by Penny Reid
“Because that would be a waste.”
The temperature in the car drops a good ten degrees.
“A waste?”
“Right. You have me now. You don’t need to...you know...”
The look on her face makes this tiny little voice in the back of my head scream Do over! Do over! Abandon ship! Abandon ship!
“Let’s go back to the word ‘indecent.’”
Uh oh.
Bzzzz.
Saved by the phone. I’d rather be screamed at in Balinese than hear whatever’s about to come out of Shannon’s mouth.
It’s a text from Marie.
Yoga canceled due to water leak in studio. You kids have a fun afternoon. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!
That list is so small.
“Your mom just canceled yoga,” I explain as I get in the left lane to pull a U-turn and head back into the city. “Water leak in the building.” Broken pipes are so underrated.
Shannon’s still upset, but pivots. “Text her back and let’s offer to meet for lunch.”
“Do we have to?” I can’t keep the gruffness out of my voice. That Resting Asshole Face quality applies to my voice, too. I have a bad case of Resting Asshole Baritone, apparently.
“You hate my mother,” she says out of the blue, bursting into tears.
Oh, shit. Just what you want your future fiancée to say four days before you’re about to pop the question.
“I don’t hate her.” Diplomacy bubbles up at the perfect time. “I just need more space than you do when it comes to Marie.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Shannon’s eyes are red and puffy already. Something in my chest feels like I’m being stabbed. “It’s not like I wanted her to come in like we were filming an episode of Sons of Anarchy!”
“There was a motorcycle in the room?” I’m lost now. Then again, there could have been a motorcycle in the room for all I cared. When I’m having sex with Shannon, the rest of the world just fades away.
“I meant your naked, sculpted ass on video.” I’ve seen the episode of Sons of Anarchy that she’s talking about. I sit up a little straighter knowing she thinks my ass is that muscled.
Wait.
How did she see my ass from that angle?
I pull over into a parking lot and slam the SUV into Park.
Her eyes widen, a creeping flush of red starting in her neck and moving up. Turns out I’m not the only one who’s caught.
“You saw the video?” The only way Shannon could know something like that was if she viewed it.
“Have you?” Her chin juts up in defiance. Didn’t expect that question.
It’s a standoff. We stare at each other with narrowed eyes, like characters in a really bad spaghetti western, the kind my grandfather used to love to watch on Saturday afternoons.
“How did you see it?” we ask in unison.
Stare.
God, she’s sexy when she’s filled with righteous indignation and lying to me.
“You told me you got the camera from those boys and destroyed every version of the video,” Shannon says slowly, pulling back from me in the front seat and giving me a look meant to convey that she was being cagey and viewed me as a pervert, all while running through a visual loop of my naked ass in her mind.
I can see my own ass in her eyes. She’s transparent like that.
“I did. But the kid without the camera was using his phone to tape everything. Said they were taught in media class that they should always have backup.”
“Great. College freshmen who actually listen to their professors,” Shannon mumbles, crossing her arms over her chest in fury. “Just our luck.” She frowns. “You deleted it off his phone?”
“No,” I say, patting my pants pocket. “I bought the phone from him.” Nice phone, too. Better than mine, which makes me realize I’ve become a dinosaur in the tech world. Need to hire an eighteen-year-old geek to keep me supplied with the latest gadgets.
“You bought his active phone on the spot? Phone number and all? He just gave it to you?”
“I didn’t really give him a choice.”
She goes silent.
“How did you see the video?” I ask.
“Agnes’ grandson had a flash drive in the camera. So there was a copy. He gave it to Mom and she gave it to me.”
I smash my fist into the steering wheel and she jumps, terrified. I don’t do violence. Hitting things is a sign of weakness, a symbol of the inability to use words and power to get what you want.
Which is why I hit the steering wheel.
Marie has made me resort to pounding the car dashboard like the frustrated oaf that I’ve become.
“Did your mother watch it?”
“No. She swears.”
“You’re sure she didn’t tweet it to Jessica? Make some popcorn and invite Agnes over? Offer a still for the side of a promotional vehicle?”
“You’re taking out your anger on the wrong person,” she replies with a coolness I’ve never noticed in her before. Looks like Shannon’s been getting some lessons in Resting Bitch Face.
I wince at the thought. And her words...
“I’m sorry. You’re right.” I turn the car on and put the car in Drive, but her hand stops me, covering mine on the gear shaft.
Knowing I’ll see eyes filled with reproach, I look at her slowly, dragging my gaze.
What I get, instead, is a kind of ragged lust.
“What did you think about the, uh, video?” she asks breathing roughly through her nose, her face carefully neutral.
“It was mercifully short.”
“That’s all?”
“And hot.” The video lasts about six seconds, a clear view of my always-pinchable ass and Shannon’s gorgeous legs, quite a bit of fevered movement, and then the screaming starts.
First the cameraman (who knew a guy could hit that octave?), then Marie, followed by what I think is Chuckles’ laughter. I don’t know. I’ve never heard a cat laugh before. But if cats can laugh, that’s definitely the sound.
“Oh, yes.” The top of her tongue pokes out of her mouth and suddenly, I’m breathing hard, too. See? This is why I thought maybe, some day, we’d make our own little personal porno.
But I never thought my future mother-in-law would beat me to the punch.
“All the copies are gone, though,” I assure her as that hand moves from the car’s gear shift to my gear shift. I go from neutral to fourth gear in three seconds.
Shannon’s right.
All guys really do think about is sex.
“Let’s get out of here,” I murmur as I reach over and kiss her neck.
“Where?”
I pause and inhale through my teeth, the hiss the sound of relief as she gives me a contrite look. Neither of us was wrong, but neither of us was right.
(But she’s more wrong, of course).
“How about we go back to an old haunt,” I say, turning toward the road that leads to the trail we were on nearly eighteen months ago when she almost turned my penis into a pincushion.
“Where?”
“You’ll see.”
“Not the gas station where you insisted we try to have a quickie?” I can’t tell if she’s making an offer or being sarcastic.
“I made a joke. Once,” I growl.
The rest of the drive we’re silent, though she reaches over to hold my hand, her lips remaining in a neutral, straight line, eyes hooded. The Incident is one thing, but the relationship between me and Marie is another. Shannon wants everyone to be one big, happy family. I get it. I do. But I come from a family environment where everything warm and fuzzy ended the day something warm and fuzzy stung my mother and killed her.
My concept of a big, happy family is one created from wistful memories, snippets of movies, and the occasional invitation to someone’s parents’ private island for Thanksgiving.
“Oh!” Shannon perks up as I make a right turn into the gravel-coated parking lot for the state park. She sm
iles. Something in me loosens.
You might think I’m out of my mind for bringing an anaphylactic bee sting patient to a park in Massachusetts in August, and you’d be right, except that Shannon—unlike my vampire brother CEO—has decided that she will not restrict her life in any way because of her allergy. She goes outside, she hikes, she all but beekeeps a set of apiaries in her zest to live a “normal” life.
Frankly, she missed the boat on a “normal” life with a mother like hers and falling in love with a billionaire’s son, but I like to humor her.
We climb out of my SUV and before we can shut the doors a bee floats past my face, lazy and stupid.
“God damn it,” I bark, pointing at the .025 ounces of death with wings.
Shannon shrugs.
I open my door. “Get in. We’ll go somewhere else.” What the hell was I thinking? Adrenaline streaks through me like I’ve been injected with it.
“See?” She jangles her purse and reaches in, pulling out two EpiPens. “I have two. One for me, and one for your penis.”
I should be in a conference room right now. Million-dollar contracts should be presented before me, arrayed like a fan, with entire divisions of companies hanging in the balance, waiting for my decision. That kind of power is what I handle best. Finding weakness, shoring up strength, making money, making more money—that’s what Declan McCormick does. It’s in my blood. It’s who I am. Power, influence, and authority are my trifecta.
Out here, in nature, where a single insect could steal the most precious being in my life away from me, though, none of that matters.
Not one shred of power can stop Shannon from dying because of a single random goddamn drop of poison on a bee’s ass.
And I can’t do anything about that. The fucking bee wins.
Sure, she has those EpiPens in her hand, and we can race to a hospital again. I could cloister her and make her stay inside eight months out of the year, living in constant fear like my brother.
Or I could walk away. Break it off. I have every right. This hits too close. My mother died and Shannon has the exact same vulnerability and it’s killing me that no matter how many millions I have in the bank, no matter how many businesses rely on my decisions for sustenance, no matter how many people I control, I have to place my heart in Shannon’s hands and trust that everything will be fine. My life with her stretches out into a captivating eternity, and if she doesn’t walk the entire journey with me because of a bee appendage no bigger than a splinter, I—
I don’t know.
I have no other option.
She walks around the SUV, takes the keys out of my open hand, beeps the locks, and starts walking down the trail. She’s a hundred feet or so ahead of me before I choose to take a step toward her, willing myself to stop scanning the air for bees like a Special Ops dude on a mission.
“My penis,” I call out to her, “doesn’t swell up when it gets bitten.”
Just then, two hikers come out from around an enormous oak tree. I pretend not to notice them as I catch up to Shannon. They’re snickering. That’s okay. I’m accustomed to public ridicule being par for the course when it comes to being with Shannon. Remember #HotSanta?
“Your penis,” Shannon says under her breath as we continue the walk up the hill toward the meadow where we first began to make love and she almost died. Those two phrases really shouldn’t be in the same sentence. Ever.
“My penis what?” It responds to sound and is listening intently. She leaves those two words hanging.
She pauses and reaches into her back pocket, pulling out her phone. It’s buzzing. I groan.
She reads the screen. “Carol. Can I come and watch her kids for an hour while she does a quick mystery shop?”
I groan louder.
“Or,” Shannon asks pointedly, “she says I could do the shop for her instead.” Shannon’s eyelashes flutter and she looks at me with mischief. “It’s a dropped sex toy shop. The mystery shopper who was supposed to do it was a no show. Carol has no choice. In fact,” she adds, trying to butter me up with a coquettish look, “I was doing nine dropped mystery shops the morning I met you.”
I narrow my eyes and try to stare her down.
She doesn’t budge.
Damn. That used to work.
“You and Greg promised me you’d stop doing shops,” I say, knowing I’m full of it, because any day now Greg’s going to beg her to do the fake restaurant shop for me.
“You’re right,” she says, tapping away on the screen.
“What are you typing?” I can see the edge of the field where we can walk to privacy. Shannon grabbed the backpack with our blanket in it as she got out of the SUV, and I have a condom in my wallet....
“I just let her know we’re on our way to pick up Tyler and Jeffrey to take them out for ice cream while Carol does the mystery shop.”
I look at the field.
I look at Shannon.
The Field of Dreams in one direction.
The Children of the Corn in the other.
My shoulders slump and I start walking back to the SUV. “Fine,” I say as she lifts an imaginary chain attached to a body part and leads me off to babysit.
Chapter 6
“When are you going to be my uncle?” Jeffrey demands as we walk through the front door to Carol’s apartment.
I look at him. He can’t stop grinning and giggling. Wait a minute. Something’s off.
“Marie!” I say in Resting Asshole Baritone. “I know you’re here somewhere! How much did you pay him to ask me that?”
Shannon pulls a one-dollar bill out of her pocket and stage whispers as she hands it to him. “Nice try.”
“Grandma paid me five buckth. You’re cheap, Thannon.” She gives him a huge hug in spite of the insult. I give him a high five, not for the uncle comment but because I can admire a budding entrepreneur. Jeffrey may be my investment banker someday if he keeps this up.
And my nephew, too.
“You need a hug,” Tyler announces from the hallway, the corners of his mouth turned down in sadness.
I bend down and open my arms.
He screeches, “I will not! I will not!” Carol comes rushing to my rescue as Tyler offers himself to Shannon for an embrace.
“Let me guess,” I say slowly, puzzling through the intricacies of Tyler’s language disorder. “He was really saying ‘I need a hug’ and he was saying it to Shannon.’”
“Good! You’re becoming increasingly fluent in Tylerish!” Carol chirps. She looks so much like a young Marie that I worry about Dad meeting her one day.
Which would be, most likely, at our wedding rehearsal dinner.
Wedding.
Proposal.
“He’s actually fluent in Russian. Remember?” Shannon winks at me.
“Chuckles smells like a pickled egg shoved inside a rotting gerbil,” I say in Russian.
Carol freezes and slowly looks at Shannon. Chuckles walks out of the room in a huff. He loves me. I know he’ll forgive me, but I’ll check my shoes before I slip them on when I’m here.
“You get the hot billionaire and he speaks Russian? All I got was a tattoo’d musician/internet marketer wannabe with an entitlement complex who left me in credit card debt hell.”
Shannon shrugs.
“He has two brothers!” Marie calls out from the back room. “Isn’t that perfect? You have two sisters, Shannon, and Declan has two brothers.”
“If you and my dad married, Shannon and I would be stepsiblings,” I say.
Marie turns pale as Jason walks into the room. Do these parents ever spend time in their own homes?
“What’s this about Marie marrying your father?” Jason asks, the corner of his mouth twitching. At first, I think he’s trying not to smile, but then I see the clenched jaw. The tight fists. He’s angry.
“Declan was making a joke. It’s not funny,” Shannon says. I, on the contrary, think the look on Marie’s face is hilarious.
“Why are we babysitti
ng when Marie and Jason are here to help out?”
“I have to go to work, and Marie’s scheduled for the mystery shop with Carol,” Jason explains. “Otherwise I’d invite you over to my place for a brew.” He’s wearing a paint-streaked t-shirt, jeans, and flip-flops. At his house, he doesn’t even bother with the flip flops most of the time. Jason’s as casual as my father is formal. They’re a study in contrasts.
Marie looks at me with a pained expression in those bright blue eyes. “Declan? A word in private?”
My hands are in my pants pockets, fingers touching the phone I paid $700 to get out of that kid’s hands in the moment. I offered $300 but he countered with a grand. Negotiating with my naked front covered by a Strawberry Shortcake pillow from Shannon’s childhood left me in a woefully weak bargaining position.
“Private?” I say quietly to her. “Is there such a thing as privacy with you?”
The barb makes her flinch. Jason’s watching us carefully, and I see his shoulders tense. I’m treading on very unstable ground here, but I don’t give a shit.
Then again, I do. I should. With a pending proposal and a commitment to be a member of this family for the rest of my natural life, the part of me that defaults to sarcastic zingers might need to pull back. In the McCormick family, fluency in Sarcasmish is a requirement.
While Shannon’s family is full of one-liners and witty jokes, there’s no razor edge to the words. Feelings are easily hurt. People here actually have real emotional reactions to painful words.
There’s no wall like the one I was taught to build, brick by brick.
Sting by sting.
Marie nods toward a small bedroom to the right. It must be Carol’s, and I realize that in a year and a half of dating Shannon I’ve never been in this room before. The walls are covered with giant maps, beautiful, textured, nuanced maps of each continent. No country names—no words at all. Just a visual, the oceans made of a very pale seawater green, the continents a muted rainbow of varying shades of beige, green and brown.
I’m staring, and Marie’s watching me, a proud smile on her face. “Carol’s a mixed-media artist in her spare time.”
“She has two kids and a job and has spare time?” I ask. “According to Shannon, Carol doesn’t have time to shower most days.”