A Visit to New Hampshire: An Andy and Patrick Deleted Scene
Patrick
“Where is your sense of adventure?”
Andy eyed the fried seafood plate between us, grimacing as she lifted the beer bottle to her lips. I studied the rhythmic bobbing of her throat while she swallowed, and I immediately regretted the decision to cash in on my months-old seafood campaign to drive to New Hampshire when keeping her in my bed was an option.
She lifted an indifferent shoulder and said, “We agreed I would drink beer and criticize things.”
“How is this weirder than the green pepper and fennel smoothie you had for breakfast on Thursday?”
Andy waved a hand dismissively, and reached across the white-washed picnic table for my beer. “Peppers aren’t the cockroaches of the ocean.”
“You’re killin’ me, Smalls.” I shook my head and tossed another fried clam in my mouth. “So you’re telling me you’ll eat Korean barbecue from that nameless truck near Fort Point, where you’ve most definitely had kimchi that spent a few years rotting in a basement, but you won’t touch a scallop?”
“Yes.”
“That’s weak,” I murmured. “There’s gotta be a better reason.”
Andy considered me over the beer bottle while I ate, an eyebrow raised in challenge. “Don’t you ever want to rebel against everything you knew as a kid? Just give it all away, and say, ‘no, this is not me’?”
My eyes drifted over her shoulder, landing on the choppy ocean just beyond the restaurant. April was not filled with gentle showers this year. “Yes and no,” I murmured. “Working with my brothers and sister means that there’s no escaping, but I like that, and I like them. Usually. The past few years have been hard, but I wouldn’t want to do this with anyone but my siblings.”
“That’s the no. What about the yes?”
Andy propped her feet on my bench and tapped my thigh with her booted toe. “The yes wants to bulldoze Wellesley and never deal with it again.”
Andy gasped. “Don’t you dare say that about an 1880s Arts and Crafts.”
“Don’t tell Riley I said this, but that place is fucking haunted, especially considering we can’t figure out why the walls moved in some of the rooms.”
“So that adds some character. Half of the properties we deal with are haunted,” she laughed, sending a curtain of dark curls falling across her face.
“You won’t eat seafood because you’re from Maine. How is that any more reasonable?”
“It’s not, Patrick, it’s not even close to reasonable. But the last thing I am is Maine.” She shrugged and polished off my beer. “And I went on a field trip to the nuclear reactor up the street when I was in high school, and I’m not convinced I want fish from these waters.”
“You can be Persian, and still eat clams,” I offered. “Maine has nothing to do with it. Neither does Seabrook Station. But you already knew that.”
We stared at each other for several beats while a worker dumped several five-gallon barrels of ice into the soda fountains, each pour roaring through the otherwise empty room.
Andy nodded, her eyes softening. I fell far into the depth of her dark brown eyes with nothing but gray skies and the deserted seacoast around us. They had a language all their own, and I could lose days staring at Andy. Every glance, stare, and flash spoke, and revealed more than any words she could say.
I held her gaze as the last bucket was emptied, and the sudden, deafening silence wrapped around us.
“Didn’t you say something about this being a pub crawl?”
* * *
Andy reclined against the booth and folded her legs beneath her before sampling the square slice of pizza. “Not bad,” she said, and took a few more bites.
“Finally,” I muttered.
She drank her weight in beer at the three seafood dives we visited, refusing to even look at the chalk-scrawled menus, and rolled her eyes when I suggested fried dough.
Andy’s first murmur sounded when I was reaching across the table for the red pepper flakes. I froze, my fingers wrapping around the plump jar as the hum slipped down my spine and around my cock, and she murmured again. Dragging in a deep breath, my eyes panned up her navy blue sweater and over her neck, landing on her eyes.
Andy was studying her pizza and didn’t notice me staring. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing? You must really enjoy fucking with me.”
Her eyes flashed with confusion. “How’s that?”
I rolled the jar between my hands to distract from the swelling behind my fly. “Um, you occasionally make certain sounds while you’re eating, like you just did, and, you do it pretty frequently when we’re out for lunch during the week, and um—”
“Get to the point, Patrick,” Andy laughed. She grabbed the jar, stilling my hands.
My words whooshed out in a compacted mess. “You make sex noises when you eat and I want to throw you on the table and fuck you until you scream.”
Andy turned, glancing at the teenage boy working the counter. He was engrossed in the UNH hockey game against UMass-Lowell. “I don’t think he’d mind,” she shrugged, her eyes lighting while I laughed.
“Are you serious? He stared at your tits the entire time he was taking our order.”
“So what? You stare at my ass every day.”
“Oh you noticed that,” I replied. She tilted her head in a clear sign that she wasn’t entertaining my bullshit. “What? Why not? Your ass is incredible. It’s especially hot with my handprint on it. I’d like to spend some more time getting to know it tonight.”
Andy frowned and picked up her pizza, quietly eating while many interpretations flitted through my mind. I knew plenty of women, my sisters included, who could skim a single comment from a conversation and extrapolate that into a one-woman show highlighting my failings as a man. I didn’t think Andy possessed that gene, but in all honesty, she wasn’t telling me enough for me to make that assumption.
Maybe she was offended that I didn’t explicitly compliment her tits. Or she felt harassed when I checked her out at work, and if that was the case, suggesting that I wanted to fuck her in a greasy beachside pizza joint was making matters much worse. It’s possible she wasn’t comfortable being spanked. It wasn’t like we ever stopped and covered the basics before I grabbed her by the knee socks and fucked her into the mattress. Or she didn’t appreciate my implied request for yet another night with her, and if so, it was too damn bad.
I wanted Andy in my bed, and I wasn’t about to apologize for it.
“Just so I’m clear,” she started slowly, gesturing toward me with her pizza crust, “you’re not throwing me on the table right now? Because I could go for that. Pizza? Good. Sex? Good. I’m not really into people watching, but he seems pretty invested in that game.”
I leaned forward and beckoned for Andy to do the same. “Just so I’m clear, I want to see a lot more of this side of you.”
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