My Big Fat Fake Honeymoon

My sweet Abigail, so responsible and reasonable when she’s not driving me crazy.

“Great! Now that you admitted I was right—which we got on video, by the way,” Violet informs us, “let’s sit down to dinner. I made lasagna. And you two can take it easy, not just inhale each other’s soul through mouth-to-mouth. Maybe, I don’t know, do something unheard of like date and get to know each other for more than a week while you’re faking some stupid honeymoon scheme?” Violet sounds quite proud of herself for getting us back in the same room.

I hear the tiniest hitch in Abigail’s breath and meet her eyes. Knowledge shines brightly there, sure certainty that’s reflected in mine.

We could do what Violet suggests, sit down to dinner and chat about the mundane whatever they discuss over pasta. Or . . .

I shake my head. “You said not half-ass, Vi, so that’s not how this goes.”

“What do you mean?” Ross demands.

“We have to go,” Abigail blurts out. “Now.”

She takes my hand and drags me toward the door despite everyone’s argument that we’re supposed to have dinner so they can interrogate me to see if I’m worthy of Abi.

“I was told to write my top three questions for these two and assured that I’d have the floor, only to be dismissed this easily?” Archie protests snarkily. I’m sure it was Violet who told him he’d get the chance to play twenty-questions, firing squad style.

“Oh, let them go. I don’t want the chef judging my lasagna, anyway. It’s too much pressure,” Violet tells everyone. “No telling what he’ll tell the people back in Italy about my American bastardization of the family recipes.”

“Are they leaving to have sex?” Ross makes a gagging sound as if he can’t fathom his sister having sex, much less fucking me in the elevator, which feels like a very real possibility.

I wonder if there are security cameras there too?

“More likely to find the closest Justice of the Peace,” Courtney answers. I recognize her and her husband, Kaede, from the wedding when I first met Abigail. And I like the way she thinks.

If I put a ring on Abigail’s finger and my cock inside her, I could stop her from ever leaving me again. The idea has merit.

“Absolutely not! I forbid it!” Ross shouts after us, but we’re already in the hallway with the elevator button lit up.

“Of course it’s not forbidden,” Violet encourages. To Ross, I think, she says, “It’s Abi, and she always does whatever the hell she wants. Why would finding a man be any different?”

I have no idea where Abi’s taking me, but wherever it is . . . I’m in. Even if it’s a JP to put a ring on her finger.

For some reason, that actually doesn’t sound like a terrifying, ridiculous idea. It sounds . . . beautiful.

The elevator doors open, and I have her pressed against the back wall in a blink, sipping at her lips once more. “Fuck, I missed you. It felt like half of my soul was gone,” I murmur between kisses.Chapter 25AbiWe run out of the elevator and into the parking garage with smiles and laughs that we can only control long enough to kiss each other again. I need to feel him, firm and hard where my hands grip his chest, to trust that this is real and not a crazy figment of my imagination.

He stops at a gorgeous black motorcycle that looks like it could eat the road. As he grabs the helmet on the handlebars, I stupidly ask, “Is this yours?”

He pushes the helmet onto my head and begins fidgeting beneath my chin with deft fingers. “Yes, and I can’t wait to have you on it with your thighs locked around my hips as we race off to . . .” He pauses, his focus on the buckle I can’t see. “Wherever you want to go, mia rosa,” he finishes.

It is, I know it. I remember from that first night, feeling the anticipation that he’d stop and we’d ride off into the night together, and then the let down when he’d kept going without me. But that’s not going to happen tonight. I’m getting on this beast . . . the bike. Not Lorenzo. Although, I’m probably going to get on him as soon as possible too.

He’s intoxicating. I don’t know how he makes me feel both entirely under his spell and simultaneously in control. He doesn’t try to wrangle me or make me anything other than what I am. If I said I wanted to go back upstairs, he’d shove me back in the elevator to make that wish come true. If I demanded that he take us on a cross-country trip, I’d be over the state line in minutes at the speed he’d drive us there.

Controlled chaos that feels so familiar, but also exciting and fresh because it’s not me against the tide, fighting alone while everyone else judges me as weird. Rather, it’s me and him, going wherever our whims take us and doing whatever we desire, and all the while, flipping our middle fingers to the world that doesn’t understand.