Singe Read online

  “I gotta get back to work,” she tells them all a while later, kissing her parents goodbye and setting the leftover cheesecake on Gertie’s front seat. Paulina and Dante run around to the front porch to wave.

  Addie isn’t going back to work though—she and Jenn have a standing post-Thursday dinner date, a tradition that’s been in place ever since Jenn first got booted out of the family. They were too young for bars then, so Addie used to scarf down her food and meet Jenn around the corner at the park. She told her parents she had an SAT study group. Addie would throw rocks and try to think of neutral topics, how homeroom was a waste of time and how gross it was that Mrs. Marchand measured their uniform skirts every day. Jenn would swing on the swings and cry.

  (She made it sound like it wasn’t such a big deal, when she told Eli about Jenn being kicked out. It was, though. It was a big, terrible deal.)

  But that was years and years ago, and now when Addie arrives at the bar—the divey club below her new apartment, specifically, because Jenn’s been begging to see it since she moved—Jenn is smiling and animated, waiting with a seat saved, even though the whole place is empty. “This is great,” she tells Addie, nodding at the filthy stage decked out in chili lights. “I dare you to dance on it.” Then, “Nice T-shirt, kid. I don’t know why you insist on doing that every week.”

  Addie slides into her seat. “Because it makes Gram look like she swallowed a lemon, and that makes my life worth living. Plus, duh, it’s a bitchin’ shirt.”

  Jenn snorts, the tiny stud in her nose catching the light; it matches the shiny diamond ring on her finger courtesy of her blonde fiancée, Liz, who’s a lawyer at a small firm in Springfield. They met in front of the bulk bins at Whole Foods. “Bitchin’, huh?”

  “Yup,” Addie says confidently. It is too. Jenn has a full line of T-shirts that sell online and in boutiques all over the Berkshires, these simple/complex drawings of buildings and landscapes and human organs and robots. Addie’s favorite one has a map of all the rivers in the US. “Listen, I can only have one drink though, technically I’m on the clock right now.”

  “Okay, rebel,” Jenn teases. She’s two years older, just enough that Addie thought she was the coolest person alive when they were kids. For a long time she was terrified Jenn would move to New York City or someplace, anywhere more interesting than here. Even now, in her ripped jeans and tank top, she looks way too sophisticated for a dump like Lookout—which is funny, since Jenn loves a dive bar more than anybody else Addie’s ever met.

  “Anyway, I am a rebel,” Addie protests once they’ve ordered from the tattooed waitress. The bowl of pretzels on the table is questionable-looking to put it mildly, but she fishes out a handful anyway. “I had sex with a random dude last night, even.”

  Jenn starts to laugh, then takes a look at Addie’s face and stops. “Wait, for real? Who? Where the hell did you meet him?”

  Addie chews hard on her stale pretzel. She feels buzzed, even though she hasn’t had a single drink—to this day, her mom still forgets to offer her wine with dinner. “Well, okay,” she admits. “Not entirely random. A guy I work with, I don’t know him that well.”

  “Hang on, a dude from the firehouse?” Jenn looks impressed. “Whoa. You move out and all of a sudden you’re hooking up with coworkers?” She reaches over and snags one of Addie’s pretzels, crunching it neatly between her front teeth. “You’ll be skipping church next.”

  “Coworker,” Addie says, ignoring the dig about church. Jenn broke up with the Holy Trinity right around the time the Manzella family broke up with her, but Addie’s faith is proving to be made of stickier stuff. “Singular. And I’m not ‘hooking up’ with him, cripes. It was a one-time thing.”

  Jenn smirks. “Was it any good?”

  Addie thinks of Eli’s working fingers and his thumb in exactly the right place, everything moving together until finally—“Yeah,” she says, taking a huge gulp of her beer as soon as it arrives. “It was good.”

  Jenn’s not fooled. “Good good?” she asks, waggling her perfectly groomed eyebrows. She’s got a piercing there too, a tiny silver hoop. “Or good like Big Y Anthony, wearer of pleated khakis and—”

  “I never said Big Y Anthony was good!” Addie makes a face. “Jesus, yes, good good, actually good, but it’s never going to happen again so there’s no reason to talk about it, I just wanted to use it to illustrate the point that I’m, you know, not entirely square.”

  Jenn laughs. “No,” she allows, eyeing Addie speculatively across the sticky tabletop. “Not entirely.”

  They catch up as fast as they can after that, racing the clock as Jenn fills Addie in on two new shops that are going to take on her T-shirts, plus her plan to alter a vintage wedding dress she found for fifty bucks on the Internet. She’s getting married at the end of the summer at Liz’s parents’ farmhouse, Jenn is. Addie’s going to be her maid of honor, not to mention probably the only one out of their whole family who’s going to turn up.

  “How’re my sisters?” Jenn asks, picking at the edges of a mushy cocktail napkin.

  “Oh, you know,” Addie says, then immediately feels like a jerk because Jenn doesn’t really. She hardly ever gets to see the twins, thanks to Marianne and their grandma, mostly just gets quick updates via Facebook. It sucks, basically. “They’re sixteen-year-old jerks, they’re fine. They’re good.” Kristine has a boy she likes, this kid Armen that Grandma hates because he isn’t Italian. Danielle’s into singing all of a sudden. Addie doesn’t like to tell Jenn that the twins hardly ask after her.

  “Okay, get back to work,” Jenn orders once their beers are drained, picking up the check and squeezing Addie quick and tight to say goodbye. “Go save lives, et cetera. Tell your sexy fireman hello for me.”

  Addie pffts at her across the still-empty bar, bumping open the door to the parking lot and wincing at the blast of hot, damp air. Quarter to nine and near full-dark out, and it’s still rainforest-steamy. “One-time thing!” she calls again, just before the door swings shut behind her. She smiles and unlocks her car.

  Chapter Five

  Eli is hanging out in the rec room when Addie turns up after dinner, drinking a Big Gulp of Dr. Pepper and playing solitaire on his phone. He looks up with interest as she clomps in, her thick braid drooping frizzily over one shoulder.

  “There,” she announces to the room, plunking a Tupperware down on the edge of the foosball table. “Leftover cheesecake.” She brought cutlery from the kitchen too, the little paper plates they store above the top cupboard for fundraising events. Sharpie and Parker abandon the TV immediately.

  “Oh, man, thank your mom for me, eh, Addie?” Parker says, mouth full of cake. Addie rolls her eyes, laughing, and Eli feels his muscles tense up oddly at the sound—a Pavlovian thing, maybe. She laughed at him a lot last night.

  “At least use the plates,” she tells Sharpie, hands on her hips. So far, she hasn’t glanced in Eli’s direction once.

  Addie’s mom’s cheesecake is famous enough that the whole firehouse descends on it in minutes, jostling for the biggest piece. They’re staffed at a minimum for the weekend shift, just Sharpie, Parker, Eli and Addie, plus Gaarder and Eleven’s acting captain, a guy named Rick Brooks, so it isn’t the free-for-all it could have been. At max the firehouse boasts fifteen firefighters, enough to man their two-pumper engines and a ladder truck. It’s the second biggest company in Berkshire County.

  “Want me to save you a piece?” Brooks asks Eli now, holding up the knife. He took over cutting from Sharpie, who was dishing out hugely unequal slices. He’s a good captain, in Eli’s opinion. He runs a tight firehouse. “There’s more than enough this week.”

  Eli shakes his head, pushing himself to his feet. “No thanks, Cap.” Addie, he can’t help but notice, disappeared right after she served the dessert.

  He isn’t quite looking, but he finds her down by the women’s lockers anyway, fishing a change of clothes out of her top shelf. She has pictures of her family here too,
stuck to the door with magnets. Lockers always remind Eli of gym class, girls on one side, boys on the other, the dank foot-smell and all that time he spent wondering about the mystery of periods. Addie’s lock is a purple smiley face, the non-Dudley kind that wasn’t allowed at Eli’s high school. His brother Will taught him how to crack those when he was six.

  “Gonna catch some sleep?” he asks, leaning against the cinder block wall.

  Addie whips around so fast she nearly topples. “What the—oh my God, did you follow me here?” She looks pissed off and pretty, the lipstick she always puts on when she goes to her family dinners. “I thought we said we were keeping this out of the house.”

  Eli smiles. “Just making conversation.”

  Addie rolls her eyes, hard. “Uh-huh.” She’s holding a pair of yoga pants in one hand, dark gray and the kind that clings, Eli’s pretty sure. He’s looking forward to seeing them on her body. “In the women’s locker room?”

  “Shoot,” Eli says, looking around at the tiny space she and Jill Buono use to get changed in, separated from the rest of the lockers by a makeshift hallway. It literally used to be a closet, Brooks told him once, back when Eleven was made up entirely of dudes. “Is that what you guys call this?”

  “Funny,” Addie replies, in a voice meant to communicate that it really, really isn’t. After that she smirks though and gives herself away. “Okay, fine. In the women’s locker alcove. Either way.”

  “Either way,” Eli echoes, then completely doesn’t follow it up or even bother moving. Shit where you eat, reminds a quiet voice inside his head. He really thought he’d gotten it out of his system last night, this thing with her, that he’d be good and done and guiltily annoyed by the fact of her continued presence, just like it’s been with every other girl since Chelsea. Then he woke up and came to the firehouse and watched Addie Manzella eat cold spaghetti all up in his personal work environment, and.

  It’s, uh…not out of his system.

  It’s not out of hers either, Eli’s pretty sure. She’s watching him like she’s real skeptical of whatever the hell his next move is gonna be, yeah, but. She isn’t moving, herself.

  “Look, are you gonna let me get changed?” she asks finally, holding up the yoga pants. She kicked off her shoes already, Eli notices. Another second and he might have caught her in her skivvies.

  Eli holds out his arms like, go ahead, just for the pleasure of watching her eyes go wide. Then he turns around and heads for the outer hallway. Addie Manzella feels like the kind of girl you have to coax.

  “I’ll guard the door,” he announces, facing away from her like they’re kids at the swimming hole. That’s the joke of the women’s locker alcove, of course, no working door—the Captain is perpetually worried about a harassment suit. “Be right out here.” After a second he hears an exasperated sigh and shuffling from behind him, the unmistakable sound of a zipper being yanked down. He hopes she leaves her underwear off with the yoga pants. Chelsea used to do that, so there would be no line. “How was dinner?” he asks after a minute, clearing his throat. “How’s your old man?”

  Addie huffs. “Christ, are you seriously putting the moves on me again? Is this what you do?” Then, when Eli doesn’t answer, “Dinner was fine. We had stuffed shells and everyone talked about throwing a baby shower for my brother’s wife.”

  Eli shifts his weight. “Oh yeah? When’s she due?” More sounds behind him, the whoosh of cotton that may or may not be her shirt coming off. In Eli’s mind she’s got that same strapless bra on, even though in reality he knows girls only wear those when they have to.

  “I dunno, actually,” Addie says. She sounds closer. Eli turns around without thinking and there she is, fully redressed. “I probably should though, huh?”

  “Probably,” Eli agrees. She’s in a faded sleep-shirt he’s seen on her before, all these nights at the firehouse, and the yoga pants are definitely the kind that clings. The tuck of them between her legs is enough to drive Eli insane.

  “Well.” Addie shuts her locker with a clang and reaches back to redo her braid fast and brutal. It’s a sport bra, he can tell when she lifts her arms up, even with his eyes locked on hers. In the second before she scoops all that hair into the elastic it springs dark and wild around her face. “I’m not a very good sister.”

  “I kind of doubt that,” Eli counters. He’s not sure which one of them is closing the distance but she’s near enough to smell now, the same faint flowers from yesterday over the mildew-bleach stink of the locker rooms. Even after a shower, her smell stuck to his skin all night long.

  “Uh-huh.” Addie raises her eyebrows. “You don’t know me very well, friend.”

  Eli raises his back. “Know you enough.”

  “Why, ’cause we—?” Addie laughs, that now-familiar cackle, and it echoes off the metal lockers. “Eli,” she says, when he hooks one finger in the hem of her T-shirt. Fuck, he doesn’t hate hearing her say his name like that. “Come on.”

  “Want me to stop for real?” he asks. He doesn’t think so, he’s pretty sure this is just her playing hard-to-get, that she’s having fun too, but. “Tell me to stop right now, I’ll stop, we’ll never talk about this ever again.”

  “I’m pretty sure you said that last night,” Addie points out, shifting her weight just the slightest bit. If she takes another step, her back’ll be up against the lockers. “Somebody’s going to hear.”

  Somebody will—yeah. Eli grins, nudging her back that last step himself. “And what are they gonna hear, princess?” He lets his hooked finger travel, running across the underside of her hem. When his knuckle brushes her stomach, Addie’s whole rib cage jumps.

  “Shut up,” she tells him, but her shoulders have settled back against the cold metal, chin tilting up. Eli smirks, leaning in even farther. He can’t resist dodging at the last second though, pressing his cheek against her temple instead. Addie growls. “Eli.”

  “Hmm?” He traces a finger up around her belly button, thumbs the dip in a pretty blatant tease. “What do you need?”

  Addie shoves at his hand—though it’s not so much shoving away, Eli notices, as it is shoving down. “Jerk,” she huffs. Those pretty boyish eyebrows are drawn together, dark and furious. She has freckles on her nose that weren’t there yesterday, faint, irregular splotches. They must have been brought out by the sun. “You’re such a jerk.”

  “I am,” Eli agrees. His hand is hovering near the seam of her leggings now. He lets it touch down lightly, just the tips of his fingers.

  Right away, Addie goes completely still. “Umm.” Her eyes are wide, like she didn’t expect him to actually follow through. He can see the pulse ticking in her neck. “Eli,” she warns one more time.

  “You keep saying that,” he observes mildly, turning his wrist and tracing the shape of her with one gentle finger. Addie gasps, widening her stance almost imperceptibly to give him room. Even through the fabric she is so, so warm. He’s barely even rubbing, not enough for actual friction, but when he brushes her clit she whimpers out loud.

  “Shh,” Eli murmurs, kissing her for real now—fuck, he wants to kiss her for ages, wants to take her home and lick his way into her mouth until he can tell what kind of toothpaste she uses. Wants to suck on her tongue until she squirms. He gets closer, palms one heavy breast with his free hand—a sport bra then, definitely, everything locked and loaded under the spandex. He imagines rucking her shirt up, pulling it down. “Somebody’s gonna hear, remember?”

  “Ugh, I hate you,” Addie complains, reaching up and winding her arms around his neck. Standing face to face like this, she’s shorter than he thought. She’s got physical presence. Addie Manzella is somebody you’d notice when she walked into a room full of people. Eli doesn’t know how it took him so long to do just that. “You’re the worst.”

  “Don’t say you hate me,” he chides quietly, working her harder. He thinks of last night, how she balked when he tried to get his mouth between her legs. “That’s not nice.”
>
  Addie bites the collar of his T-shirt, tongue pressing against the cotton. “Guess I’m not nice then.” She’s using his shoulders for leverage, going up on her tiptoes to get a better angle on his fingers. Eli gives her one firm stroke, top to bottom, and her mouth drops open helplessly. “Shit, Eli. We really can’t be doing this here.”

  Eli grins, kissing her again. “So?” he says. “Stop me.” Her nipples are tightening up, he can feel the change in texture through her sport bra. He tries pinching, but the spandex is holding her too firmly to get any purchase. “You hate it so much, stop me.” He’s getting hard himself, has been sitting at half-mast since basically the second he touched her. He sucks on her chin, chances sliding a few fingers under her waistband.

  “Oh my God.” Right away Addie stands up even taller, forcing his hand farther into her pants. There’s hardly any room to maneuver, all that clinging fabric. “Fast, okay? You got me all—so just do it fast.”

  “I got you all, huh?” Eli asks, worming his hand down to cup her fully. He opens her up as best he can with one finger and yeah, she’s not kidding—she’s slick as a river. Eli hisses through his teeth. “Gotta take care of that, then.” He’s pretty sure he’s walking away from this encounter with blue balls, what with her not here’s and her so just do it fast’s, Addie Manzella the pillow queen. He doesn’t give a single fuck.

  “Come on,” Addie whines, rubbing herself against his knuckles. “Hurry up.”