“How has everyone’s month been?” Caroline put her Tupperware platter of postcoital cupcakes on the coffee table and took off the lid. “Anybody do anything fun?”
“Not as fun as you.” I leaned forward and snagged a cupcake and a napkin from the pile next to them. Red velvet, hell yeah. She caught my eye and we grinned across the table at each other in divorcée solidarity.
“You need to get out there, April,” Caroline said. “There’s lots of stuff going on. Ladies’ nights, meetups. You should come out with me sometime. Earn yourself some cupcakes of your own.”
“She’s got a point,” Marjorie said. She reached for a cupcake even though she’d been disparaging them a minute ago. “Caitlin’s off to college soon, right? You can get back to working on yourself then.”
“I’m good.” I sounded nonchalant as I picked the wrapping off the bottom of the cupcake and licked frosting off my thumb. I always sounded nonchalant, because that was the easiest way to get through life. “Your idea of working on yourself seems to involve going out, crowds. Things that involve putting on pants.” I shuddered. “Can’t I live vicariously through you and your sex cupcakes?”
Marjorie choked on her mouthful of cake, and Caroline shrugged in an exaggeratedly helpless manner. “I tried. I want to see you happy, that’s all.”
“Oh, I am. As long as you keep bringing cupcakes to book club.” I polished off said cupcake and reached for another. I wasn’t getting laid, but I was getting plenty of sugar. Close enough, right?
As Marjorie turned the talk away from my lack of a sex life and back onto the book we’d been reading, I ran my finger around the edge of the second cupcake, scooping up the frosting and depositing it directly into my mouth without needing cake as a vehicle. For a split second, I imagined telling the group about Mitch. About how I’d agreed to pretend to be his girlfriend this weekend. I thought about the girl talk that would ensue, and while there was a part of my soul that craved that kind of connection with other people, I knew I’d shrivel under that kind of spotlight. I didn’t want it. Caroline and her cupcakes could have it.
Anyway, this whole thing with Mitch and me didn’t count. It wasn’t real. A friend helping a friend—nothing that would lead to sex cupcakes. Nothing more than a weekend hanging off of one of Mitch Malone’s giant biceps, doing my damnedest to throw enough loving glances his way to fool every member of his family.
Oh God, this was going to be a disaster.
Seven
Caitlin hardly said a word to me before school on Friday morning. She glared at Emily’s bag in the guest room, huffed a few times at me, and then she was off. I could have made a big deal about it, but my mind was already a few hours ahead, on Mitch’s gargantuan red pickup truck pulling into my driveway and getting this weekend started. I already wanted it to be over.
My pulse spiked when he arrived, but I forced some deep breaths as I gathered my things and locked the front door behind me. It was going to be fine. It was all going to be fine.
“All set, honey?” Mitch stressed the last word as he hoisted my suitcase without asking, stowing it in the back of his extended cab, next to his leather duffel-shaped overnight bag. Seeing our bags nestled together like that didn’t do anything for my anxiety. This wasn’t me. I didn’t go away for a weekend with a man. What was I doing?
But I forced myself to breathe through the anxiety. I was an adult. I could do this. I made myself smile and roll my eyes at him—the kind of reaction he was used to from me, as opposed to terror. “Let’s go, babe.” I pulled myself up and into the passenger seat.
He flashed me a grin as the engine started with a roar. “Here.” He handed me his phone once I’d clicked my seat belt. “Lulu sent me all the info for the hotel when I was at the gym this morning. It’s in the calendar. Can you pull it up?”
“Sure.” I took the unlocked phone and navigated to today’s date. Sure enough, there was an entry for three p.m.—our check-in time—with the address, phone number, and confirmation number for the hotel reservation. I was about to tap on it when an entry from earlier this morning caught my eye: 6:00 a.m.—Fran.
Huh. I glanced over to Mitch, trying hard to not make it a side-eye. “You said you were at the gym this morning?”
“Yep.” He glanced over his shoulder as he backed out of the driveway, one long arm across the back of my seat. “Why?”
“Nothing.” I glanced down at the phone, then back up at him. “I . . . I figured that’s why your hair was still wet.” Indeed, his hair was damp, the residual water making it a dark blond color, and he smelled clean, like soap. He’d definitely showered before picking me up, but why was he lying about going to the gym? We weren’t a couple. But we were friends. He could tell me if he was having a quickie before going out of town.
“Yep,” he said again easily. “You got that address?”
“Oh. Yeah.” I pulled it up and plugged the address into the truck’s GPS. But I couldn’t resist poking through his calendar. I should have, but I couldn’t. Every other day this week was dotted with appointments, and I clicked on them. Monday said Annie, and Wednesday was Cindy. Both at six in the morning, like his rendezvous this morning with Fran. Apparently he was into early morning hookups these days. Good to know.
No. No, it wasn’t good to know. I didn’t need to know this. I had no right nor reason to know or care who he met up with and when. I plugged in his phone and tucked it into the center console, settling down for the drive to Virginia. Besides, maybe it was good that he’d hooked up before the trip. Maybe he’d keep his flirting with me to a minimum.
The beginning of the trip was tense, as a road trip that went through Washington, DC, always was. But it didn’t take long for us to be out of the insane beltway traffic and into the rolling hills of the Shenandoah Valley. By then my nervousness had faded, lulled by the scenery and the classic rock station on satellite radio. Then something he’d said registered, far later than it should have.
“Wait a second. A hotel? What happened to the whole family gathering at your grandparents’ homestead?”
“Oh. Yeah.” He turned the radio down a few clicks, so this was going to be a conversation, not just a quick answer. “Sorry, I should have told you. There’s a lot of people coming this weekend, and there are only so many bedrooms in their house. Lulu emailed me this week to tell me that some of us got put up in a hotel. It’s not far from their place—like a ten-minute drive. Not a big deal.”
“Sure.” I turned back to the window with a frown. The weekend suddenly looked a lot different. It was bad enough when I thought I was navigating a family weekend: three days of social activity, but at least there was a bedroom where I could hide. But now even that had been taken away from me. I hadn’t thought this through. What had I expected? He’d told his family we were a couple. Chances were slim that I would have been getting my own room anyway, at either the hotel or the house. No matter what, I was about to share a room with Mitch.
This was bad. But I didn’t realize how bad until we got to the hotel. Everything was in Mitch’s name, so he checked in while I tried to stretch the kinks out of my back—not to mention my leg—in the parking lot. It had been a relatively short drive, as road trips went, and his truck was so big that it felt like I was sitting on a sofa the whole time. But even a comfortable couch was hard to sit on for hours on end, and as I put my hands on my hips and leaned backwards I heard as well as felt a satisfying pop from somewhere in my lower back. I straightened up just as Mitch came back to the truck and handed me a keycard.