Problematic Summer Romance (Not in Love, #2)(66)

I fist his shirt with both hands. “So if I offer to return the favor with a hand job, or a blow job, if I tell you that you can fuck my tits or literally any other part of my—”

He groans. “You can’t, huh?”

“What?”

“Be good. Not even once.”

I laugh, but no sound comes out. He’s quiet, too, as he picks me up like I’m a cotton-stuffed plushie. I follow his lead, wrap my legs around his waist, and he carries me to the bed like the exhausted girl that I am, pulling back the cool sheets, depositing me between them.

I stare at him from the too-thick pillow, yawn, and say, “Conor Harkness, you are a coward.”

The twitch of his lips feels like agreement. “Go to sleep.”

“You’d love it, wouldn’t you? It would make me shut up.”

“Such a fucking menace,” he mutters.

His hands tremble as he pushes a few strands behind my ear. There is a cautious, fragile glint in his eyes, as though he’s shaken, tender and achy from what just happened, but in a way that has nothing to do with his body. I think I get it: He thought he’d come up here and play me like an instrument, handle me like a business deal. Maybe he hoped that there would be something clinical about this.

He underestimated me.

No, Conor has always recognized me for who I am. What he underestimated is us.

“I wish you good luck,” I inform him.

“On what?”

“On your righteous journey of self-denial. You’re going to”—another yawn—“need it.”

He shakes his head. Takes my phone out of his pocket and plugs it into the charger. “Go to sleep, Maya,” he repeats.

I bury my face in the pillow, waiting for him to walk away, but I’m out like a light before he even leaves the room.





3 days before the wedding





Chapter 28




The following morning, I wake up late, and only because Nyota is threatening to slap someone with a lawsuit right under my window. I put on a pair of shorts, the trilegged top she gave me, and dash downstairs, only to find her pacing in front of the cliffside’s rail; Tisha, Rue, and Minami watch her from a stone bench, heads moving back and forth as if to follow a Wimbledon match.

“What happened?” I ask, winded. White clouds cluster at the horizon, and the day is not as bright as the last few have been.

“Well, several things. Rue’s…” Minami’s eyes narrow at me. “Is that a hickey, Maya?”

My heart drops. “Where?”

“On the right side of your throat.”

I raise my hand, instinctively, to the spot Conor bit last night. “Probably a mosquito bite?”

“Oh, yeah. I get allergic reactions all the time, too.” She scoots, making room for me to sit. “So, you know how this wedding might be cursed?”

My stomach drops. “Oh, no. What happened now?”

“They delivered the dress Rue’s supposed to wear for the ceremony.”

“And?” I love Rue’s dress. It’s simple and lithe. Sexy but with no frills, just like her. I’ve been looking forward to seeing her in it, and to watching my brother see her in it for the first time. That’s why, when Tisha shows me the picture on her phone, I let out a terrified scream.

It’s not a yelp. It’s not a gasp. It’s a scream.

“Kill it with fire,” I plead. “Load it on a barge and cast it out to sea. Erase it from this metaphysical plane. What the hell is that?”

“The dress that was delivered.”

“Why does it look like a tampon?”

“Oh, yeah.” Tisha nods. “We’ve been calling it ‘the condom,’ but that fits way better.”

“There was some kind of mix-up. This is someone else’s dress,” Minami explains.

I blink. “Are you implying that someone, someone who is a human being who inhabits this here planet with us, was planning to get married in that?”

“Yup. All we know about that person is that she’s about half a foot shorter than Rue. Wait, we know something else: she has Rue’s dress.”

“Can she ship it to us?”

“That will not be possible.”

“Can the store send us a replacement, then?”

“That is why Nyota is, um, threatening to tear their corporate structure to pieces,” Minami says. “The boutique has been refusing. She just called the person on the line a ‘herpetic little mouth sore.’ Maybe it’s the pregnancy hormones, but it made me a bit horny.”

“Why is the boutique refusing?”

“Well, it’s not just them. It’s actually more of a widespread problem.”

“Huh?”

“It’s just not a good time to fly something to eastern Sicily.”

“I used to not believe in curses,” Rue says. She’s at the other end of the bench, and sounds a little shell-shocked, so I lean forward to look her in the face. “I swore that marriage would not fundamentally change me as a person, but here I am. Three days to the wedding, and reconsidering my stance on the supernatural.”

“Oh, Rue. The poisoning and the drowning, those were accidents.” I smile, reassuring. “And the dress…If anyone can strong-arm someone into something, it’s Nyota, which means that you’ll have it in no time. There is no curse. And if there ever was, it’s losing steam. There were no near-deaths in the past thirty-six hours. This is a robust upward trend, and…” I stop talking, because Tisha raised her arm, and is pointing at something in the distance. I follow the trajectory, and that’s when I see it.