expected. A lot of actors are quite short, you know.”
I followed her into the house and back to the kitchen, where she found the big bottle of red we'd started the night before. We’d planned to make sangria, and bought the cheapest red in the store, but then we decided it was okay on its own, and nobody needs extra fruit juice calories in their drink.
We raised our glasses in a toast, standing by the fridge.
“You're perfect,” Shayla said. “Guys like him think you'll be so impressed he’s even talking to you, that you won't say shit if you have a mouth full of it. But you sure showed him.”
I swirled the wine and started drinking as Shayla unzipped the back of my dress and peeled the damp fabric away. I felt warmer already in just my underwear plus the wobble-taming waist shaper. I took a seat at the walnut pedestal table in the kitchen.
She’d heard a few details from the driver, and I filled her in on the rest, from our odd bookstore meeting to him accompanying me to the wedding.
Giggling, I said, “And tonight, I was going to sleep with him. Dalton Deangelo. With his penis right up in my vagina and everything.”
“And you would have rocked his world. You would have spoiled him for all other women.”
I finished the red wine and got my glass refilled.
“Who are we kidding? I would have turned out all the lights, then lay there with my bra still on, holding absolutely still to reduce jiggling, and faked an orgasm so it could be over.”
Shayla giggled into her glass. “And you would have been so good, so convincing.” She rolled her eyes up, fluttering her eyelashes. “Oh, Dalton, you're an animal! I don't know if I'll be able to walk tomorrow!”
“Gross!”
We laughed for a bit, and when the giggles died down, she said, “Too bad you didn't saddle that one up. Would have made for great stories. He’s bumpy all up and down his front. They don't make 'em like that around here in Beaverdale.”
“No, they do not.” The wine was warming me up, and I thought about getting a robe or something to throw on over my underwear and Spanx, but my room was up the stairs, which was too far. “You know, I forgot to ask him why he was even in town.”
Why had Dalton Deangelo been in little Beaverdale, Washington, population 14,041?
I guess I haven't told you much about Beaverdale, also known as The Beav or B-dale to locals. The town was incorporated in 1898, and the main street was named after the father of the town, Mr. Leonodis Veiner. In 1942, the street was accidentally renamed Leonardo Street when City Hall contracted out the new street signs to a sign maker up in Seattle. A copper-haired city clerk by the name of Donovan Monroe (my great-grandfather), rushed his paperwork that day so he could get to the pub and await the news of his first child's birth, surrounded by his friends. The pub was on the opposite side of town as the hospital, and the bartender kept the telephone line clear for the news, because that was how they did things in those days.
My grandfather, Arthur Monroe, came into the world at three in the morning on January 7, 1942, and the pub never closed that night. My great-grandfather did, however, disappear for a few hours that evening to find some trouble. The kind of trouble who hangs a red light in her window.
Nine months later, my grandfather's yet-to-be-named half-sister was born at the town’s only bawdy house.
On the very same day, the sign installers got their packages and did their installation, renaming the following streets:
Leonodis Veiner Street became Leonardo Street
Orchid Drive became O Drive
Euripides Avenue became Spider Avenue
and
Larch Street became Lurch Street
People in town were cross at my great-grandfather for celebrating the birth of his first child by siring an illegitimate child with one of the town's loose women, but they were generally happy about the renamed streets, save the good people who now lived on Lurch Street.
The little
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