Rough Rowdy Reckless (RRR #1) Read online

  ROUGH. ROWDY. RECKLESS.

  Book One

  A Prologue

  By Kimball Lee

  Copyright 2015 Kimball Lee

  Kindle Edition

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  And so it begins…

  “Okay, we’re all feeling a little restless, am I right? We need this trip— Austin, South By Southwest Music Festival—music, cold beer, hot guys, so many tequila shots that we dance on tables until we lose our minds, get laid, or pass out. Can I get an Amen?” I say and lean forward from the backseat of Gigi’s VW Beetle convertible, perching on the edge of the seat as I wrap my arms around my two best friends. Gigi and Penelope—or just plain Penn, if you know what’s good for you. These are my girls, my BFFs, my islands of calm in this scary-as-shit sea of almost-out-of-the-nest, our-college-days-are-nearly-over, so-long-to-Mom-and-Dad’s-credit-card, reality-is-knocking-on-the-door, ADULTHOOD.

  Yippeeeee and oh fuck!

  “Amen!” They shout over the roar of the wind. The top is down, wind whips through our hair, stings our cheeks, and brings tears to our eyes as we barrel along IH-35 heading north from San Antonio to Austin.

  “Sit back Bossy-Flossy, and buckle your damn seat belt,” Gigi yells, tilting her head so that her cheek presses against my arm affectionately for a second before her eyes shoot up to the rearview mirror to give me a mock-exasperated look.

  “Okay Mother, talk about bossy,” I tell her, rolling my eyes and scooting back to buckle myself in.

  “She’s right, Scarlet, safety first,” Penn adds in her ‘stick to the rules’ way, she squeezes my arm when I hug her but never looks up from the book she’s reading. “This little ‘bugaboo’ Gigi drives might look totally innocuous, but it has a turbo-charged engine and she only has two speeds, fast-as-fuck and stop.”

  “I freaking LOVE my baby-blue-bug! This car tells the story of my life—California girl leaves her plastic, pretentious mother behind and starts over as a down-to-earth grass-roots Texan,” Gigi says elbowing Penn and handing her a hair tie so she can wrangle Gigi’s enviable mass of perfectly highlighted golden hair into submission.

  “Back to the topic at hand. I’ve made some unbreakable rules for the week. This is our last Spring Break ever, our last hurrah before we actually graduate from college and real life turns us into our mothers,” I say and Gigi and Penn groan in unison. “Shut up and listen, rule one—no sleeping with frat-boys.”

  “No fraternity dip-shits,” Penn says swiping a finger across her Kindle to turn the page and glancing up as the jagged Austin skyline materializes in the distance.

  “Been there, done that, not going back,” Gigi says, lifting a hand from the steering wheel and rattling off a string of curse words over a slightly chipped nail.

  “Okay, good, great,” I say. “Rule two—let’s find some hot local men, emphasis on MEN, and just throw caution to the wind, get down and dirty, but use a condom of course.”

  “We get it, this is the week of the ‘Zipless Fuck’,” Penn says and she looks from me to Gigi, narrowing her bright-blue eyes to see if we catch her meaning.

  “I love that!” Gigi says with her usual effervescence and her foot gets a little heavier on the gas pedal. “Did you just make that up? It’s totally brill.”

  “Nope, she didn’t, she stole it from Erica Jong,” I say and feel like I could dissolve into a fit of giddy teenage giggles. I’ll never admit to the number of times I hid between the stacks of the Atlanta Public Library when I was thirteen and read and reread a well-worn copy of Fear of Flying. “But it totally fits for our week of guiltless pleasure. Okay, recapping rule one—I’m serious, no barely legal, pimply-faced, done-in-three-minutes college boys. If any guy says he’s working on his masters at U.T. or just got accepted to law school— please say ‘adios motherfucker’ and move along. And no hot Longhorn jocks with fake IDs and nonstop erections.”

  “What if I meet a hot neo-hippie who’s working on his PhD and he’s from like, I don’t know, Idaho or some shit? By the way, that’s it? Just two rules that kinda go without saying in the first place?” Penn asks, kicking off her sandals and propping her little Tinkerbell feet on the dashboard as she runs a delicate hand through her choppy, shoulder-length, white-blonde hair.

  “No means no, Penelope. N. O. Period. Exclamation point. There’s one more rule and take it to heart, sister-girls, absolutely no regrets. This is the one week we can be anyone we want to be, anything goes, we love ‘em, we use ‘em, we leave ‘em, we never look back. Now for our mantra, let me hear it –and I’ll go first. Shout it if you mean it! I WANNA GET ROUGH!”

  “I NEED TO GET ROWDY!” Gigi yells drumming her hands on the steering wheel and wiggling her hips.

  “I’M FEELING KINDA RECKLESS!” Penn says and kicks her feet into the air and we all shimmy and squeal like cheerleaders at a pep-rally.

  “Oh, great!” Gigi grumbles as lights flash and a siren wails behind us.

  “Just what we need, a speeding ticket,” Penn says, tucking her legs under her and marking her place before switching off the Kindle.

  “Not to worry, I always talk my way out of trouble,” Gigi says, pulling onto the shoulder of the highway and checking her face in the mirror. She swipes on a coat of lip gloss, curls her eyelashes, and adjusts her perky little spray-tanned boobs so they’re enticingly displayed in her thin tank-top. When the officer looms above the car she beams up at him with her disarming surfer-girl, sparkly-eyed cluelessness, and asks, “Hey there officer, what could possibly be the problem?”

  “Driver’s license and registration please,” he says, he’s young, semi-hot, definitely a rookie, and doesn’t stand a chance. His gaze is immediately glued to Gigi’s tits. “Is there an emergency of some kind, Miss? Are you aware that you were doing eighty-five miles an hour? Not to mention that you changed lanes without using your turn signal and you were swerving, somewhat.”

  “Oh dear, this little car gets away from me! I’m sure I saw a sign somewhere back there that said the speed limit is eighty, didn’t I?” She says and lifts a can of Diet Coke to her glossy lips, takes a sip and “accidently” spills a splash down her cleavage. “Uh-oh,” she says as she dabs at the spill. Her fingers linger on the tops of her breasts, nipples clearly erect and visible through the skin-tight shirt as she sighs deeply and tilts her pretty head, her eyes lingering somewhere near his belt buckle. “Wow, are those real handcuffs? I’ll bet they come in handy.”

  I lift my sunglasses and smirk, and Penn turns sideways in her seat to get a better view as the officer clears his throat and shifts from one foot to the other. He leans down to hand Gigi a handkerchief from his back pocket, clearly trying to decide what to do next. Judging from the conflicted expression on his face he’s not sure whether to write out a speeding ticket or clap the handcuffs on her, throw her over his shoulder, and climb in the backseat of his patrol car to explore their more unconventional uses.

  “I’m gonna let this one slide,” He says, writing out a warning ticket. He wipes beads of sweat from his forehead and seems disappointed, like he wanted to ask for her number but thinks he better not fuck with the Texas penal code. “Slow it down please, ladies, and ya’ll be safe. There are a lot of reckless drivers on the roads during the music festival.”

  “Oh, absolutely, officer, the last thing we wanna be is reckless.” I say, distracted by an incoming text from my ex. He misses me, can’t live without me, he promises his undying love and nights of nearly unbearable pleasure. Unbearable? You got that right.

  “God bless Victoria’s Secret for so expertly lifting and padding your tiny tits,” Penn says, as the officer walks away with slumped shoulders and a look that says he probably just missed the opp
ortunity of a lifetime. Penn syncs her phone to the car’s sound system and cranks up the volume as we pull back onto the road. “Our fave retro tune for my girl’s listening pleasure, here’s to Duffy cuz we’re gonna have the boys begging for mercy this week!”

  We hoot and howl, yelling above the road noise, belting out the words to a song we all love, but can’t really relate to. None of us has been so deeply in love that it brought us to our knees, but we don’t care, we sing the words like we know what we’re talking about—“Yeah, yeah, yeah! I don’t know what you do, but you do it well, I’m under you’re spell. You got me begging you for mercy!” Our voices mix and blend, lifting and swirling out into the warm March afternoon as the capitol city welcomes us. We’re loud and off-key, not one of us can carry a tune in a paper bag, but who cares, we’re here, together, young and free and aching for adventure.

  *

  All three of us have had a taste of sorrow— When Penn was twelve years old she lost her mom in a car wreck that might or might not have been an accident, and her dad has recently become engaged to an ex-stripper. Gigi’s mother is a superficial space cadet who discards husbands like used Kleenex, and not once in four years has she left the set of her Beverly Hills reality show to visit her only child at college.

  My family life is fairly normal except that my mother is a romance novelist and she thinks all relationships end in happily-ever-after. Which means she isn’t speaking to me since I called off my ginormous June wedding when I caught my fiancé getting a blowjob from one of my former, bitch-and-a-half, sorority sisters. It was the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve and instead of kissing me he had his teeny-little-weeny stuck down that slut’s throat in the restroom of the San Antonio Country Club. Ugh.

  To be honest, I was kind of—make that VERY—relieved for an excuse to get out of a relationship that looked good on paper but left a lot to be desired in reality. I’d met him my first year of college and got swept along in his ‘I’m going to be a big-shot doctor and you can be my trophy wife’ scenario. But we were completely incompatible, and not only in our views of the world and life in general—I just wasn’t head-over-heels in love with him, not to mention that the man was way beyond inept when it came to sex.

  My ex, Corey Baumgartner, finished four years of medical school at the top of his class and learned every nuance of human anatomy, but he never had the slightest clue how to give me an orgasm without my constant instructions.

  I pretended to be sad when he moved back to Atlanta to finish his medical residency, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Gigi and Penn begged me to leave his scrawny, pompous ass ages ago, they both said the same thing, more or less. “Scarlet honey, so what if he’s a brilliant cardio-thoracic surgeon with a life of privilege and wealth to offer—if he’s bad news in bed, ditch the loser.”

  And I defended the cheating sack of shit for three years! I told them, “Well, he’s only an intern, he’s still in a learning phase.”

  To which ‘voice of reason’ Penn replied, “Trust me, if he hasn’t located your clit by now, he never will.”

  Gigi and Penn haven’t been in committed relationships since high school, and with my ruined relationship, we’re ecstatic to leave Trinity University behind for a week of drunk-and-disorderly conduct at SXSW. Gigi claims to have a wildly fulfilling sex life, but the walls of our cozy little duplex are paper thin and she and her battery-operated-boyfriend are loud. As for Penn, she’s a budding artist and the queen of one-night stands, her philosophy is that committing to one man requires too much effort and would stifle her creativity.

  Honestly, I can tell that Gigi would sell her soul to fall in love even though she swears she never will since her mother’s nine marriages all ended in messy-but-lucrative divorces. On the other hand, Penn really isn’t the least bit interested in finding her happily-ever-after in a monogamous relationship. She has a nerdy-but-cool friend-with-benefits who knows how to satisfy her and stay out of her way when they’re not rolling around in the sack, so she’s in no hurry to replace him.

  “Here it is, turn right. Not left, your other right, Gigi, what the fuck!” Penn says as we navigate South Congress Avenue and swerve onto a side street. “This is it, pull into the parking garage. God, your driving is all over the place, I think I need a Dramamine. Okay we’re here, hallelujah, let me out of the damn car.”

  “Calm down, I knew where I was going. Geez, you’re such a wimp,” Gigi says, parking near the elevator and flipping down the visor to check her gorgeous face in the mirror, as per usual.

  “No fighting, you two,” I say, throwing my legs over the side of the car and climbing out. “Pop the trunk, let’s grab our bags and party. I wanna see the sun set from the rooftop with a beer in one hand and a shot in the other.”

  *

  We’re spending the week in a penthouse condo owned by Penn’s strange, middle-aged-but-still-kinda-cool-and-a-little-bit-sexy father. The building sits a block off South Congress, the street known as the hip-heart of all that keeps Austin weird, as the city’s slogan goes. It’s not a tall building by New York or Chicago standards, only seven stories high, but the penthouse and it’s outside deck have unparalleled views north across Lady Bird Lake. On the opposite shore downtown Austin sprawls in a lazy spiral from the grounds of the domed State Capitol, around the refurbished Governor’s Mansion, along legendary Sixth Street, past the iconic Clock Tower, to Longhorn Stadium and the University of Texas campus.

  We haul our luggage into the elevator, mostly we haul Gigi’s luggage. To put it mildly—the girl can shop. Penn is talking a blue-streak as she gives us a quick tour of the condo. Normally she’d rather read and listen to me and Gigi talk, but she’s on a roll explaining why one side of the space looks like a demolition zone. Did she forget to mention that her dad sold half of the ten-thousand-square-foot condo to some rich ranch family? Well he did, since that slutty bitch he’s engaged to insisted he buy a house on Mount Bonnell so she could brag to her trailer-trash friends that she lives near Matthew McConaughey.

  “Yeah,” Penn says as we wander through the contemporary space gasping at the panoramic views from wall-to-wall floor to ceiling windows. “I don’t think I’ve told y’all the slutty fiancé’s name, brace yourselves— Estrellita. It means ‘little star’ in Spanish and she’s not even close to being Latina, she’s freaking Croatian or something. Ughhh, and it’s not a made-up stripper name, at least that’s what Gus says.”

  Gus is Penn’s father, better known in the tech universe as the Gustav Van Doorn, college buddy and former business partner of Michael Dell. He moved to Austin from Green Bay, Wisconsin to attend U.T. and like Dell, he dropped out after his freshman year to dabble in ‘tech stuff’. Gus is what Austenite’s enviously refer to as a ‘Dellionaire’, he got in on the ground floor of Dell Computers in the mid-eighties and retired with millions in stock and cash fifteen years later.

  “That cannot be her real name,” Gigi says and we all stop and listen as the front door of the adjoining condo slams and a cacophony of male and female laughter interrupts our party of three. “Yay, noisy neighbors, sounds like cute guys to me,” and Penn and I both give her a look that asks how the hell she can tell they’re cute just from hearing them laugh. “Well at least it’s not some old retired couple who’ll get pissed off if we sunbathe naked on the deck.”

  We stand for a minute, not saying a word, separated from the voices by heavy, builder-grade opaque plastic sheeting stapled to bare wood studs. The interior of the condo has been opened up right down the middle and new walls have yet to be built. I’m pretty sure we’re hoping that our noisy neighbors are cute guys, because it would be a snap for one or all of them to drunkenly stumble into the plastic and literally come crashing into our lives.

  “I need a shower first and then a shot,” I say breaking our reverie. “Where should I put my bags, Penelope? This place is enormous.”

  “Let’s throw our stuff in the master-bedroom, we can get dressed in there and
pass out in Gus’s freakish waterbed if we come home alone. There are a bunch of other bedrooms, pick one of those and lock the fucking door if you get lucky. Here, Gus left an ‘All-Access’ wristband for each of us, these get us into every official ‘South By’ event this week,” Penn says, handing us the wristbands stamped VIP. “I don’t care what y’all do, home-girls, but I’m going backstage to meet Jimmy Fallon after his show Tuesday night. And FYI, I have to stay sober on Friday for my internship interview at Alice-Anne’s Farm Market, please don’t let me get wasted and forget, it’s my dream job.”

  “I’ll remind you, not that you’d forget your big chance to become the authority on pesticide-free, farm-fresh melons,” I say and she punches me in my arm and then hugs me.

  “Oh my God! I wanna meet Taylor Swift,” Gigi squeals. She’s in full-on party mode and Penn’s career aspirations are the last thing on her mind. “Can I do that, like hear her sing at a venue and then actually meet her?”

  “Gross, who’d want to? But, yes you can,” Penn says. “What about you Scarlet, anyone you’re dying to see? And sorry, baby girl, Jay Leno won’t be making an appearance, so your crush just got crushed.”

  “I will never understand your obsession with that huge old man,” Gigi says and acts like she’s about to hurl. “God almighty, Jay Leno is like, enormous, his body, his head, his freakish chin. Is it because you spent too many nights with pint-sized Tom Thumb, alias Corey Bumfuck?”

  “Shut up, Jay Leno is the sexiest man on the planet,” I say just to mess with their heads. “There is this one singer I want to hear, Jon Wylder. Y’all know his song, Shooting Stars, it’s always on the radio and I love it. I need to find out when and where he’s gonna be playing. Besides, I saw his face on a poster, he’s impossibly beautiful in this effortless messy-sexy-don’t-give-a-fuck way. What? I’m going out on a limb sexually, I’ve made up my mind— I’m banging the scruffy-pretty-boy singer if I get the chance.”