It’s not weird that lots of beautiful women want to sleep with Uri. He’s rich, he’s famous—well, infamous—and he is very, very easy on the eyes.
What’s weird is how jealous I feel sometimes of those women.
I’ve had sex before, though only a handful of times. The whole dog-and-pony show makes me nervous, if I’m being honest. It’s so intimate. People in your space. Breathing your breath. Sweating your sweat.
Er, no thanks.
A therapist I saw for a bit after Ziva suggested that I might have “intimacy issues.” I laughed and said, “No, I don’t have intimacy issues—I just don’t want anyone close to me ever because if I open up to someone then they might just die and leave me and I can’t bear the thought of that happening, so I shut myself off to the world before the world can inflict any more cruelty on me.”
Come to think of it, she might’ve been onto something.
The silhouette grows closer. Ten seconds or less to impact.
An hour ago, life was just peachy. I was refreshing the Eve’s Garden shipment tracking info again and again. Three stops away. Two stops away. You are the next stop. I waited for the doorbell to ring, but…
Nothing.
No knock, no doorbell ring, and, when I went downstairs to check the stoop, no discreetly wrapped package of purple alien dildos.
But as I glanced up, I saw in horror that the mailman was walking up the drive to Uri’s mansion—with my package tucked under his arm.
I should’ve done something then. Screamed, tackled him, maybe even sniped him from my roof with a bow and arrow. Instead, I just stood stupidly in place and watched as the mailman set the package down on Uri’s front step. Then he walked back down to his van, got in, and drove away.
After that, I started panic-dialing any post office phone number that might be useful so they could send in the Postal Service S.W.A.T. team to rescue the goods. But I kept getting bounced around from call center to call center. No one could help.
The end result was that my package was still marooned at the Bugrov estate and I had only one way of getting it back.
Going to do it myself.
But that thought made me want to curl up under my bed and never come out. Giving the gift to Elle was gonna be humiliating enough. Marching up to Uri’s massive front door and demanding the blue-eyed titan who lives there to, ahem, hand me back over my giant purple alien dildo, please?
That’s asking for death by embarrassment.
What other choice did I have, though? I tried telling myself that Uri or his housekeeper would just throw it out. That I could just order a replacement and forget all about this embarrassing little oopsie-daisy. But none of that calmed me.
The most painful part was that I could still see it sitting on his front stoop. Right freaking there. That was when my worst idea came to life. If I waited for nightfall, maybe I could sneak over the fence and steal it back without anyone being the wiser…
Somehow, of all my plans, that was the one that won out.
I told myself I’d be fast. In and out like a ninja. I even changed into all black clothes so I didn’t raise any eyebrows.
“It’s all gonna be fine,” I whispered to myself just before I stepped out into my backyard. “In and out like a ninja. In and out like a ninja.”
If Ziva could’ve seen me then, she’d have busted her gut laughing. I glanced over at her picture sitting on the mantel. A photo of the two of us at high school graduation. The Walsh twins, both of us in matching mauve dresses with matching seventeen-year-old smiles.
Mine hasn’t changed much over the years.
But hers is frozen like that forever.
I ripped my gaze away. I needed to focus. Eye of the tiger time.
At first, everything went well. I hopped the fence like I was on American Ninja Warrior: Sex Toy Exfiltration Edition.
Darted up to Uri’s stoop.
Picked up my package and high-tailed it back to the fence, tossed it over into my backyard, started the climb myself…
Then: disaster struck.
The nail struck, more specifically. It sliced open my thigh and pinned me in place. Garfield came out to say hello.
And now, the man of the hour is here to ask me one very reasonable question.
“What the hell are you doing on my property?”
2
URI
There’s a half-naked girl hanging from my fence.
I pause a few feet away from her and stop to survey the scene. She’s dangling helplessly. One hand on the top of the boards, so close to freedom and yet so very fucking far away. There’s some kind of orange cartoon cat printed on her ass. The tattered material of her leggings flaps in the wind.