I Pucking Love You

by Pippa Grant

  Tyler: *gif of a dude saying FUCK YOU ALL*

  Dad: I’ve got a lovely buffalo coconut in my butt.

  Brit: Seriously, Ty, who died? And are you okay?

  Allie: Why didn’t you tell us? You know we wouldn’t have let you go to a funeral alone.

  Keely: That’s exactly why he didn’t tell us.

  Daisy: Don’t worry. West and I are on the way.

  Tyler: Why do I even talk to you?

  Keely: Because you know we’d have your back in the zombie apocalypse.

  Allie: I really didn’t think Keely would be the one to follow in Mom’s footsteps, but there she goes with another not-dead grandpa joke.

  Brit: OH MY GOD. Tyler. It’s a woman, isn’t it? You’re dating someone! Who is she? What’s her name? When do we get to meet her? Are you bringing her home for Christmas? Is she a bunny, or is she someone else? Wait! Wait! Are you dating one of your teammates’ sisters? OH MY GOD. You’re dating the coach’s daughter and you’re trying to make a good impression, aren’t you?

  Tyler: *picture of a skinny white guy with big glasses* Haha! Psych. I stole this phone. This is me. I’m Bernard. You guys sound like fun. Will you adopt me? I’ll send you my real number.

  Dad: That’s a funny Grand Canyon of a vagina, Tyler, my favorite son, god of the sun and moon, he who bangs best.

  Dad: Grand Canyon of a vagina.

  Dad: WHO CHANGED MY PHONE TO INSULT YOUR YO-YO MA’S SEX TAPE?

  Dad: BEEEEEEEEEEEP.

  Keely: OMG, I’m wheezing.

  Allie: My favorite part of this is that Tyler’s going to get blamed for changing the autocorrect setting in Dad’s phone. Again.

  Brit: I can’t believe no one changed “joke” in his phone before now.

  Dad: I CAN STILL SEE YOUR MESSAGES.

  Keely: Let’s hope Ty’s new girlfriend doesn’t tell jokes, or Dad might autocorrect insult her vagina too.

  Tyler: Wow, this family is really inappropriate. I like it. So will my mom. I’m thirteen.

  Brit: You tried that last year, Ty. Same fake selfie and everything. We’re not buying it.

  Keely: Also, if you don’t want us to ask about your girlfriend, the best course of action is to stay silent in group texts.

  West: I can confirm this battle strategy. *thumbs up emoji*

  Allie: OMG. West. It was YOU! You changed Dad’s phone, didn’t you? It’s always the quiet, serious ones.

  Brit: Don’t let him distract you, Allie. We’re talking about Tyler’s dating life.

  Keely: It’s like eleven at night there. If he had a girlfriend, he’d be getting busy with her, not texting with us.

  Brit: Good point. You need advice, T? We’re here for you.

  Keely: I can call Staci and type in her opinions. I’d do that for you.

  Allie: No, don’t bother Staci. She’s been waiting on Javi all day.

  Dad: That man’s poor balls.

  Brit: Hey, Tyler disappeared again.

  Daisy: Maybe he’s having happier balls than Javi is.

  The bathroom door opens, and I hit the power button on my phone. Part of me is pissed that I hit the wrong conversation in text and ended up getting ambushed by my sisters, and the other part of me is pissed that I wasn’t the one who changed the settings in Dad’s phone to mess with the word “joke.”

  That should’ve been a no-brainer with Mom being out on her Does This Joke Have Ketchup On It? tour.

  Also, I’m not leaving my phone unattended the next time I’m home.

  Maybe I won’t take my phone at all.

  Except it was very helpful in getting us around Richmond tonight. Can’t use apps to get rides if you don’t have a phone.

  Muffy steps into view from the short hallway, looks at my face, then my chest, and twists her head up and away so fast she probably snapped something in her neck.

  She’s in a Thrusters t-shirt that hugs her breasts.

  No bra.

  Plain black pajama shorts. Curvy thighs. Adorable knees.

  Adorable knees?

  Fuck.

  I have a problem.

  Was she the one playing footsie with me at the restaurant?

  Or was that Veda?

  Had to be Muffy, unless Veda’s into hitting on her friends’ dates of convenience, and I didn’t get that vibe off her.

  She hustles to her side of the bed, shoving her dress into her luggage quickly on the way, hits the light on her side, and eyeballs her pillow.

  This bed isn’t remotely big enough for me by myself, much less two human beings.

  I pointedly shift until my hip is right at the edge, then gesture to the space left.

  Yeah, I’m a dick.

  She has like three inches.

  And if that’s three inches, I used to have two-foot boners, back when my junk worked.

  “The switch is by the door!” She darts back to the door, fiddles with the deadbolt and the chain, then plunges the room into total darkness.

  Two seconds later, there’s a clank, then— “Ouch!”

  “Watch out for the furniture.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Obvious.”

  She grips my foot, then yanks her hand away. “Sorry. It’s dark.”

  “I noticed.”

  The bed creaks and sags as she sits on the other side of it. Sheets rustle. The bed shakes.

  Her leg brushes mine and jerks away just as fast, but not fast enough.

  My dick has just gotten its second jolt of juice in under two hours. It’s like watered-down apple juice, the stuff my sisters give to their kids, instead of high-octane, full-strength energy drink, but I will literally take any movement at all in the cock area right now.

  “Could you maybe be a side-sleeper so you take up less room?” she whispers.

  Could I? Probably. “What’s it worth to you?”

  “Never mind. This is fine. We’re adults. We can accidentally touch in our sleep, and the world won’t end. Thank you. I don’t think I’ve said that enough. I really appreciate that you were here for me today, and I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you we were going to a funeral. I didn’t think anyone would go if they knew it was for a funeral. But if I knew you didn’t like funerals that badly, I would’ve told you. I swear.”

  It’s weird how a not-simple thank you can make you feel like a complete slug. Probably because she keeps thanking me like if she doesn’t, I’ll sneak out of here in the middle of the night and leave her to go alone tomorrow. “That’s what friends are for.”

  I definitely would not be here if I’d known this was a funeral. I’ve successfully avoided funerals for over twenty years, and going to a stranger’s was not in the life plan.

  But I won’t abandon Muffy.

  I can’t.

  I like her too much to want her to suffer on her own.

  Dammit.

  “Are we friends?” She’s still whispering like she’s afraid her mother’s down the hall and might overhear us.

  I flop onto my side to face her, making the entire bed shake and the headboard rattle against the wall. “I don’t know, Muffy. Are we? You have secrets. I have secrets. We had sex. It was bad for you. You tricked me into coming to a funeral. Your friend played footsie with me all through dinner. Does that—”

  “Veda was playing footsie with you too?”

  I smile into the darkness.

  So it was Muffy.

  “No. Only you. Just checking to see how you would’ve felt if I was into her.”

  “Do not hit on Veda. She got out of a long-term relationship a month ago, and now she’s—never mind.”

  They must’ve talked a lot while I was on the phone with Daisy, because I was under the impression Muffy had no idea what Veda’s relationship status was.

  “Muffy?”

  “What?”

  It’s so easy to get a huffy what? out of a woman sometimes. “I’m yanking your chain. I’m not into Veda.”

  “Oh.”

  “And you’re welcome.”

&n
bsp; She takes a big breath, like she’s about to say something profound, then sighs. “We should get to sleep. Funeral plus long drive home equals sucky day tomorrow.”

  The bed shakes and the headboard rattles the wall again. My eyes are adjusting to the darkness, and I can make out the curve of her neck, up her shoulder, down her arm, over her hip.

  I wonder if she usually sleeps on flat pillows and hard beds, or if she’ll wake up refreshed tomorrow.

  “I had a bad experience with a not-dead body when I was little,” I hear myself say.

  I don’t mean to, but given how much I’ve asked her to tell me today without giving her anything in return—other than passing out at the funeral home—it only seems fair to confide in her.

  And maybe I need to change tactics if I want her to talk to me about whatever it was that happened to her here, and maybe I need to do something nice for her if my dick is ever going to work again.

  The sheets rustle as she half-turns toward me. “Not-dead?”

  “My grandpa had a zombie moment. The whole family was there at the hospital with him. Kidney failure. He flatlined. Everyone cried. The nurses unhooked all the machines, and everyone left, but I stayed because it was sort of morbidly fascinating. Until he…well, he came back to life. He rolled over, gasped once, looked me straight in the eye, said DIE!, and then he died again. He might’ve said Ty. I don’t know. I just know he died, again, with his eyes and his mouth open, staring straight at me, and it was the fucking scariest thing I’ve seen in my entire life. My mom thought my dad had me, and my dad thought my mom had me, and they left me at the hospital, so I had to sit outside the room with a hospital security guard while they tracked my parents down. When they transported my grandfather’s body out of the room, the whole thing was shaking like the casket did tonight, and I—I don’t like death, okay?”

  “Oh my god.”

  “I don’t watch zombie movies. Or movies where there are corpses. I can’t even make it past the first sequence in Up.”

  “Oh my god,” she whispers again. “So at the funeral home—with the casket moving—you basically—”

  “Man down. Yeah.”

  “I’m so sorry. I should’ve told you where we were going. I didn’t know.” She strokes my face, then freezes like she’s realized she’s touching me, and she jerks back. “Sorry,” she stammers again.

  I’m sorry too, because I wouldn’t mind if she kept touching me, but I’ve been giving her all the right leave me alone signals. “I knew where we were going by the time we got back to the funeral home.”

  “But what were you going to do, wait in the car?”

  I don’t answer.

  I wanted to wait in the car.

  But when Muffy ran into that guy and went the same pallor as my dead grandfather, there was no way I could bail on her.

  You don’t abandon friends just because you don’t want to come face-to-face with a dead body.

  Even when you don’t know what the whole story is with why they don’t want to be there in the first place.

  If she’d said I don’t want to go to a funeral, that’s one thing.

  Who doesn’t get that?

  But there’s more to this story.

  “It’s my turn, isn’t it?” she says in the darkness.

  “Are we taking turns?” Are we friends? Do I want to be friends with Muffy?

  Holy hell. I think I do.

  But she’s suddenly still as actual death.

  Not kidding. I’m starting to sweat.

  After a moment, she takes a deep breath. “I was drowning in student loans and credit card debt and I didn’t get matched for a residency so I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do for a job or money or if I’d ever be able to be a doctor at all, because without a residency, you can’t become a doctor, so I auctioned off my virginity and then couldn’t follow through because—just because—and then I was so mortified that I left town and never came back. I didn’t even get my clothes from my apartment. I just went.”

  No small part of me is nodding along, thinking this makes sense because it’s Muffy, but who does that? “Seriously?”

  “No more talking. And if you ever repeat that to Kami, or anyone, I’ll—okay, I don’t know what I’ll do except for probably move to another state, without my clothes again, and start over with a new name, which I can do, because I am friends with senior citizen criminals who can help with that sort of thing.”

  It’s weird to have a woman in my bed, on the verge of tears, and not have an overwhelming impulse to leap away. “Why did you…” I trail off, because I can’t make myself form the words to ask the question I want to ask.

  I couldn’t ask my sisters the same question.

  Not that any of them ever would’ve done what she did. I don’t think.

  “I got the idea from a book,” she mutters. “And I’d lost a bunch of weight because of stress and I was hot for once, and then my mom found out how much I owed and that I hadn’t found a residency, and she was researching how to sell a kidney, or other things you don’t want to know about, and I think she was serious, especially when she started asking how much kidneys weigh so she’d know how many pounds would come off immediately, so I knew I needed to make some fast cash, and it was what I had, so I decided to see if anyone would bite. Sex is pretty clinical when you get right down to it. Tab A, slot B, right? What’s the big deal if it’s nothing more than going through the motions? Except I couldn’t—I swear, Tyler, if you tell a single soul—”

  “It was the guy you bumped into before the viewing, wasn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “Muffy.”

  “I need us both to believe me right now, okay?” she whispers.

  I want to hit someone. Or something. Specifically that professor. “Was that his wife with him?”

  “Tyler.”

  Fuck. Just fuck. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You never told Veda?”

  “She knows about the auction but she doesn’t know who showed up or what happened after that. No one does except me and that person. No more talking. I only told you because we were doing the friend thing and confessing things that won’t exist in the morning. Plus, some people at the funeral tomorrow might remember that the auction was a thing and say something, even though I tried to be totally anonymous about who I was through the whole thing, which I don’t think I did very well, and I didn’t want to look like the kind of idiot who doesn’t tell her date about the dumb stuff she did in med school, even if nobody knows what happened the night that…the winner…came to collect his debt. And I’m probably moving to Montana as soon as we get back to Copper Valley.”

  My sister Britney got engaged in college to this total dick who always stared at her ass and tits, even when they were visiting us, right in front of my dad and me, but never West, since he was off in the Marines, which explains why the guy’s still alive today. When the jacknugget broke up with her, she spent two weeks crying in her room at home. I remember wanting to punch the guy, but I also remember wanting to punch her.

  Why was she broken-hearted over some asshole who didn’t deserve her?

  The only thing she’d done wrong was to fall in love with a dick, and for the way he treated her, I couldn’t see why it was worth it.

  She told me I’d never understand how women felt about their own self-worth.

  She was right.

  And now I want to punch Muffy’s parents again. Anyone who whispered behind her back in school. Or ever. That dude she ran into, who better not be the guy who tried to buy her virginity.

  Oh, fuck me.

  “Muffy?”

  She flops around in the small bed, her legs brushing mine, her elbow connecting with my gut and making me oof, until she’s facing away. “We should go to sleep.”

  “You weren’t…you know…when we…”

  “I said go to sleep, Tyler. Don’t make me get up and smear cookie crumbs in your she
ets.”

  Dammit.

  “Muffy—”

  “Shut up.”

  Catching up, you idiot? my dick says with a yawn.

  She was a virgin.

  That night, in the fridge at the bunny bar, she was a virgin.

  17

  Muffy

  I’m in the middle of a dream that I’m drowning in regrets in a hot ocean when I wake up to the realization that Tyler Jaeger is spooning me.

  No wonder I’m hot.

  He’s like an ocean. An ocean of lava. And he’s surrounding me.

  Also, his hand is cupping my breast, and my nipple is very much enjoying the human contact. My other nipple is aching for attention too, but my stomach feels like I ate barbed wire and drank gasoline last night, which is overriding my sudden curiosity over whether Tyler also wakes up with morning wood.

  If he does, he’s not poking me with it.

  Is my butt in his crotch?

  Is that why I can’t feel it?

  Was he serious about his penis being broken? Did I actually break his penis? Is my vagina the curse of death? Does it have superpowers that render men impotent?

  Or was I that bad at sex?

  Oh my god, I told him about Dr. Richardson.

  Will he remember? Can I tell him I made it all up because what happened was even worse?

  Would he believe that?

  Probably not.

  Does it get worse than I tried to auction my virginity and couldn’t follow through when my married rheumatology professor showed up in the hotel room?

  I mean, I guess it could be worse if I murdered him and covered up the crime, but that actually is out of character for me.

  Someone bangs on the door. I’m so deep into my head that it scares the crap out of me, and I scream and fall out of bed. I don’t know what Tyler does, but I assume he’s moving too, because the headboard rattles, sheets go flying, and there’s a thump and a “Fuck!”