I shake my head in mock judgment as I twine my arm around her waist, pulling her closer. “Are you trying to seduce me into buying more ice cream?”
She bats her lashes, a slow sweep up and down that kicks up the heat in the room another notch. “I don’t know, is it working? If so, I was thinking that the Peppermint Stick flavor would taste amazing licked off of certain body parts.”
“Oh yeah?” I ask, teeth digging into my bottom lip. “Like…your foot?”
She nods with a sexy smile. “Or your…elbow.”
My next breath hisses in through my teeth. “Don’t start that in here, Pickett,” I whisper, fingertips digging into the curve of her hip. “You know how hot I get when you talk about licking shit off of my elbows.”
She laughs, fanning her face. “Okay. I’ll stop. It is hot in here. I don’t want to make it any worse.”
She sighs as she reaches for a fresh spoon from a mason jar at our corner of the ice cream bar. “But seriously, sexual favors are on the table if we can take home a pint of every flavor. I don’t think ten pints is too much when you consider that it’s the holiday season and a time of love and good cheer. And what, I ask you, says love and good cheer better than ice cream in the freezer?”
“Maybe the Santa and Mrs. Claus bellies we’ll have after we eat all that ice cream?” I tease, chuckling when she crosses her eyes and sticks out her tongue in response. “Be careful. A smart girl I know once told me your face can stick that way.”
“She wasn’t a girl; she was a woman,” Penny says, lifting her nose into the air as the sample deliveryman reaches our section. “A woman who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to ask for it.”
Before I can tell her how much I love it when she asks for what she wants, the bearded man with the holly suspenders places two small bowls of handcrafted cream in front of us. “All right, folks. Thanks for your patience. Here we’ve got a half-scoop each of another seasonal flavor, Reindeer Droppings.”
Reindeer Droppings.
This is it. The flavor I’ve been waiting for, the only one with pieces of candy in it, candy that could cause a person to choke if they aren’t careful.
Pulse speeding, I casually slide my free hand into the front pocket of my slacks, finding the ring and slipping it onto the tip of my finger. I’ve practiced enough to know I’ll be able to seamlessly slip the ring into my mouth while pretending to take a bite of ice cream, but I’m still nervous. I don’t want Penny to see what I’m up to.
Recreating the time she choked on a fake engagement ring with a real one won’t be nearly as much fun if she catches me and asks why I’m sticking jewelry in my mouth.
“Hot chocolate flavored ice cream,” Beard Guy continues mildly, having no clue I’m about to pop the question, “with a fudge swirl and chunks of malted milk ball candy and toffee bark scattered throughout. All made on site. All sinfully delicious.” He grins as he pats his hands on the bar. “Enjoy.”
“Oh, we will.” Penny’s tongue sweeps across her lips in anticipation as our deliveryman heads off to service other guests. She slips her spoon between her lips, closing her eyes as she savors the first bite, making a sexy moaning sound that momentarily distracts me from my purpose.
But I’ve recovered and am about to launch Operation Heimlich Maneuver Proposal when Penny’s brow furrows and her eyes fly open. She coughs, covering her mouth with her fist, then coughs again, harder than before.
“You okay?” I ask, sliding my hand from her hip to her back.
She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I just—” She breaks off with another cough. “My throat is so tight and my tongue is on fire.”
“Let me ask for more water.” But before I can signal to one of the servers behind the counter, her spoon clatters to the bar.
I turn back to her to see her hands grip the base of her throat and her eyes slide closed. A second later her knees buckle and she sags against me.
I curse, terror flooding through me as I catch her beneath the arms and guide her down to the ground. In the few seconds it takes to realize that she’s unconscious and in trouble, my mouth fills with the taste of panic and metal, my heart does its best to punch a hole through my ribs, and my stomach turns inside out. My throat clenches and the back of my tongue goes rigid and when I turn to shout for someone to call 911, it feels like I’m choking on the words.
The first time, no one hears me over the roar of conversation, laughter, and the clinking of spoons.
The second time, I pull in a deep breath and shout like a madman, “Hey! My girlfriend is unconscious. You in the red sweater.” The man in question jabs a thumb at his chest, not looking nearly as upset as I would expect him to be after seeing a woman out cold on the floor. “Yeah you,” I snap. “Call 911! Tell them there’s a woman here who passed out after a bite of ice cream. No known allergies and she’s breathing but I don’t—”
The sweater man chuckles and his date, a rosy-cheeked woman with dreads, lifts a hand to cover her mouth in a half-assed effort to conceal her smile.
I’m about to lose my shit on them—Penny is in trouble and I will fucking kill them both if the time they’re wasting ends up hurting her—when Penny shifts in my arms.
“Relax, Bash,” she says, patting my shoulder as she sits up. “I’m okay. No one needs to call 911.”
My forehead wrinkles hard enough to send pain flashing through my temples, but before I can ask Penny what the fuck is going on, she puts a hand to my lips.
“Before you freak out, I want you to think about how you felt when you thought I was in trouble, even for just a minute.” She holds my gaze before her eyes dip pointedly to my left hand. “And then think about whether pretending to choke on that engagement ring on your pinkie finger was really such a great idea.”
I freeze, jaw unclenching as I realize what’s happened. “Francis and Eddie sold me out.”
Penny shakes her head. “No, my mom sold you out. She reads the twins’ e-mail.”
“That’s shitty,” I say, fear slowly transforming to mortification.
“It’s normal,” Penny says, lips curving gently. “They’re only nine years old. And clearly not the best judges of perfect plans. Did it ever occur to you three that the rest of the innocent people in here might be scared to see a man pretending to choke?”
“Right. Um, well…yes. Maybe.” I shift my gaze, glancing back at the people gathered around us, sensing that this will probably end up being one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. “But I figured it would be over before anyone had a chance to get upset.”
“We’re not upset,” Red Sweater Man says. “Your girlfriend wrote a note warning everyone of what was going to happen. We got them with our tasting menus.”
“Now we just need to know if you’re going to say yes,” his date says, grinning as she leans in to squeeze his arm.
I blink, but before I can rally and remember all those romantic things I planned to say after fake-choking on the engagement ring, Penny is kneeling in front of me, pulling a plain silver band out of her back pocket
“Clearly, you need me around to keep you from doing dumb stuff,” she says, a tentative smile spreading across her face as she holds the ring up between us. “And I need you for lots and lots of things. Like making me laugh and making me happy and making me excited to wake up every day to see what kind of fun we’re going to have together. Because I never have more fun than when I’m with you. You’ve changed my life so much. And all of it for the better.”
She pulls in a shaky breath as her eyes begin to glisten. “Because you’re not just about the good times. You’re there when I’m sad and when I’m ashamed and when I’ve forgotten, just for a little while, how lucky I am. But you always make me remember. I am so grateful for you, for us, and for every day I get to spend with my best friend. And I really hope tonight you’ll make me the happiest girl in Brooklyn.”
I swallow hard, fighting the unexpected stinging at the backs of my eyes. “By letting
you take home ten pints of ice cream?”
Her breath huffs out, but she’s smiling when she nods. “Yes, by letting me take home ten pints of ice cream. And saying that you’ll be mine. Forever.”
“Forever sounds about right,” I say, before adding in a softer voice, “Yes, Penny Pickett, I will marry you and spend the rest of my life feeling like the luckiest bastard in the world.”
I pull her in for a hug and then a kiss while the tasting room erupts in applause.
Penny and I finally manage to stop making out long enough to get our engagement rings slipped onto their respective fingers. Mine fits perfectly. Hers is a little loose, but she says she’ll fix that by eating more ice cream. And we laugh and pretend we aren’t crying a little, too, and finish eating our mostly melted Reindeer Droppings and three more fantastic flavors that are not nearly as fantastic as my girl.
My fiancée.
This amazing woman who will one day soon be my wife.
By the time we head for home, with ten pints in a freezer bag held between us, I’m already accustomed to the new weight around my finger and looking forward to all the wonderful things to come. Like wedding cake tasting and wedding ice cream tasting and being married to my best friend.
My love. My Penny.
Check out Aidan’s story in
SPECTACULAR RASCAL by Lili Valente
Available Now.
Visit Lili at www.lilivalente.com
1
New Orleans, Louisiana
At what point did hashtags become an acceptable form of conveying that one has, in fact, terminated a relationship?
Seated at her vanity mirror-turned-office space, Lizzie Danvers stared at her phone, a glass of wine on the desk beside her mason jar of ride-or-die makeup brushes. The brushes were top of the line—her bread and butter—thanks to her career as a beauty influencer. The wine was necessary because, well, she’d just been dumped over Instagram. Publicly. With creatively used hashtags. And a photo of a superimposed red X over her face.
“Who does that?” she muttered as she reached blindly for her wine. At the rate she downed the pinot grigio, she’d be better off drinking straight from the bottle.
But desperate times called for desperate measures, and this was desperation at its finest.
The damn photo had been liked no less than thirty-thousand times in the last twenty-five minutes since Scott had posted it. With each minute that passed, the comments doubled, tripled, quadrupled. And Lizzie watched them all unravel down the screen like something out of a horror movie.
In other words, the horror movie that was now her life.
Because her ex, another YouTuber, had followers, and lots of them.
You never should have trusted a gamer.
Yeah, that’d been her first mistake. Her friends had warned her about Scott Manson. The thirty-five-year old might have the face of an angel, and the voice of a fallen angel, but he was slick. Real slick. And, sure enough, Lizzie had fallen for his charms—including his promise that he was good with his hands.
Considering he spent all day thumbing a controller, she’d figured it had to be true. Ha.
The only thing Scott did well with his hands was play World of Warcraft and jerk himself off.
Which made his public dumping even more ridiculous because the jerk had seen fit to claim that Lizzie was hopeless in the sack, that she’d bored him, and . . .
She squinted at the photo’s caption, her gaze tracking the words for the twentieth time:
It is with sad regret that I announce my split from Lizzie Danvers, otherwise known as ThatMakeupGirl across social media. In case you’re wondering why, let’s just say that a man likes to be pleased. In bed. From a woman who not only knows what she’s doing but is more exciting than a ball of cheese. Mansonites, you know how much I hate cheese, so this says a lot. Anyway, let’s just put it this way: #terminated #MansoniteGaming #betteroffwithoutyou #singleforlyfe #ihatewingedliner #shallowbytches
Lizzie honestly didn’t know what she found more appalling—the fact that he hated cheese (this should have been her first tip-off), that he couldn’t spell worth a damn, or that he thought her shallow.
She wasn’t going to touch the bad-in-bed comment. Clearly, he was delusional.
But as for the shallow bit . . . Sure, she got heat all the time for applying makeup for a living. Lizzie heard it all—airhead, bimbo, waste of space. Whatever. If she could make young women and men feel confident about their looks, to enhance and show off their already beautiful features, and still make money doing so, then she didn’t care what anyone called her.
Sticks and stones, and all that jazz.
But this—this was bad.
This was potentially career-ending. It was nearly midnight; by the next morning, she had no doubt that Scott’s post would be trending everywhere. The people loved him. Lizzie did not.
After another sip of wine . . . Oh, who was she fooling? She chugged the glass. One swallow. One loud hiccup. One drunken swipe of her hand across her mouth.
Really, she should leave well enough alone.
Be the bigger woman.
Prove to the world that she didn’t care if Scott Manson died with only his right hand for company.
Not her problem.
She’d planned to dump him anyway. He’d only sped up the process.
Another comment popped up, and she recognized the username, sunsetgurl, as one of her die-hard followers.
You just gonna take it like that @ThatMakeupGirl??!
Lizzie traced her finger around the rim of her glass.
Was she? Was she just going to sit back and let one “playboy” embarrass her like this? It wasn’t her heart smarting; in all honesty, in four months of dating Scott, she’d learned pretty quickly that he wasn’t The One. But he’d charmed her into believing that he was different than her string of exes—in other words, troubled bad boys who never shaped up into men worthy of a painful Brazilian wax, let alone a long-term relationship.
She was over charmers.
She was over bad boys—those who were wannabes and those who were the real deal.
Maybe she was overreacting. Maybe she was too drunk to think clearly.
But she did know that sunsetgurl was right; she was not going to take Scott’s public humiliation like the quiet victim. Yeah, not happening. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.
Lizzie hadn’t spent the last decade, since the very day she’d turned twenty, creating a recognizable brand to just hang her head and retreat from her business when the flames flickered. She stood up for herself, always.
And right now, it was necessary to show the world that Scott’s words hadn’t clawed at her pride. She was unfazed, in every way that mattered, and there was no better way to prove that than to hop onto her home-away-from-home and deliver that message to the masses.
YouTube, here she came.
Launching up from her chair, she set up her equipment—or as much as she cared to do at midnight. Ten minutes later, she had a full glass of wine, a swipe of gloss on her lips, and a burning fire to do some major damage.
Petty isn’t a good look, girl.
Yeah, well, Petty hadn’t ever been #terminated via Instagram.
Desperate times.
She cast a quick glance in her mirror, fluffed her caramel-accented brown hair, and flicked on the recording button.
Game on.
She smiled brilliantly at the camcorder, which sat on a tripod behind her laptop.
“Hey, dolls!” More smiling. Wider. Toothier. Screw you, Scott Manson. “Today’s video is a little bit different. For one, I’m not coming to you with a Chit Chat Get Ready With Me or a full face glam tutorial. Nope, by the time this video goes live, you will all have seen that I was dumped. Epically.” Lizzie held up a hand as though warding off her viewers’ gasps of horror—she was so accustomed to speaking to the camera like her fans were physically present that it was truly second nature.
She sipped her wine for li
quid encouragement.
“So, here’s the thing. We all know that on my channel, I’m all about self-confidence. Loving yourself first, and treating yourself with respect. Well, dolls, that’s still the case tonight, but after what I just saw, I have to take a stand. Why is it ‘funny’”—she threw up air quotes—“for a man to completely tear at a woman on social media? I’ve been reading these comments, y’all, and if I weren’t so secure in myself, they’d be enough to throw me into a depression.”
You are drinking by the glassful.
Lizzie purposely took another sip of wine.
“Slut shaming is not okay, dolls.” She pointed her glass at the camera, absently noting the way the liquid sloshed violently against the side. “It’s never okay. Have some respect.”
Swallowing against the hurt, Lizzie shoved her chin up and narrowed her eyes. She saw herself in the viewfinder, and she wondered who that angry woman was staring back. A woman scorned, that’s who. Her caramel hair was still curled perfectly from early that morning and her foundation hadn’t budged, thanks to a facial setting spray she’d tried out for an upcoming First Impressions video.
But when she met her blue eyes . . . yeah, that angry person wasn’t her.
Lizzie had spent a lifetime working to keep a level head. To the outside world, she was Bubbly Lizzie Danvers. Flirty Lizzie Danvers. That was her brand. At this point, it was her, although sometimes she wished that weren’t the case.
Tonight, her eyes told a different story.
Glittering (and not because of her duo-chrome eye shadow) and rimmed with black liner, she looked ready to kick some ass. Scott Manson’s ass. The ass of every bad boy in the world who’d wronged her, stood her up, called her an idiot, and deemed her a “shallow bytch” because she loved makeup, who treated her as though she was only good for what existed between her legs.
When she’d first started on YouTube, she hadn’t realized all that would come with it—including all the man-whores who deemed her an easy lay.
Vote Then Read: Volume III Page 264