The primitive sex beast in my vagina wants to know if his muscles are bulging under his coat.
The rest of me is smart enough to tell her to shut up if we want to survive this without a quill to my dog or to any of our faces.
The porcupine isn’t moving at all.
“Good boy,” Grey says to Jitter. “Good puppers. Back. Back we go.”
Jitter eases back onto Grey’s legs and whines.
Grey gets a grip around his body like he can hold back my hundred-pound dog if Jitter decides to charge.
I’m panting.
Grey grabs one of my hands and squeezes through our gloves, still clutching Jitter. “Gonna be okay.”
“I’m supposed to be the experienced mountain woman telling your beach bum ass that,” I whisper back.
“Quit being funny.”
We sit in silence for what feels like an eternity, Grey squeezing my hand and holding my dog until the porcupine eventually decides we’re not a threat and lumbers around the gazebo to climb under it.
“Time to go,” Grey says.
“So time to go,” I agree. “Thank you. For—just thank you.”
He drops my hand and grabs my coffee tumbler, which has leaked all over the ground. I untie Jitter’s leash from the picnic table leg and hold him tight while we scurry back to our cars.
Grey insists on seeing me into mine first, but he holds my door open after both Jitter and I are in the car.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says.
I hold his gaze. “Likewise.”
“You’re playing dirty now?”
“Change might be inevitable, and I might have the utmost respect for you wanting to find peace and closure, but Bean & Nugget serves a vital purpose in our community. I won’t let it go without a fight.”
What he does next startles the crap out of me.
He leans into my car, pecks my cheeks, murmurs, “I hope you find what we need, but even if you don’t, looking forward to every minute of the next twelve days,” and then shuts me inside my car.
My breath whooshes out of me.
It’s game on.
And I don’t know if that’s good or bad.
For either of us.
19
Grey
Sabrina Sullivan has invaded every one of my thoughts at every moment of every day, and it doesn’t matter what I do to try to shake her, she manages to cement herself in there even more firmly.
Worse?
From the moment the words find it left my mouth, hope has taken hold.
Hope that she comes through with an alternate plan to destroy Chandler in a way that I haven’t been able to puzzle out myself.
I’ve been working on it too, but I don’t have the connections or the background knowledge of this town and how he fits in it to have any fresh ideas myself.
Since yesterday morning, the dude-bro’s taking up a lot of space in my head. That five-minute exchange cemented my need to make him pay, not just for what he’s done to me, but to everyone he’s hurt.
Even his wedding getting canceled and him starring as the villain in the world’s most viral video hasn’t changed him.
Since yesterday evening, though, all I can think about is playing dirty with Sabrina.
Kissing the ever-loving hell out of her.
Stripping her out of her clothes.
Licking every square inch of her body.
Making her scream my name in utter ecstasy.
My real name.
And this is a problem.
Because I’m walking around prepared to go Super Vengeance Man while constantly suppressing a hard-on, which makes it hard to think.
You don’t see Thor distracted from saving the world because he’s battling boners.
I’ve sunk to new lows, and I’m now demanding Zen find out every morsel of gossip they can about Sabrina.
I close my eyes, I think about her.
I open my eyes, I think about her.
I go to Bean & Nugget, I think about her.
I get home, I think about her.
I avoid her, I think about her.
I see her, I think about her.
I comp someone’s meal because I heard them compliment another customer, I think about her.
I hold a door for someone, I think about her.
I call the number on the collar of a stray dog sitting outside the café, I think about her.
A less chilly breeze blows, and you guessed it, I think about her.
Fine.
Fine.
I’m destroying Chandler Sullivan because he made Sabrina cry.
Fuck everyone else in town.
He’s going down because he made Sabrina cry.
That’s the bare, simple truth of it.
“You didn’t get anything out of her old gymnastics teacher?” I ask Zen on our way into Bean & Nugget early Tuesday morning.
“I learned I can still do a cartwheel,” Zen reports.
“I meant anything helpful.”
“If you ever need to torture me, you should hold me upside down, because while I can cartwheel like a nine-year-old—that’s all momentum—I can’t handstand to save my life.”
I stop at the back door, hands freezing, toes going numb, and give my nibling a you know that’s not what I mean look.
As usual, Zen is immune, but they smile as they finally give me the information I’m waiting for. “Sabrina Sullivan was mouthy but mostly walked the line of not being too mouthy while being friendly and helpful when she took gymnastics as a kid. She would’ve gone a lot further if she hadn’t twisted her knee in second grade, which her teacher suspected was a fake injury, but could never prove. And she also said if a kid didn’t want to be in gymnastics, then it’s better for them to find what they wanted to do. And considering Sabrina was, in fact, born in the kitchen right next to the sink and basically grew up there, there’s no question Bean & Nugget is where she belongs.”
“It took you five hours last night to find that out?”
“No, I stuck around and did an adult gymnastics class.”
“You did an adult gymnastics class,” I repeat.
“It was fun.”
“You participated.”
“In corduroy pants and a button-down shirt.”
Now I’m the one stopping us from entering the back door when the cold is generally something I’ll avoid at all costs. “And?”
“Does the name Austin George ring a bell?”
I frown. “Is that one of the neighbors who dropped off food?”
They laugh. “Uncle Grey. He’s a gold-medal gymnast from like twenty years ago?”
“Oh.”
“He and his husband run the gym in town now. Bought it like eight years ago. So after Sabrina’s brief rule as the terror of Tooth Gymnastics.”
I bite back the question about how Sabrina’s now a terror. “That doesn’t mean they get the instant Zen seal of approval.”
“Yes, it does.”
“It does?”
“When one of your childhood idols offers to help you do a cartwheel, you do the fucking cartwheel, and then you stay and gossip with all of the fabulous ladies who were there for class before heading to the salon where Sabrina’s mother works for an apparently super late night rendezvous that might’ve been hosted by a local Wiccan who’s Wiccan cool. Heh.”
I refuse to admit how much my entire body perks up at the mention of Sabrina’s name again and how much I don’t really care about the rest of that sentence. “And?”
“And I don’t remember any of their real names, so take this with a grain of salt, but Myrtle has a grandson who just switched college majors for the fourth time, Viola’s Subaru is at that age where she knows it’ll last another ten years, but also, if she sells now, she’ll get a better deal than if she lets it get any older on a trade-in, and Sue Ellen’s daughter seriously needs a divorce, in Sue Ellen’s opinion, but if you ask me, Sue Ellen is a judgmental hag who sees what she wants to see and has no idea what her daughter’s marriage is really all about.”