Muffin Top

Lucy didn’t just look at him, she seemed to look right inside him. He wasn’t a man who squirmed, but he did anyway. If she gave her clients that kinda look, he couldn’t believe that they didn’t just shut the fuck up and change their behavior immediately.

“Why do you want to do this?” she asked, suspicion thick in her tone.

Because he was running away from ghosts of women past. He needed to clear his big head, and celibacy was a helluva lot easier when there wasn’t temptation involved. Lucy was a great girl, but she wasn’t the kind that he needed to worry about moving his zipper. She was, without a doubt, a total ballbuster, and he wanted to keep his family jewels intact. “You saved me from a boring night at Marino’s. Let me return the favor.”

She narrowed her big brown eyes at him and pursed those full red lips of hers. He was holding his breath without really understanding why and didn’t let it go until Lucy’s mouth turned upward in a bemused smile.

“Fine,” she said, chuckling as she shook her head. “Frankie Hartigan, will you go to my high school reunion   with me?”

Chapter Three

Lucy added a dab of green paint to the canvas in front of her, took a sip of white wine from a small plastic cup, and tried her hardest to keep her red mouth shut. It was a losing battle. She knew it. Judging by the curious looks her best friend Tess, who sat next to her at paint and sip night, kept sending her way, she knew it, too. Glancing left, Lucy spotted her other besties, Gina and Fallon, sending her questioning looks. She pressed her lips together and turned her focus to her canvas again. It was supposed to be a tranquil creek flowing through a hilly landscape underneath a smog-filled sky—the leader of their weekly paint and sip night, Larry, was an odd duck, to put it mildly.

“What is going on?” Tess whispered. “Why are you so quiet?”

On her other side, Gina and Fallon leaned in closer. Lucy had two choices. The first was to fake a sudden case of deafness. The other was to try to bullshit her way out of telling her friends the truth. Both had an equal chance of working. Her girls knew her too well. They knew she saved all her secret-keeping for her clients and let all of her shit fly in the wind.

A counselor she’d seen in college told her that she used TMI as a defense mechanism. She’d told the counselor to go fuck himself. Yeah. He may have been onto something there.

She swished her paintbrush in the plastic cup of water she’d been warned a million times not to mix up with her plastic cup of wine. “I’ve decided to go to my high school reunion  .”

“Okay, so this should be when you should be telling us everything and psyching yourself up,” Gina said, narrowing her eyes at Lucy. “Instead you haven’t made a single comment about the dead birds falling from the sky in Larry’s sample painting.”

“I’m taking someone.” There it was, out there. That should end the questioning…if she lived in an alternate universe.

Gina, Tess, and Fallon stopped painting and turned to her in unison, their eyes wide. Then they all spoke at once.

“Who?” Fallon asked.

Tess burst out with, “You’ve been holding out on us!”

“Tell us everything,” Gina said, clapping her hands excitedly but forgetting to put down her paintbrush first, so they all ended up with little dots of gray on their smocks.

Lucy couldn’t give them a hard time about their surprise. She was still in shock herself. For years, she, Tess, and Gina had considered themselves the undateables—really, they had novelty T-shirts made up and everything. Lucy was the designated fat friend. Tess, the introvert who couldn’t say six words to a member of the opposite sex unless they were “I am Groot”—twice. Gina wasn’t what anyone would call conventionally attractive. They’d banded together and formed a little alliance. Now Gina had a big ol’ rock on the ring finger of her left hand. And Fallon? Well, she spent her days in scrubs as an ER nurse and her nights in shlubby joggers, keeping the same suffers-no-fools attitude twenty-four seven.

Needing fortification before making her announcement, Lucy shot back what was left of the discount-aisle wine in her cup. “I’m going with Frankie.”

There was a beat of silence before the words came flying at her from all directions at once.

“Frankie who?” This from Tess who, present company excluded, loved her plants way more than people. She gasped. “Not Frankie Hartigan, right?”

Fallon let out a groan. “Oh my God, no.”

“How did that happen?” Gina half asked, half squealed.

Larry cleared his throat and sent their little group a look that said shut up now. That was Larry. He loved them for being regulars while hating them for it at the same time. He liked his studio to be an oasis of quiet creativity during paint and sip nights. Lucy and her crew—like 99 percent of the other customers—came to gossip, drink, and giggle.