Muffin Top

Lucy just stood there, shell-shocked, the hateful words on repeat in her head.

There must be something wrong with him.

It took a second, but her anger started pummeling her in hot waves of fury. Of course there had to be something wrong with Frankie if he was with her, because people sure seemed to think there was something wrong with her. Her degree, her professional success, her friends, none of it mattered to some people who would only see her as the fat chick to ignore or to passive-aggressively correct. She wasn’t a person. She was a walking, talking morality lesson of what happens when a woman lets herself go, when she fails to meet society’s expectations.

By the time Constance and Bryce were out of visible range, her gut was a sloshing mess of angry bile and humiliation.

“I’m not really in the mood for the Ferris wheel anymore,” she said, squeezing the llama too tight for a cheap carnival stuffed animal, but it was better than tracking the witch down and strangling her. “I need to cool off.”

Most people would have downplayed the bullshit of what had just happened by saying it was just the ramblings of a drunk—or they would have looked at her with pity. Not Frankie. He laid his hand at the base of her spine, offering the comfort she so desperately needed at the moment.

“Does this town have a pool?” he asked. “I wouldn’t mind a little cool-off myself.”

“Oh, there’s a pool all right, but I’ve got a better place in mind.”

Emerson Lake wasn’t really a lake so much as it was an oversized pond a mile down a dirt road in the woods with a floating dock in the middle. When she was growing up, all the cool kids at school had hung out at Woodson Lake, which was bigger and had a beach. Lucy and her small group of friends—none of whom had come back for the reunion  —had taken over Emerson Lake and made it their own.

The bubbling anger had cooled to a simmer by the time Frankie parked his car in the makeshift parking spots between two copses of trees. Once she’d slipped off her shoes and put her toes in the water, her vision wasn’t tinted with red. It was close to what she needed, but not quite there. She needed more. She needed water up to her chin, she needed to float free, she needed to be able to let go.

“Turn around,” she said, reaching behind her for the zipper of her dress.

Of course, that just had him turning so that he faced her straight on as they stood on the edge of the lake. “Why?”

“Because I’m taking my clothes off.” The sound of her zipper going down seemed way louder than the gentle lap of the water against the shore.

But talk was cheap. She wouldn’t let Constance’s drunken verbal vomit hurt her anymore, and she wouldn’t be fooled by Frankie’s sweet nothings. Just go with it? She should have known better. This was why she led with insults. Being always on the defensive meant not getting sucker-punched by the assholes of the world who knew nothing about her but felt perfectly fit to judge her anyway. She knew who she was. She was the woman who’d made something of herself, and fuck all those people who couldn’t stand that.

Fuck. Them.

“And I don’t get to look?” Frankie said it with a joking tone, but even in the moonlight there was no hiding the serious set of his jaw.

“No matter what happened the other night, it’s different when you can see the whole package, and I’m done with people who can’t accept me for who I am for one day.”

She’d been through it before. Occasionally there had even been comments. She’d walked out on those assholes while they were holding their dry dicks in their hands. That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt, though—that didn’t mean it didn’t still hurt today.

“And you don’t think I’ll like what I see?” Frankie’s voice rose with frustration. “Have you been listening at all to what I’ve been saying to you for the past few days?”

Yeah, the past few days when he hadn’t been having any sex at all for the first time in forever. And it wasn’t like they hadn’t known each other before. He’d had the opportunity to approach her before and hadn’t until he’d turned off his sex tap. Hurt and anger and self-doubt and all the old insecurities brought to the forefront by coming home again pummeled against her ribs, made her lungs tight, and clogged her throat with emotion. They’d been at the same BBQs and parties for months, celebrating Ford’s engagement to Gina, but he’d never given Lucy a second look—at least not one of those looks. And now he couldn’t get enough of seeing her?

“You want to see?” she asked, her voice strained with pent-up emotion.