“Okay.” I called it out to him as he headed for the door and I rushed to order a couple of takeout meals. Two omelets, no tomatoes for him. Hashbrowns. The works.
Then I returned to the page with the flight information and reserved two tickets for us to arrive in California with plenty of time to intercept Felicia at her fundraiser obligation.
Plenty of time. Mav and I weren’t in a rush to figure out what the future held for us.
Plenty of time…
Fourteen
Mav
When I woke, I slid closer to Carly and ran my hand up her smooth back, along her toned upper arm, and then rerouted at her elbow and ended up with my finger tracing light circles above her belly button.
My alarm clock hadn’t gone off yet.
Perfect. We’d have enough time to at least have another round of exploring each other’s bodies and coming again.
Sometime after we’d eaten a tardy dinner, I’d asked her what time our flight was to set an alarm. She’d tossed me her phone to look at what she’d reserved. I’d never known her to be late for work, for picking up Violet and Amber from their club meetings, for anything. Still, I wanted to set my own alarm.
Between glancing at her brushing her teeth and checking the reservation on the screen, I’d managed to hold off pursuing her until I at least found the time of the flight and made an alarm on my phone for an hour before that.
Who knew dental hygiene could be such a turn-on? I’d never nearly lost it when any other woman brushed their teeth. Taking care of yourself is always a sexy trait—or a basic one to get you anywhere with adulting. But she smiled so saucily at me around the brush when she’d noticed she’d captured my attention. And the back-and-forth motions set her bare breasts swaying. Teasing me. Demanding I set our phones down and rush for her.
It was the only time we’d come together all night and didn’t climax, but it was probably the best part of the whole weekend. Slowly kissing each other. Holding her in my arms. Her touching at my wounds like I was a soldier coming home to my personal nurse. Gentleness. It was even more addicting than the frenzy of sex.
“Morning,” I murmured with my lips on her shoulder. God, she tasted so damn good. It’d taken a while for her clean soap and lemon scent to return after not one but two showers.
She slowly stretched and rolled to me, raising her arms up over her head. A wide smile pushed her lips open and she arched her back off the mattress with a yawn.
“Mor-ning,” she drawled.
I lowered my head to kiss the top of her breast and she shoved my head away.
“Not morning!” She scrambled out of the bed after looking at her watch. “It’s almost one o’clock!”
I frowned and reached for my phone on the nightstand, following her off the bed. “It can’t be.”
“Because you tell time to stop and it does. Goddammit! I thought you set an alarm!”
“I did.” I was scrolling to find it now. My stomach dropped when I located it. Um. It was the first time I’d made this mistake since depending on this smartphone for damn near everything. Too much of everything, maybe. Back in the old days, I’d pulled the too-low-volume accident on the alarm clock standing on my bedside table.
I’d never fucked up selecting whether I’d need the six in the morning or six in the evening. And since we’d fallen into bed to sleep sometime around two… My alarm was set to go off in five more hours.
Shit.
“I did. For PM.”
“Goddammit!”
We rushed to get dressed and as I shoved everything into our bags, she dragged her thumb across her phone. I didn’t say anything while she concentrated on finding us a new flight. My purpose would best be served getting us into the rental car and back to the airport as fast as I safely could.
In the car, she didn’t speak, glowering at the phone screen like it better man-up and be held accountable. Anything in the path of her fiery stare would need to bow down and apologize.
Hell, I needed to. Even if we were in this predicament by accident.
“I’m sorry, Carly.”
“Don’t.” She held up her hand. She didn’t have to treat me like I was Violet or Amber and had pulled an unwise stunt.
I was sorry. But I was also human. Mistakes were encoded in our DNA.
“It’s f—”
She roared a yell, more like to herself than me. “This is not fine!”
“Well, it can’t be the end of the world. We’ll get there as soon as we can. And give her the ring.”
“But until last night, there was no deadline. Now there is. And we could miss it.”
I crumpled a little more, chugging along on a guilt trip as I sped down the highway. Optimism held fast, though. “It’s going to work out.”
“There’s a flight that will get us there fifteen minutes after this event is supposed to start.”
“Then get that.”
“It still may not work. I’m sure security will be a bitch to get through. We don’t have invites.”
“We’ll make it work. We’re just a little behind, but we’ll get there.”
“No thanks to you!” She slapped her phone to her lap and turned her glower to me. “This is all your fault.”
Setting a faulty alarm, technically, yes, it was my fault we’d missed our originally planned flight. But I thought I’d done that as a backup to her alarm. Bad move to assume. Yet, I’d been operating on maybe four-fifths of brainpower when I’d set that clock. The other one-fifth had been mesmerized by her brushing her teeth, a fraction of my mental power that was rapidly overtaken completely.
“I’m only human, Carly. I fucked up the alarm clock, fine. I apologized. But I’m not to blame for everything that goes wrong.”
“No?” She crossed her arms and worked her jaw. “Let’s review.”
I tossed a scowl her way.
“You kissed me in New York and got the ring stolen.”
True, but she’d kissed back. “Well, you punched Tito and landed me in the police station.”
She held up her hand as a buffer to my words. “You insisted on going down the path of that mudslide.”
“And you lost your step.”
Now she slapped her palm to her thigh and leaned toward me, as though I wasn’t aware she was bitching at me. “And you slept with me. And got all comfortable and brain dead that you couldn’t even set an alarm.”
Why didn’t you set an alarm?
“We slept with each other!” I twisted my grip on the steering wheel, trying to hold back the words burning to lash out. “You can’t blame me for everything. I get that you’re a homebody and haven’t been with anyone for a long time. But we’re all only human. Just because I’m a man doesn’t mean I’m always the bad guy!”
She was still and quiet, no longer staring at me like I was a ghost of her ex.
“This isn’t the end of the world.”
“But it is work. This weekend has been nothing but a circus of ridiculousness. Working for Richard often is. But this whole…adventure wouldn’t have happened if not for you.”
I set my lips together, keeping my reaction inside before I said something I couldn’t take back. Whether I kept it in my head or spoken out loud, there was no denying it.
She…regretted it all. Every step forward we’d claimed by proving how well we fit together last night, they were lost as we fumbled backward now.
“Being away from home, being stuck together like we have…” She huffed and gripped her hair to keep the curls from her eyes. “It’s made us act out with the excitement. Forget about who we are and how we can barely get along on the best of days in the office. Once we’re done with this and back in Orlando, we won’t have to worry about this insanity.”
Done.
“I’m done.”
She whipped to face me. “You’re…quitting?”
“I need my job. I’m done with you.”
I wasn’t strong enough to take her back and forth anymore. If she’
d discount all the highs and lows we’d gone on this weekend, and circled back to dismissing it as irregular behavior since we were out of routine lives, she’d never consider me having a place in her life.
Why try when she’d only had years perfecting her mistrust? Nothing I could say or do would reverse the fine-tune molding she’d done to wall herself off from anything resembling the utopia we’d found in each other’s arms. If she’d lay all the blame on me all the time, it’d make me bitter despite my love for her. I was blindly in love, but I still cared enough about myself not to take her mental fuckery.
I wasn’t a big enough fan of torture to stack myself up against those odds.
“We’ll get her this ring and go back to the way we were.”
Fifteen
Carly
“I understand it’s last minute,” Mav told the flight attendant, softening his face into a dark-stubbled, charming grin for her, “but I’d really appreciate it if I could have my seat changed.” He made a show of glancing at her nametag. “Whatever you can do, Larissa.”
She smiled as though she hated herself for giving in and clacked on her keyboard. “Well…”
I slid my molars over each other. I couldn’t tell what bothered me more at that moment. The fact he was going out of his way to not have to sit next to me on this flight or that he was so damned skilled at getting this flirty woman to bend to his will.
Was this what “going to back to the way we were” had in store for me? Now that I thought back to the past few months, he hadn’t had many women at his apartment. Amber hadn’t had any comments, being annoyed or peeved with the women he’d chosen to date.
Except, for last night, he’d had me.
Was he doing it to rub it in my face?
I scrubbed my hands over my eyes. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t matter. I had a job to do and that was what I needed to focus on. On me. My life, not fitting my existence in to make a man content.
Since my divorce, I’d slowly but painfully learned I had to. I didn’t have an obligation to shove my needs and goals aside to make my ex’s life easier. I’d learned the hard way, after a lifetime of watching my mother do the same damn thing, that I didn’t have to be second. To be an aside. To be a supporting cast member in a relationship or family. That just because I was a woman, I’d do better with a man to steer my ship.
Fuck that.
I had a job. A smart kid who loved me. Freedom to spend my life as I wanted to. Like being able to…to…binge watch old shows and sleep in whenever I wanted to.
A frown took over my face as we boarded. Had I been bored, lonely over the last week? Seeking companionship in the sudden absence of my daughter, even if her being gone was only temporary?
Maybe.
It was a natural reaction to ripping off the Band-Aid of 24/7 company. A whiplash of landing in solitude. Yeah, it was a hint of how I might be miserable when Violet grows up and has her own life. That was years to come. I had plenty of time to figure that out, ease into being just me again, not a single mom.
As Mav settled in his seat a row ahead and across the aisle from me, I realized I wasn’t truly alone. Not as I thought I could be.
I had my anger with me. My…remorse, as I thought about how his face had freaking crumpled like I’d kicked his cat when I’d said we could go back to how we used to. How we were before I knew what exquisite heaven it could be to bask in his arms after orgasming so hard I lost a little gray matter.
Maybe I’d reacted a little harshly. Been too rash with my words and turned off any censor to my thoughts. But I was never late. Not my periods. Not for any of Richard’s dry-cleaning pickups, Violet’s drop-off lines at school, not anything. I hated impunctuality, which proved miracles did happen, because my best friend couldn’t manage to be on time for anything, ever.
With Richard putting a timestamp and a final deadline to getting Felicia his engagement ring, probably because of some legal date for the trust fund crap, it made it crystal clear for me.
I had to get over this spontaneous excitement of the weekend. From New York to Satan’s woods of mud and spiders. Now to LA. This wasn’t just a trip out of the blue with off-beat complications. This was still work.
Yet, when Mav and I returned to Orlando, it’d still be work. With him. Unless I tried to find a new apartment and pull Violet up from her roots again, he’d be everywhere I looked at home, too.
As the flight attendant lectured us on safety and takeoff procedures, I kept my eyes turned to Mav as he made small talk with the brunette seated at his right.
“He’s done with me?” I whispered to my palm as I covered my mouth.
How could he be when I was always there?
How could he want to be? Despite my blowup, didn’t last night mean as much to him as it had to me? Sure, I was pissed, and rightly so—how does an adult not set a freaking alarm to go off on time?—but it didn’t detract from everything I’d felt last night. I might not know how we’d get along at home, back on our turf and with our real lives, but I did know I wanted to see where we could go.
Regret mounted to the point I felt I’d vomit. I gripped the armrests and tried to steady my breaths at the scaling panic attack choking me.
“Nervous flyer?”
I shook my head at the old man next to me and tried to smile.
But I was torn and confused at what awaited after this flight.
First, I had to make it through the flight. The kind gentleman next to me wasn’t nosy or overbearing, but he must have found a vocation to hunt vampires, because he absolutely reeked of garlic. Then the teenager across the aisle from me knocked her iced coffee not only off her tray but the liquid somehow diverted everything I thought I knew about gravity and dumped onto my lap. In the bathroom, I changed into my last available clothes—aside from the flapper dress—and slipped on a piece of toilet paper on the floor. I exited with a bruise on my elbow and blue dye from the toilet on one half of my right thigh. All the while, I dared Mav to stay talking to that girl in the sorority hoodie next to him. When he’d gotten his bag, probably looking for something, he pulled out that historical romance. I froze, yet he just slipped it aside and continued being chatty with her about something else.
He couldn’t be serious. Could he? She looked like she was twelve freaking years old. Well, not literally. Violet was ten and this big-boobed, smiley stranger was at least an adult. Still…
When did college students start to look like babies?
I grimaced and counted down the minutes to the flight landing at that point.
We finally landed in LA and Mav and I disembarked without speaking to each other. He stayed at my side, walking next to me with a dangerous-looking blank face that the bodyguards he employed usually wore. Even in the Uber we got, we continued the mutual silent treatment.
It killed me not to speak. To berate him again for not at least checking his damn alarm. And why did I assume he’d take care of the waking up deal? I was a responsible adult too. Oh yeah. I hadn’t because I’d been too busy taking responsibility for giving his dick some tender loving—
I clamped my lips shut at the memory and crossed my arms in the car.
Hell, I couldn’t say anything because I didn’t know what to say. And it was a crapshoot of which emotion would filter through first. I didn’t want to fight again before we got Felicia this stupid ring. Who knew what could result from the next explosion.
After our driver brought us to the beach venue that was hosting the event, my hopes of meeting Richard’s deadline plummeted. As star-studded as this place was supposed to be, the security and crowds made sense.
“How are we going to get in?” I asked, clutching my tote bag on my shoulder with one hand and my other around the rings on my necklace.
He stood there, his face stern behind his aviator glasses, and seemed to scan the security personnel. Did he know anyone? Did they have some universal secret fist-bump to guarantee entrance to VIP areas of any event?
“You sai
d she’s volunteering at this?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Then that’s how.”
I frowned at him as he strode toward the doorway that had a banner flapping in the wind over it. From beyond the entrance, an announcement boomed from the distance, the emcee explaining what was coming up next in the day’s agenda.
Volunteer Check In.
But…we weren’t signed up.
“Let me figure something out.” He didn’t wait for my reply and since my acting skills were iffy, I had no issue allowing him to hatch a strategy this time.
I waited behind him, leaning into his strong back and peering around his arm. Woodsy spice assaulted my nose and I narrowed my eyes at the distraction. I’d never be able to smell a pine tree again and remember…all of it. Him. The tent. The driver’s seat of the car. Falling asleep nestled against him after our second shower, inhaling his masculine scent. Christmas would be hell with all the evergreen fragrances spritzing everywhere.
I listened as he convinced the older woman that we were late to our volunteer posts. She was either too old to care about his sexier-than-sin smile, or maybe she preferred women and was immune.
“But, Karen,” her fellow worker said, “we are short two bodies.”
Bodies. Sure, that made this whole fiasco nice and welcoming. We weren’t even people anymore, just bodies. What the hell were they making the volunteers do? Felicia wasn’t into anything extremely heavy like manual labor or anything disgusting—other than camping—that I knew of.
Karen pursed her lips. “Well, they could help out there. In the background.”
Background. Foreground. Middle. Stick me anywhere beyond those gates as long as it would give me a chance to be in the same breathing space as Felicia for thirty seconds. Before… I glanced at my watch. Shit. Before seven. Twenty-seven minutes.
“We’ll do it.”
I jerked to attention at Mav’s words. We’ll do what, exactly? Karen hadn’t explained.
“All right. Follow me, you two.”
And so we headed inside. People milled around in an open audience space and there was a raised, lit-up stage up ahead. I heard the first notes of “Uptown Funk” and couldn’t let the beat take over me like it always did. Okay. Maybe I bobbed my head. It couldn’t be helped.
Next To Me Page 13