Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [72]
“Let me guess: just laughing out of the joy of this moment?” I ask.
“Sort of,” he laughs. “That, and the memory of you sleep-singing the last time you were in my car.”
Now I start cracking up. “Christ, why didn’t you drive me to the nearest insane asylum?” I ask, cringing at the memory.
“Don’t think I didn’t want to,” he says, smiling. “But then I knew I’d never have a chance with you.” Still chuckling, he pulls up in front of a garage in Venice. “Now prepare yourself for a creature so cute, she even gives you a run for your money.” Adam stops the car, jumps out, and rushes to open the door for me. “My lady,” he says, giving me a mock bow.
“Sir,” I say, mock bowing back, opting not to confess what a horrific surrogate Mom I was to Tiger. “Please bring me to my arch nemesis, the other woman vying for your love.” As soon as the word “love” is out of my mouth, I want to hurl. The primary way to terrify a man—probably right behind sleep-singing in his car—is to tell him you love him. I hadn’t, of course, but the word is potent enough on its own.
But Adam doesn’t seem remotely ruffled. “Don’t you worry, now,” he says, leading me down a path to his apartment. “There’s enough love in my heart for both of you.” As he opens the door and an adorable, tiny golden retriever comes bounding over to him and immediately starts humping his leg, I tell myself not to make too much over the fact that he said the L-word back. And I don’t really have time, seeing as the image of this tiny dog thrusting back and forth on his shin like her very life depends on it is so hilarious that I immediately lose it.
“I thought you said she was a girl!” I gasp, between laughs.
“She is!” he shrieks, cracking up himself. “Doris, stop!” he yells at the dog, who seems to take that as a cue to hump Adam’s leg all the more furiously. Adam looks at me. “Is that totally weird—a female dog being this sex-crazed? Is Doris some kind of a mutant, gender-bent pervert—possibly a preop transsexual?”
“Doris?” I ask, actually trying to get myself to stop laughing. “What kind of a dog name is that?”
“It’s not,” he says, gesturing for me to pull Doris the dog off him, which I do. Falling back onto the floor, Adam sighs. “It’s my favorite grandmother’s name,” he says. I look at him, not sure if he’s kidding, and let Doris go. Instead of rushing back over to Adam, she digs under his couch, where she seems to have stashed a roll of toilet paper. “Oh, God,” he says, watching Doris grab the toilet paper in her mouth and start tearing it apart. “She loves to TP the place,” he says, smiling, gesturing for me to come sit next to him. “She’s worse than a drunk teenager on Halloween.” I sit on the ground, next to where he’s lying down, and he pulls himself up and faces me. I see Doris kick the toilet paper across the room and lunge at it, then skid with it in the other direction.
“We should probably take that away from her,” I say. “I predict nothing good can come from this.”
Adam moves closer to me. I can suddenly hear my heart beating in my chest as he moves less than a foot away, staring at me and not breaking eye contact. “Screw the dog,” he says. “I’m sorry but she’s just going to have to share me with you.” He leans in and, before I can wonder if he’s going to kiss me and if it’s going to feel as amazing as it did the last time, our lips are touching and pressing together and opening and meshing as perfectly as two things not belonging to the same person could.
After being with Adam—two hours of the best kissing of my life, followed by him telling me he had to pack because he was taking the red-eye that night, both of us saying we couldn’t wait to talk and see each other soon—I feel so much better that I realize I’m perfectly capable of writing at home without succumbing to any urges to call Alex. Now that I’m filled up with joyful thoughts about Adam, the idea of coke is actually back to sounding completely disgusting again. So I go home, ignore all the thoughts I’m having about how I don’t know the first thing about