Muffin Top

“Have some pity. I almost died from that. Tell me the truth.”

She cocked her head to one side and gave him a considering look before saying, “I was going to go to my high school reunion  , but thank God my sanity returned.”

“What are you talking about? I went to mine. It was a blast,” he said, trying to wrap his brain around her stance. “Anyway, you have one of those cool jobs with celebrity clients that you can shove in people’s faces.”

She snorted and gave him a hey-dumbass look. “I’m sure it was fun for you.”

“But not for you?”

“Spend a week with all the fat-shaming jerks I went to school with when I could be getting a mani-pedi? No way.”

She stopped fidgeting with her straw and looked up at him as if daring him to disagree with the assessment. He couldn’t do that. Lucy Kavanagh was plus-sized. No one made it through to adulthood without getting picked on for something—he’d had his locker stuffed with gingersnap cookies in seventh grade—but anyone who looked different from the norm got it worse. But that was when they’d all still had lizard adolescent brains. There had to be another reason—and his gut was telling him exactly what it was.

“You’re full of shit.”

“Excuse me?” One of her eyebrows went up—way up.

The little patch of color blooming at the base of her throat confirmed he was right. “You’re scared.”

“I am not.” More fidgeting with the straw, as if it was either that or sitting on her hands. “Fine. It’s going to be couple central, and I am not looking forward to a week of being the third wheel or being a wallflower during all these activities—even a pseudo prom at the end. It would be awkward, but I’m not afraid.”

“Really?” He paused and pointedly dropped his gaze to her fingers on her straw before looking back up at her face. “Prove it by going.”

She released the straw and dropped her hand to her lap. “Unlike some people,” she said, giving him a look that made it all too clear she was talking about him, “I am not about to get dared into doing something dumb.”

“Fine. How about getting dared into doing something fun?”

She cracked a smile. “You’re trouble, you know that?”

“You’re not the first woman to tell me that.” He winked at her and tapped his beer mug against her soda glass.

“I can believe it,” she said before popping a stray jalapeño into her mouth as if it wasn’t going to set her mouth on fire.

Frankie had grown up with enough estrogen in his house to know that women were not delicate, mysterious creatures. They were like dudes, but curvier, and usually a helluva lot meaner when you pissed them off. This observation hadn’t been changed by his encounters with the women of Waterbury whom he wasn’t related to, either. In fact, because of the women he’d dated, he’d added the following to his all-about-women knowledge base: Don’t fuck with them. Don’t lie to them. Don’t come until they have first.

Still, he also knew when to leave things alone, so he moved the conversation on to funny stories about their newest rookie. She had him laughing his ass off with some of her clients (unnamed, of course) who did even dumber shit than the rookie. He never would have thought a monkey could be trained to attack paparazzi, but he learned something new that night.

By the time the waitress dropped off his bill with her phone number scrawled on the bottom, he was relaxed back against his chair, having a damn good time because he wasn’t worried about impressing Lucy so he could get in her pants. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d broken bread with a woman and had this kind of an easy, low-key good time. Mellow didn’t usually describe his interactions with women. Naked and orgasmic usually described his interactions with women, just not long enough to include actual conversation like this.

Shit. What if Shannon was right? What if he was just a good-time guy and nothing more? What if there wasn’t anything more to him than orgasms? He took a drink of beer, which had suddenly gone skunky.

Lucy sat across from him digging through her oversized red purse—the woman had a whole color-scheme thing going—for exact change to pay her bill, pulling out a quarter, rooting around in the bag again, then pulling out a dime, and repeat. It was kinda hilarious.

“You know,” he said. “They will make change.”

She paused in her search long enough to flip him off.

He laughed long and hard as he placed a few bills on top of his check. Shit, he couldn’t remember the last time a woman with whom he didn’t share a last name was so totally unimpressed by him. Since puberty, the fairer sex had pretty much fallen at his feet. That wasn’t a brag. It was fact. So he’d acted like any red-blooded man and had accepted the status quo as his due. He’d never given the situation a second thought—right up until Shannon’s comments had struck him like a two-by-four to his thick skull.