"Rooftops and Invitations"
by Rain Hawkins
"Hey, will you come in here a sec?"
Her voice was muffled by the bathroom door. I muted the game and went in, totally unprepared for what I saw.
You know when a girl takes a bath in the movies, how everything except her shoulders and maybe a little leg is neatly concealed in a cloud of bubbles? Well, I don't know if they use a special kind of bubbles or what, but Rachel sure wasn't concealed. Wet, yes, with foam clinging to her abundant curves, but just about the exact opposite of concealed.
"Oh, gosh, um…" I tried to duck back out of the bathroom but, to my immense embarrassment, she beckoned me closer with one twitch of a sudsy hand. Unable to do anything but obey, I sat on the toilet beside the tub.
"It's okay," she said soothingly, sliding down until her hair floated like seaweed and her knees and breasts broke through the steaming water like soft brown islands. "Like what you see?"
She smiled. My face was burning. "What are you doing?"
She shrugged, her wet shoulders sloshing bubbles away to reveal more of her neck and her smooth, firm stomach. My own stomach was churning.
"Nothing," she said. "Anything you want. Get in."
"What?"
"Come on," she urged, cooing like a siren. Any minute now, I would be dashed to pieces on jagged rocks. I just knew it. "It'll make us both feel better."
It would have been so easy. I was aching to hold her, to be held, to lose myself in her red seaweed hair and forget, just for a little while, the emptiness in my heart.
But what would have been the point? Rachel wasn't the one who broke my heart, so she couldn't put it back together. She didn't even know where all the pieces were.
"No," I said, amazed at my resolve. "I want to. Up until a few months ago I would have jumped at the chance. But ever since Jimmy—"
"That's it, isn't it?" she demanded, splashing water every which way as she sat up in the tub, eyes flashing fire, breasts gleaming like a pair of staring eyes. (Fake or not, they were spectacular.) "That's why you won't give me a chance. You blame me for what happened with Jimmy."
I shook my head. "I don't." I honestly didn't. "I really like you, Rachel, and I'm sure we'd be good together—amazing, actually—but we'd just be pretending. A quick fix."
"What's wrong with pretending?" She was so beautiful, and I could have kissed her right then and the whole world would have looked brighter. But would that one moment of relief have been worth the hangover in the morning? I don't know. Maybe it would have.
I took a towel from the rack and handed it to her as I got up. In about half an hour, I would decide to stop trying to be bold and dangerous and go back to the old dependable Mouth, and she would leave me stranded at this cheap motel in Honey Grove, Texas. But neither of us knew that yet.
"You don't love me," I said, "and you're not Shelly, and we both deserve better than that."
I left the bathroom and shut the door behind me.
A few minutes later she emerged, wrapped in the towel and still glistening. She sat on the bed and didn't look at me when she said, "I'm not Shelly, and I don't love you. You're too good to let me. But the Mouth McFadden I saw this week—the wild, passionate guy you've been hiding—I could love him."
The funny thing was, even as I left (to clear my head, I told her), I knew that it was true. I just didn't know if I could be that guy, the one she could love. And I sure as hell didn't know what to do with the fact that, just for a while, I really, really wanted to.