33:New Theory

The sharp knock on the bathroom door was followed by a loud, masculine, “Jon!”

Shower water muffled the voice enough that he couldn’t tell if it was Matt or Tony, but since both had seen him in the shower more times than he could count, it didn’t really matter. 

“What?” he called, twirling the handle that would halt the flow of cool water sluicing down his body. 

After spending much of the afternoon on the beach, he was overheated and on the verge of being sunburned, making this one of those rare instances where a hot shower wasn’t his best friend.  The chilly water not only chased away after-effects of the sun, it was exactly what he needed to revitalize him for this final round with the counselor tonight. 

After a long night and morning of exploiting her willing body, he needed a boost before he took up the task again.  She’d proven capable of going as long and hard as he wanted, and that enticed him to try a full exploration of her limitations tonight.  When he got dressed, it might be a good idea to have a Red Bull so that they didn’t reach his limitations before making it out the outer boundary of hers.

Sticking his arm out through a partially opened shower door, he patted around until finding the towel hook and pulled the plush cloth inside the stall to swab over his face.  As he did, whomever wanted him spouted way too many words to be talking through solid wood.  Jon couldn’t make out a damn thing being said.

“Open the door,” he called while scrubbing the water from his hair and kicking the shower door closed.  The towel had just settled around his waist when the doorknob twisted to admit his middle brother.  "I didn't hear a fucking thing you said.  Try again."

He did, but not without a sigh of disgust.  “You mentioned Luke and Charlie coming for dinner, but didn’t mention their kids.  I need a total headcount so Lilah and I can make a run to the store.”

“I assume they’ll be here.”  Turning to open the drawer with the Q-tips, he mentally counted his family as five, Matt’s as four, Tony’s as four, and the counselor’s as five.  “That makes eighteen, I guess.”

The low whistle of surprise had Jon looking over his shoulder with a confused frown, unsure as to what the big deal was.  Once the dinner headcount reached the teens, eighteen was practically the same as the thirteen they’d had all week.

“Jon, man.  What the hell happened to your back?”

Shit.

He wore a sleeveless shirt on the beach today, taking it off only at the last second to drop onto the beach towel and sun his chest.  When it was time to go, he had done the same thing in reverse so nobody had noticed the mauling he’d taken at the counselor’s fingernails.  All very simple and low-key.  No muss, no fuss.

It had never occurred to him to hide in his own bathroom.

“Jellyfish,” he lied shortly.  “You want something else?”

Spreading his feet and folding his arms, Tony offered up a smug grin.  “Jellyfish don’t have fingernails, you lying sack of shit.  Who is she?”

Quite frankly, even with the threats that had been dispensed, Jon would be surprised if Matt hadn’t already spilled the beans.  There was at least a seventy-five percent chance that Tony was busting his balls and knew exactly who “she” was and that Jon was with her last night, but Jon wasn’t admitting to anything unless the odds went higher. 

“You askin’ because you don’t know or you just wanna hear me say it?”

The grin became a wider splash of white in the middle of his brother’s goatee.  “I wanna hear you say it.”

“Fuckers.  Both of you,” he swore, turning to the mirror and finger-combing his hair while very deliberately not saying it.  “You’re under the same warning as Matt.  If Lilah finds out, you’re working my next tour as a strictly volunteer gig, and I’m not even fucking kidding.”

“She won’t hear it from me,” Tony promised with upraised hands.  “But don’t forget about that intuition thing of hers.   If she finds out you’re screwing the lawyer, blame Fate, not me.”

Lilah and her damn Fate.  She swore up and down that’s what brought Tony to her, or her to Tony or however the hell she happened to end up as the thorn in Jon’s side.  That whole concept was just another verse of the bullshit song that he’d been talking to the counselor about last night – people laying on their lazy asses and accepting their lot in life rather than carving their own destiny.

He hated that shit.

“I’ll take my chances.”  He swung around to find his brother still standing there, staring like a dumbass.  “What?”

“Don’t get pissy with me.”  The bland declaration reinforced his title as the least excitable Bongiovi.  “If I don’t get to tell my wife she’s right, you’re depriving me of the sexual manifestation of her appreciation.  That entitles me to more than a secondhand account of you and Charlie screaming at each other in the pool and wandering off to some mysterious location for the night.  What’s the story?”

The story was him getting laid tonight, although he hadn’t nailed down the particulars on where and when.  The prologue to the story was that he’d also gotten laid last night and the night before.  The horrifying cliffhanger at the end of the chapter was that he liked it more than any sane man should.

“You think I’m just gonna stand here and spill my guts to you?  Have we met?”  With a shake of his head, he stipulated, “Ask a specific question and you might get a specific answer.  That’s the best you can hope for.”

“Okay…”  One hand circled in the air.  “Where were you last night, since you obviously didn’t go to a business dinner in the city?”

That answered that question.  Matt had kept his mouth shut about last night, which pleased Jon considerably.

Sliding a condemning look in his brother’s direction for calling out his fib to the family, he balefully bit out, “Borrowed a boat out of Montauk and spent the night in the Vineyard Sound.”

The eyebrow Tony kicked up had more natural arch to it than Jon’s, giving him a villainous appearance.  That suited him right now, because Jon considered him evil. 

“Lotta trouble for a screw.”

Why did everybody keep calling it a lot of trouble?  He borrowed a boat.  It only cost him fuel and crew wages, so he’d considered it a cheap solution to his privacy problem. 

“It was easier than a ‘copter to the city, and we aren’t calling it a ‘screw’.  The terminology going around is ‘vacation fling’ and, since she goes home tomorrow, we’re on the verge of calling it ‘done’.”

“On the verge?  Not actually done?” 

“Not yet.”  One more exhausting battle to the orgasm awaited before he would ring the final bell.

“So that means we should stay away from the pool tonight?”

Although probably intended as nothing more than blatant sarcasm, it actually wasn’t a bad idea.  The pool itself was out of the question, but the Airstream was a dry and viable option.  If his brothers knew to stay the hell away, they would also steer the rest of the clan away, leaving this circle of knowledge very small and very intimate. 

He could count on them to do that.  Whatever else he might say, his brothers always had his back.

“Yes.  All of you stay far away.”

“Jesus.”  Tony’s groan teemed with disgust.  “I was kidding, man.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not.  Nobody goes out to the pool or trailer.”

His dark head shook with resignation as he sighed, “I’ll try, but in return I get to ask you something.”

Jon hated questions that were prefaced by an announcement that the question was coming.  It was a tactic specifically designed to put a person on edge and, even though he knew that, he still went out on that edge every time. 

“What?” he demanded impatiently.

“She lives in the city, right?”

“Brooklyn.”

“So there’s no reason you couldn’t continue this.  If you wanted.”

Yes, but he didn’t want.  Things between them were explosive in both a good and a bad way, with enough bad that he wasn’t interested in a regular diet of it.  The vacation limitation worked for him as well as it did her. 

Are you sure about that?  You’ve had her five times in the last twenty-four hours and are willingly orchestrating a way to make it happen again.  You’re fifty-three.  Aren’t you just a little surprised by your resilience?

Sex was like pizza.  The very worst was still good, and the novelty of a new woman escalated his hunger.  That was all.

“Not gonna happen,” he declared bluntly, dismissing the voice hinting that it had more to do with the woman than her newness.  “You’ve seen us together.  We hate each other, and it’s only marginally better naked.”

“I dunno, man.  You know what they say about there being a fine line between love and hate.”

The condescending laughter didn’t amuse Jon.  It grated on his nerves.

“Yeah.  They say you’re a dumb fuck.  Weren’t you going someplace?” he reminded bitterly and pushed past his brother into the bedroom, careful not to slip on the shiny, dark hardwood.

“Eventually.” 

Silently grumbling in annoyance at the lackadaisical response, Jon dropped the towel to the floor and stepped into a pair of tan cargo shorts.  They were buttoned and zipped in short order, and he reached for the light blue button-down that was hanging on one of the walnut bedposts.

He’d fastened it up to the middle of his stomach when the weight of Tony’s bespectacled eyes on him became too heavy for comfort.  “Now what?”

His brother was unmoved by the short-tempered question, passively responding, “Just noticing that you’re dressing for company.  You didn’t do that last time she came to dinner.  If you’d shaved, I would say Lilah might be right with her new theory.”

The stubble on his jaw was by design, although he would be keeping that little detail to himself.  The counselor had mentioned in the throes of morning sex that she liked the look on him and the feel on her.  Recalling the whimpered admission had provoked afternoon beach fantasies about pinking her skin with whisker burn – all over – so here he was.  Unshaven.

“God save us all from her frigging theories,” he drawled, finishing up a couple more shirt buttons to prop open hands on his hips.  “What this time?  The counselor and I are star-crossed lovers destined to meet over a divorce?”

“Well…”  Finally showing the first signs of uneasiness, Tony started slipping toward the door while thoughtfully stroking his facial hair.  “I wouldn’t use those exact words…”

It was either get mad at her psychotic tendencies or blow them off as the craziness they were, so Jon opted to laugh at the absurdity of it.  His theory centered on his sister-in-law being a little Kentucky kook who really shouldn’t be interacting with socialized people. 

“What words did she use?”

“Tony?”  The woman under discussion was knocking at his bedroom door.  “Are you in there?”

“Why don’t you ask her?” Tony’s grin was as villainous as his damn eyebrow, and he stretched an arm out to twist the handle so that his wife could join them.  “Hey, babe.  I was just telling Jon that you have a new theory about Charlie.  Wanna tell him what it is?”

Stepping into the room with yet another bright sundress swirling around her ankles, Lilah’s mouth puckered into an ugly frown.  She zapped Tony with a heated version of Jon’s stink eye while sweetly denying, “Why, I don’t know what you’re talkin’ ‘bout honey, but Jon looks like he got too much sun.  You need some aloe.  Didn’t you wear sunscreen out there today?”

Those same eyes went from stink to blink as they turned on Jon and batted with the innocence of a newborn babe.  The broad swing of her dramatic pendulum was enough to make him snort out loud.

“I swear to God you’re a borderline nutcase,” he chuckled, tucking his arms into one another.  “Just tell me your frigging theory so I can finally assign you to the nut side of the line.”

“Fine.” Huffing, she demeaned her husband with one more mini stink eye before turning a beseeching gaze on Jon.  “Charlie’s got problems nobody knows about.  I think a little kindness would go a long way with her.”

Okay.  That wasn’t even really weird.  It was more like a generic fortune cookie – applicable to everyone.  Her “theory” was a life observation instead of a nutty prediction/premonition. 

Unless there was more to this story?

Jon’s darted a questioning look back and forth between his brother and sister-in-law until Tony nudged Lilah. 

“Tell him the rest.”

Another serving of stink eye was dished up, this one more fierce than the first. 

“You just lost your bedroom privileges for tonight, Jersey.”

“Wanna bet, Bluegrass?” he countered with an arrogant pat to her rump.  They still acted like newlyweds most days.  It would be nauseating if Jon wasn't happy for his brother.  “Tell him.”

“Grr.  I wish your high-handedness wasn’t such a damn turn-on!” Her sour look shifted its focus from Tony to Jon.  “Charlie needs you.  Be nice to her because, if you’ll show a little patience and understanding…  I think she’s the rest of your life.” 

Jon roughly brushed a hand over his forearm, pushing down the hair that now stood on end. 

“Next thing you know, you’re gonna start demanding a fucking gypsy tent at the front door of my shows,” he ridiculed angrily.  “Well, it ain’t happenin’, just like that woman and the rest of my life ain’t happenin’.  Stop painting your damn shiny shit on things that are just shit, Lilah.”

He was halfway down the hall when the lazily drawled question caught up to him.  “Why'd you invite her to dinner, Jon?”

“Because she wanted to see the fucking house!”

And because he wanted to fuck her.  Both were straightforward and uncomplicated reasons that involved the rest of his night – not the rest of his life.