Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112961 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112961 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
“Very.” I put my hand atop Juno’s head and bend to meet her eyes. “I’ll be right back.”
And with that, I duck into the crowd.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, we are inside, holding beers in the small suite the venue executive who once asked to be called Doctor in bed booked for us, and watching a delighted Juno and Stevie dance on the glass-enclosed balcony to music being piped through the speakers before the show begins.
Connor is smiling at me like I’m a superhero, but really all it took was dragging the bewildered security team to the entry gate where an enormous cluster of people were cutting in line and wedging in ahead of everyone. Once they sorted that situation, concertgoers started filing in, happily organized.
“You could have been trampled,” he says now.
“Unlikely.” I sip my beer, wiping away the foam on my lip. “When I’m determined, I look much bigger. I bet I was at least six foot two walking through that crowd.”
“Aren’t you afraid of anything?”
I laugh when Juno and Stevie begin pretending to twerk. These tiny dummies. “No.” And then I reconsider, looking up at him. “Wait, yes. I’m afraid that at some point in the past I’ve accidentally FaceTimed someone while masturbating and they are too mortified and polite to ever tell me, so I will live out the rest of my life not knowing whether I actually did that but always suspecting that I have.”
Connor stares blankly down at me.
“What?” I ask. “Don’t you ever worry about that?”
He smiles, shaking his head as he tips his plastic cup to his mouth.
A rare flush of self-consciousness takes root. I know I’m a lot to take, and I suspect if Connor found me unbearable, he wouldn’t ever let on. He couldn’t. He’d grin and bear it, maybe just like he is right now. He has to put up with me because he wants this show to work, and he wants this show to work because if it doesn’t, he’s out of a job and likely has to move two hours away from his daughter, this tiny bundle of barely contained energy, dancing over there like a sparkler on New Year’s Eve.
“Sorry,” I mumble into my cup.
“For what?”
“The masturbation thing,” I whisper, and then add with a smile, “And the Kendall Roy joke at the soccer game. You are not nearly that broken.”
This makes him laugh. “Don’t be so sure. And now I’m wondering if I’ve ever accidentally FaceTimed someone during a wank.”
I look over at him, grateful at his attempt to ease the tension, but emotionally obliterated by the mental image that’s now being projected in HD in my brain.
Connor shrugs, taking another sip of his beer, and affection clutches at me as I register yet again how easy he is to be around and how much I genuinely like him.
The words are out before I’ve given them time to marinate: “Sorry about the other night, too.”
“The oth— Oh.” And now tense awareness falls like shrapnel from the sky. Connor contemplates something in the distance, squinting. “Yeah, no. You don’t have to apologize for that.”
“Yes, I do.”
I do everything I can to not fill the answering quiet with jokes or innuendo or even remarks about the weather. I just stew in the awkwardness of it, wanting him to know that I’m capable of gravitas and sincerity, even if I am outwardly terrible at both.
“I declined for several reasons,” he says finally, and my mortification bottoms out to dungeon levels.
“Please don’t feel obligated to list them.”
He turns to face me, expression sober. “But none were because I wasn’t interested. I’m sorry if I didn’t make that clear.”
“Oh.” I have to break eye contact from those hypnotic, fresh-leaf eyes. Suddenly my brain is nothing but the static white noise of a thousand sexy songs blaring over each other. Connor has no idea that he’s toying with barely controlled fire, that flirtation is my love language, and that I haven’t gotten laid in a very, very long time. Frankly, I was just being polite by apologizing.
“Tell me about Jess and River,” he says, blessing us both with an escape route. “How do you know them?”
“Jess and I have been friends forever. River used to come into our coffee shop every morning and they’d do this whole Pride and Prejudice flirt-but-not-flirt thing. It was entertaining but ultimately exhausting. I forced her to do the DNADuo. I’m telling you, if it wasn’t for me, she’d still be single. I should get a finder’s fee.”
“I wasn’t really paying attention to the technology yet when the company first launched,” he says, “but they had a very high match, right?”
“Diamond—a score of ninety-nine, in fact, still the highest score in company history. The executives actually paid her to get to know him. Honestly, I couldn’t have written a better happily ever after myself.”