Oops, I've Fallen

She hasn’t answered the door yet, which I don’t understand given the level of her earlier zeal, but what she has done, apparently, is change her clothes too.

She’s wearing one of her favorite Juicy jumpsuits again, and her boobs are pushed up to gravity-defying heights to showcase a serious amount of cleavage beneath her V-neck shirt and zip-up jacket, left perilously zipped until the point of maximum tension, right below her ta-tas.

The doorbell rings again, and she looks me up and down. “Is that what you’re wearing?”

I glance down at my tank top and cutoff jean shorts and favorite Converse shoes before meeting her eyes again. “What’s wrong with this, Ms. Juicy?” I question. I nod toward her cleavage. “It looks like you’re about to serve your tits for dessert.”

In Stella’s defense, her outfit fits her MO to a T. She’s never been one to balk at showcasing curves, wears skinny jeans and stilettos, and in plain English, is a fucking cougar. But the same could be said for my outfit and me, and with the way she’s looking at me, you’d think I’m normally in a ball gown.

When the bell rings a third time, I nod toward the door. “So, are we going to let them in or not?”

She sighs, thankfully choosing not to pick a battle with me about my clothes that’ll end with claw marks and bloodshed, and shuffles forward to wrap her hand around the knob and open the door.

Sal’s face is the first one I see. With his pepper-gray hair and a smirk that could win Academy Awards, I can’t deny he’s a really handsome older dude. “Stella,” he greets, winking at my mom and holding out a bouquet of flowers for her. “You look beautiful, darlin’.”

“Oh, thank you.” She giggles and opens the door farther so that there’s room for him to pass.

Sal shuffles inside, and to my surprise, he holds out a second bouquet…for me. “Carly, you also look beautiful, darlin’.”

I smile. I can’t help it. Sal Miller might be older than my mom, but when a man brings a woman flowers without prompting, he’s going to get himself a smile, no matter his age. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the ladies at Sunny Creek are fighting over him.

“Thank you, Sal,” I say, taking the bouquet from his hands and leaning my nose down to give them a thankful sniff.

“Hi, Stella,” his son Ryan says, the familiar, deep baritone of his voice surprising me by making the little hairs on my arms stand on end.

His appearance, though, is not at all what I expect.

No GQ, “I’m a CEO” sleek suit. No dress shoes. No pretension at all.

Ryan is one-hundred-percent casual tonight in dark, slightly faded jeans and a crisp white T-shirt. And I don’t know what it is about this change in attire, but holy hell, my uterus just did a weird, tingly flip thing. The white of his shirt makes his blue-as-the-sky eyes stand out more than ever, and his dark hair is tousled in a way that makes me want to run my fingers through it.

“I’m so glad you came, Ryan,” my mom says, and his biceps flex in the most distracting way as he reaches out to give her a friendly hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“And you brought the wine!” Stella exclaims, promptly stopping my brain from going down a dangerous, fantasy, rabbit hole with just the sound of her voice. “Thank you so much!”

Ryan holds up two bottles—one white and one red. “I hope you don’t mind, but I went ahead and got a white too.”

“Oh, you didn’t have to do that,” my mom responds and waves her hand downward. “Red would’ve been just fine.”

“Well…” Ryan’s grin is tentative but friendly. Our gazes lock. “At the grocery store, it seemed like Carly maybe isn’t the biggest fan of red, so, I figured options were good.”

The simple gesture catches me off guard.

He’s not wrong. I only drink red on the occasions when white isn’t available—frankly, usually it’s only when nothing else is available—because red gives me a headache, but the fact that he noticed all this and realized from a shrug at the grocery store messes with my equilibrium.

And the actual gesture of caring enough to do something about it is even more of a mindfuck. I didn’t even think it was biologically possible for a man to pay that close of attention to a woman whose vagina he hasn’t seen.

I find myself smiling at him as he steps up to greet me like he did my mother.

His arms close around me, giving a friendly pat to my back, and then he turns, theoretically to kiss my cheek, but I’m too scrambled up inside to make sound decisions about the basic positioning of my body. I’m off-balance and startled, and a simple peck to the cheek turns into a bobbing and weaving dance that ends with a misplaced kiss to the very corner of my mouth.