Ritchie, it turned out, lived in the apartment over Naughtie’s with Naught. Preston walked with her and Turner for a couple of blocks, then caught a cab to return to wherever he lived.
Overall, it had been a good night. After playing darts with Preston for a while, they switched out partners, so Ritchie played with her and Preston went to shoot pool with Turner. Naught was good at keeping an eye on everything and keeping them in drinks, without any requirement for them to ask.
Still, the earlier conversation was on her mind.
“Can I ask you about something personal?” Poppy asked, curling her arm around Turner’s, holding herself near to him as they walked.
“Here we go, it’s always the same. No,” he said on a sigh. “I don’t wear women’s underwear.” Confused as hell, Poppy frowned up at him, but he just kept on watching where they were going. “I don’t shave puppies or throw rocks at kittens. I don’t have tattoos of naked women anywhere on my body.” As a smile contorted her lips, she still didn’t know what was going on. “I never visited a brothel in Vegas and I did not break into the botanic gardens to have a threesome…”
“Uh… that’s good to know, I guess.”
“It was the golf course next door.”
She laughed. “What? You had a threesome on a golf course?”
“I was nineteen and stupid… What else did the guys feed you? Did they try the porn star one? She wasn’t a porn star, she was an exotic dancer… the video came out after.”
“Turner!” Poppy shrieked, hurrying around in front of him to stall their progress. “You have a sex tape out there?”
“It wasn’t with me,” he said. “I dated her when she was a dancer… It was like two years later she was in some tape with a lowlife who called himself a rock star. That’s about as much as I know. Yes, she came around to lay low at mine for a while after, but we weren’t having sex… No matter what Ritch tells you.”
Enlivened, Poppy was shocked and yet glittered with the excitement of his experience. What a life. Living like that, being free, it was the ultimate dream.
“What else don’t I know about you?”
“A lot,” he said, taking her hand to lead her back onto their path home.
For a minute or so, she just thought about all the things he might have done that she didn’t have any inclination about. It excited her, but at the same time, made her yearn for all the secrets she wouldn’t have time to learn.
“I thought you had rules,” she teased. “You can break into places for sex and sleep with strippers, but I’m out of bounds… I think I need a written copy of these rules.”
“I met Chantal in a bar. It’s not like I picked her up at the club when she was working. And I don’t care about what someone does for a living, it’s about chemistry.”
“No, it isn’t,” she said, dropping her head to his arm. “Because we have that in spades.”
“We can’t be together because of where you live, our deal. If we got together and things got complicated… if you get mad at me for something—”
“Why would I get mad at you?”
“Couples argue, babe. You’ve gotta know that.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I’ve never lived with a guy… other than my father, but that doesn’t really count in a house with like fifteen bedrooms, does it?”
“Your house has fifteen bedrooms?”
“It’s my grandmother’s house,” she said, noticing that he’d taken a turn that wouldn’t lead them to home. He wanted to walk with her. “And there are staff quarters, I don’t know how many rooms there are down there.”
It was flattering that he wanted to extend their time together; he was flattering. The bubble of delight that rippled through her was just a hint of what he was capable of doing to her.
“But you live there? You and your folks?”
“I did. Me, my parents, and my sisters. My father was an only child, my grandmother miscarried a couple of times after him and then my grandfather died. He was only thirty-five… She was crazy for him and never remarried. I’ve never seen her with a man romantically.”
“You’re a romantic.”
“You didn’t know that by now?” she asked, pulling herself closer as he looped their joined hands up over her head to rest his arm across her shoulders. “They met when they were teenagers… ran away together when her father objected… All very