With This Fling (Summersweet Island 5)

“You were saying?” he teases when I finally stop retching into the sand.

I quickly stand up and jerk away from his hand that was still holding my hair back, while Dean just smiles at me in that annoying way. This is now officially the most mortifying moment of my life. That’s just great for me.

“So, I’m gonna guess it’s still a no on the making out?”

“Oh, you can just fuck all the way off,” I mutter, making his smile turn into a full-on belly laugh as I stomp around him, kicking up sand as I quickly make my way back to the stairs for the hotel deck.

“At least you didn’t puke on his feet.” Karen shrugs, bringing me back to the present as she tears into a packet of sweetener and dumps it into her coffee cup. “Those boots were hot, and I would…”

Karen’s voice and the rest of the diner sounds fade away when my eyes land on the empty white packet she tossed down in front of me with the word Sugar printed across it.

“Tell me what you need, sugar.”

Dean’s words from last night flash through my mind, and my body heats with something other than this damn hangover and a shit-ton of mortification. And then I remember the vomit and quickly come back down to reality with a sigh.

“I puked in his general vicinity after trying to maul him. I can never look at that man again,” I remind her. “Why is this even bothering me so much? He’s just one man. One extremely hot, kind, slightly annoying man, but still. I don’t even know him! I’ll never see him again after this wedding is over and he goes back to his life, so who cares if he thinks I’m a hot-mess grandma of three who can’t hold her liquor?”

“You are a hot-mess grandma of three who can’t hold her liquor.”

Karen’s laughter at her own joke cuts off with a curse when I grab her half-eaten cinnamon bun from her plate. I chuck it as hard as I can across the room, barely missing a tourist’s head, before it lands on the floor and rolls under a table.

“What do you need, sugar?”

Karen’s complaining is drowned out by Dean’s voice in my head. His words just won’t leave me alone, or the way he looked at me, and that’s probably why it’s bothering me so much. It felt entirely too good having someone ask me that and to actually feel like I could let go and allow someone to take care of me. I didn’t feel alone for once, and I had someone to just spew all of my problems to—as well as the contents of my stomach. He wasn’t a family member or a best friend, or anyone required by law to listen to me bitch and complain. He followed me outside to make sure I was okay, and he just listened and wanted to make it better. And it was… different.

Intimate.

Sweet.

Hot as hell.

Until I drunkenly decided to live a little and head-butted him as a thank-you. I’ve never been with any man I felt like I could just unload all of my problems and worries onto, especially right when I met him. Younger men don’t want to hear about hot flashes, or mid-life crises, or feeling old, or grandmotherly problems. That’s just a bright neon sign flashing in their face, reminding them how much longer you’ve been on this earth than they have.

“You’re right. It’s pretty bad.” Wren snorts from the other side of me, finally speaking up and reminding me that Karen isn’t the only one hearing all about my disastrous evening. “But absolutely fascinating. Please continue.”

My body hurts too much to swivel my stool in my daughter’s direction and glare at her over the top of my sunglasses, so I use my loving words instead.

“Who even invited you? Go away.”

“Are you kidding me?” Wren laughs in between bites of french toast. “Like I was really going to miss OG Sip and Bitch today. You barely gave us any of the goods last night after you came racing back onto the deck and locked yourself in the bathroom during the salad course.

Because I was too busy choking down dinner and trying not to throw up again, then zig-zagging around people the rest of the night to avoid that man at all costs.

“And I say again, who invited you? OG Sip and Bitch is just that—it’s for the OGs. You know, the ones who invented Sip and Bitch and graciously gave it to you girls,” I remind her as Karen lifts her cup of coffee and clinks it against mine.

“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times,” Karen toasts. “Your mom and I just wanted to enjoy a nice glass of wine in the living room every once in a while, without listening to the melody of teenage angst coming through the thin walls.”

“So much screaming.” I shudder. “Birdie complaining to Tess about boys, you complaining to Emily about boys, and then all of you together, complaining about boys.”

“It was too much.” Karen nods. She might not have had teenage girls, but she was over at my cottage enough while mine were growing up that she felt my pain and wanted a resolution as much as I did. We felt like geniuses when we came up with the idea of Sip and Fuss, where the girls could enjoy a tasty slush from the Dip and Twist and complain all they wanted at the picnic tables outside.

Even though it happened at my place of business, it wasn’t inside of my own home, where nothing could drown out the sounds of their rage. It was in a safe, public place where I could still keep an eye on them, and they had to condense their raging to once a week, unless there was an emergency. When the girls got older, it morphed into boozy slushes and being called Sip and Bitch. And a lot of those evenings resulted in several late-night phone calls where I had to either bail them out of jail, bail them out of a jam, put out a fire Tess started, or bail them out of the Summersweet Pond after they drunkenly rode their bikes in there, but still. Very therapeutic. All in all, it’s been the perfect invention.

“Stop trying to distract us with a trip down memory lane,” Wren complains. “We need to figure out what you’re going to do with sexy Uncle Dean. I think you need to play a little hard to get and make him work for it.”

The perfect invention until one of your annoying daughters decides to crash your private bitch session.

“I’m pretty sure one of the rules of you being allowed to attend an OG Sip and Bitch was that you had to just sit there, feed my future grandchild, and shut up,” I remind her. “No one is working for anything. I will be perfectly fine if I never see that man again.”