pants section. Something tight would do the trick, even though he hadn’t shown any aversion to tight pants, both then and now.
Then I spotted it. A kilt. Green and black tartan. Oh yes, this would look wonderful on my Scottish Hawaiian dude. I rounded out the outfit with a black fedora. Now he was also a private eye.
“Okay,” I called to him over the racks. “I have your stuff.”
“Already?” he asked, still searching through his end. “Should I be worried?”
“You should be very worried. Unless you’ve always wanted to be a Scottish detective from Hawaii.”
“Like Magnum P.I.?”
“Not even close.”
I walked down the aisle and over to him. He was holding a glow-mesh halter top in one hand. Figures. I peered at his other hand. It was a leather miniskirt.
I breathed out sharply through my nose and shot him an apologetic smile. “Yeah, I’m not wearing the skirt so you can just put it back.”
He shook his head and kept going through some cardigans. “Rules are rules, Ellie. You have to wear whatever I choose for you.”
I crossed my arms, the pile of clothes bunching up. “I am not wearing a skirt.”
He kept on as if he didn’t hear me and the click click click of hangers being slid past were driving me insane. I bundled my clothes under one arm and put my hand on his to take the skirt away. He wouldn’t budge.
“Seriously, you know I’m not wearing that.”
He sighed and turned to face me, his dark brows coming together to create a deep groove between his eyes. “Why not?” He sounded like his patience was being tested, which in turn made my patience feel tested.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You know why. I have scars, Camden. Still have them.”
“So?”
I fought the urge to raise my voice. “So? So I don’t feel like wearing something that’s going to humiliate me.”
“We used to humiliate each other all the time. You’re trying to make me look like a cross-dressing Tom Selleck.”
“That’s different. And we had our own rules back then. You knew how I was, so you’d only dress me in pants or long skirts.”
His lower lip moved back and forth as he studied me. “I thought you’d have gotten over it by now.”
My eyes nearly bulged out of my head. “That’s not exactly something you can get over, Camden.” The absolute nerve of him. “I’m not like you. I can’t just get over every shitty thing that gets thrown my way.”
He focused on me intently. “I don’t get over everything.” His voice had dropped a register or two and flowed out of him like a snake.
I broke away from his gaze and took my hand off the hanger. “Well, so then you know. Look maybe this whole thing was a bad idea. I mean, we’re twenty-six years old and playing dress up…”
I took in a deep breath and turned to face the changing rooms. My face looked back at me from the mirror. I didn’t like that view either.
Suddenly I felt him behind me and his arm going around my waist. He turned me around and pulled me to him, then embraced me in a hug. All our clothes and hangers dropped to the floor, and over his shoulder I saw the cashier getting off her stool to look over at the clatter.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m being an insensitive jerk.”
He squeezed me tight enough to make breathing hard. I patted him lightly on the back, not wanting to see this side of him, not over something like this.
“It’s fine,” I told him, trying to sound breezy and not at all caught off guard. “I just get a little touchy over it. It’s…it’s something I’m working on.”
He held me in a pause of silence. I heard the buzz of the dim overhead lights and the rustle of the newspaper as the cashier resumed reading.
“You’re still such a brave girl, Ellie,” he said softly, sadly. “It’s too bad.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant it was too bad I was brave or the situation was too bad. While I was mulling that over, he let me go and scooped up our clothes. To my relief, he stuck the skirt back on the rack and focused behind him where the women’s pants were. In seconds he had plucked out a pair of skin-tight, orange leopard-print leggings. Insanely tacky. It was perfect.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After the antics at the thrift shop were over and we walked away with a hideous mix of materials, our next stop was to pop into the grocery store and stock up for our meal. Thankfully, we were only wearing our crazy outfits for dinner and didn’t have to go into the store looking like total lunatics.
Camden decided on filet mignon which he wanted to grill on his new barbecue, with a side of asparagus. You couldn’t get a sexier meal than that, unless you threw in some oysters. To Camden’s brazen credit, he did check at the seafood department but they didn’t have any. I decided to supply the wine and picked up two bottles of deep, bold reds.
“Do we look like alcoholics if we have two bottles?” I asked him, holding them both up, one in each hand.
His eyes sparkled. “Hold on, stay like that.”
“Like with wine in the air?”
He put down the grocery basket and came toward me while I stood frozen. I was like a statue of the world’s most enthusiastic wino.
He pressed himself against me, leaving barely any room between us, and with those searing baby blues trailing from my eyes down to my lips, he cupped my face with one hand. I closed my eyes, gripping the necks of the bottles extra hard, and felt his lips press against mine. They were soft, warm, and sweet. It felt like I didn’t have a hard bone in my body, just this lightness and sunshine.
Then I felt the wet brush of his tongue along the inner rim of my lip and I almost dropped the bottles.
He pulled back before I could readjust my grip and attack him more voraciously. That was probably a good thing considering we were standing in the middle of Safeway in Conservative Old Person Central.
“What was that for?” I asked breathlessly, finally lowering the bottles. My arms had been shaking but from the strain or the kiss, I didn’t know.
He picked up the basket and gave me a nonchalant look. “You looked cute. What can I say?”
“I thought maybe I looked easy, with the wine and all,” I joked, hoping my cheeks would stop flaming.
“Oh. Well, that too.”
A half an hour later, while my lips still tingled from our first kiss (well, second kiss, if you wanted to get really technical), we were back at Sins & Needles and taking the groceries up to where he lived on the top floor. The front of the house with the porch was the entrance for the shop, while the entrance to the upstairs was from the side of his house, also where he had a small garage. I noted that it was used as a woodworking shop instead of for keeping the Jeep.
“I didn’t know you were such a handyman,” I told him as he unlocked his front door. It was just a simple deadbolt, nothing too fancy. I hadn’t heard or seen any motion detectors or cameras either, though I knew from experience that it didn’t mean there weren’t any. There was a large hedge of desert rose between the side of the house and the main street, which blocked this door from prying eyes. That was a plus.
He glanced behind me as he opened the door and let me in. “Ah, I’m not so handy, believe me. I dabbled in the sign making business for a bit and sometimes do it for fun.”
The shop had a beautiful sign out front. “Did you do the Sins & Needles sign?”
“Took me a hell of a long time. Luckily when you screw up doing woodwork, the wood doesn’t cry out in pain and sue you.” He shut the door behind us. “Well, this is the part of my life most people don’t get to see.”
To the left of us was a door that I assumed led into the shop. To the right was another door that looked like it went into the garage. Then of course there were the stairs we were climbing. That left three ways to get out of the house if I had to. Not too shabby.
“How do we get to the backyard?” I asked him as we went up.