“You kicked ass,” I tell her sincerely. “I don’t know how you kept up with everything while you were doing dance lessons for the show too. Seriously amazing. My sister and I couldn’t stop talking about how we would’ve been so exhausted after the first thirty minutes of rehearsals, but you killed it like a major lady boss. Such a great role model for young girls everywhere. High five, rock star.”
I lift a hand.
All three women stare at me like I’m an alien.
I glance at Hayes and find that he, too, seems completely befuddled.
“You don’t celebrate each other’s successes?” I ask.
“And you wonder why I like her,” Hayes says to his mother.
That’s all the warning I get before he grabs me by the hips, spins me so our bodies align, and lowers his mouth to mine.
My first instinct is to protest, but I ignore it.
Not because I’m contractually obligated to, or some other legal nonsense reason.
But because if these people truly don’t celebrate each other, then who am I to interfere with Hayes’s plans to not get set up with one of them?
Also, I haven’t been kissed in months.
Months.
Well over a year, for sure.
And I like kissing. I like being close to someone. Skin to skin. Breath to breath.
Intimacy.
I don’t miss Chad.
I miss intimacy.
Hayes wraps one arm tighter around my waist while he settles his other hand at my nape, his fingers spreading over my scalp and making my nerve endings stand up and rejoice. He licks the seam of my lips, and I melt.
I’m no longer Begonia Fairchild, lost child in search of herself.
I’m a puddle of paint in every color of the rainbow, swirled and glittered and beautiful and wanted, or at least, I can pretend I’m wanted.
For just a minute.
I miss being wanted.
I part my lips, touch my tongue to his, and while a hazy part of my brain tries to remind me that this is just for show, when he teases my tongue right back, my vagina leaps to her feet and throws her bra at the stage where Hayes is performing the encore of all rock show encores.
“Hayes,” a distant voice says.
I ignore it.
He ignores it.
This is a spectacular kiss.
I would believe this kiss if I were watching it.
He could make you come in thirty seconds if he kissed your pussy like this, a little voice whispers.
There’s a shriek in response, and I realize that’s not me shrieking.
Nor is it my vagina recoiling in fear that we’re not ready for pussy-kissing.
It’s an actual shriek.
“Dog!”
Dog.
Dog.
Marshmallow.
I wrench myself out of Hayes’s arms and spin away. “Marsh—”
“Sit,” Hayes orders.
He’s right behind me, and I can feel his chest heaving against my back.
I can also feel—oh.
Oh, that’s not good.
I mean, it is, but—did he enjoy the kiss that much? Or does he have a hair-trigger erection?
Focus on the dog, Begonia.
For once, Marshmallow has followed an order.
And he’s now sitting in the middle of the living room with a lacy pink bra draped over his head.
A lacy pink bra that is not mine.
My gaze flies to the luggage that the three women dragged in behind them.
And then back to my dog.
“Marshmallow.”
“Put. It. Back,” Hayes says.
Marshmallow whimpers, rises to his feet, and skitters across the floor to drop the bra at Amelia’s feet before army-crawling to Hayes’s feet, where he plops all the way down, then lifts his eyes at my fake boyfriend like he’s begging to still be loved.
“Good boy,” I squeak out.
Giovanna’s gaping at me.
Amelia lowers herself to the floor, lifts the bra with a single finger, and rises again, draping it over her shoulder with a meaningful look at Hayes.
Georgia O’Keefe have mercy, I am in an entirely new social class, with entirely new rules, still reeling from that kiss, and I’m pretty sure my fake boyfriend is being propositioned with a bra that my dog dug out of another woman’s luggage.
Adventure?
Oh, yes, Begonia.
You are getting an adventure.
9
Hayes
The problem with infinity is that you can’t count to it.
I’m trying.
I’m desperately trying.
I’m at six million, four hundred twenty-three thousand, two hundred sixty-one, with my eyes closed, a sheep pictured for every increase in count, allergy medicine consumed, headache medicine consumed, and my brain will not shut off.