“What was Fallon right about?” Hope asked.
“That you’d all be wasted, and no one would be sober enough to pull proper guard shift.”
“Hey, I shot a beer can off a fuckboy’s head while sloshed a week ago. I mean, I took off a little skin. But he needed to be humbled anyway,” Layna told Danny.
“I feel like I missed a lot of the fun,” Danny declared, reaching for an egg roll off the table where Willa currently had her hand planted, trying to stop the world from spinning.
It was refreshing to see her let loose a little. I wasn’t sure I knew anyone aside from Hope who worked as hard as Willa did. Except Hope got to be on the road or on the move a lot. Willa was in an office from before sunup until after sundown, trying to build an empire for herself.
You wouldn’t know that from looking at her with her suit jacket off and her blouse unbuttoned most of the way down because she was hot from the vodka, revealing the delicate peach lace bra. Her expensive shoes were kicked across the room. Her brown hair with heavy blonde highlights that she usually kept pulled back mercilessly was loose to fall in waves around her shoulders, framing her pretty face with her slightly upturned nose and her pretty blue eyes.
I worried about her not having any sort of work/life balance.
She always shot back that I worked a lot too.
The difference was, my job gave to me as much as it took from me. I wasn’t so sure about Willa’s job. It gave her money, sure. Boatloads of it. But it seemed to drain her a lot of the time. I didn’t know what it was going to take for her to slow down and realize there was more to life than charging up the corporate ladder, but I hoped to hell it wasn’t an all-out breakdown.
“You okay over there?” Danny asked, looking at Willa.
“Willa, you want me to walk you to the bathroom?” Vi asked, grimacing at the shade of green our cousin was taking on. “Wills? Earth to Willow…”
“That’s a silent yes,” Danny declared, rushing forward to grab Willa, practically dragging her to the bathroom. Where, it sounded like, she made it there just in time.
“We broke Willa,” Layna declared, shaking her head.
“I think we did a number on Luna and Gracie too,” Hope agreed. The former had passed out sitting up. And Gracie was stripping out of her shirt and pressing the cool bottle of vodka to her chest. Andi wasn’t faring too much better, either, nodding on and off, mostly due to tiredness since she hadn’t had much to drink.
“We’re bad cousins. Bad, bad cousins,” Layna said, smirking.
“We should have known they don’t have our tolerance,” Vi agreed.
“You’re holding up alright,” Layna said, looking at me.
“I’m buzzing,” I admitted, finding no sticky thoughts in my head. They all just kept floating past me, disappearing before I could fully grasp them.
Until an image of Rowe popped up.
He got stuck.
Right there at the forefront of my mind.
His thumb on my clit. His finger inside me. His intense gaze on my face as he brought me to and through an orgasm.
“I’m gonna call him,” I declared, mostly to myself, but I’d said it aloud.
“No!” was the chorus from the whole room.
“You don’t even know what we’re talking about,” Layna said as Danny joined in as she came out.
“As a general rule in life, you never call the guy. Especially not the guy you are thinking about when drunk,” Danny said, snatching one of the throw pillows and blankets off the couch. “Willa is in the bathroom for a while,” she explained, taking them in, and then making her way back out. “Oh, ah, your neighbor has his cock and giblets out. You want me to close the curtains?” she asked, jerking her thumb back toward my room.
“Oh! Manuel!” Layna said, bolting to her feet. And, to her credit, she only swayed for a moment. “I have to go tell him how much I love his new series.”
“New series?” Vi asked.
“Yeah on his porn site. He reads erotic poetry while he lazily jerks off. It’s hot. Oh, Maneullllll!” she called, disappearing into my bedroom.
“I like her,” Danny declared, nodding.
“Oh, I forgot you haven’t met everyone yet. I would have introduced you,” I said. It was hard to remember at times that not everyone was raised around our giant family unit.
But Fallon’s girl, Danny, and Malcolm’s girl, Holly, were new additions to our little girls club. They hadn’t met everyone yet. Especially those like Layna who weren’t always around.
“Hey, why didn’t Holly come tonight?” I asked, worried someone had forgotten to invite her. Like we’d clearly forgotten to invite Danny.
“She’s baking a big wedding cake,” Vi explained. “We didn’t forget her.”