Prologue: Maggie
I wasn’t usually the type of girl who lied.
Honest to a fault, my mom would always say. I would blurt out whatever was going on in my life like it was burning a hole inside of my chest. I didn’t like lying, either, didn’t like hiding things or keeping secrets. Growing up, it used to drive my friends and parents nuts how I would complain about books, movies, television, even real life drama, saying that all of the problems could be solved if only characters—or people—wouldn’t keep secrets or lie to each other.
“It just creates more problems!” I would say.
Which was why it was so very out of character for me that I was lying tonight. Outright, manipulative, made-up-a-massive-story kind of lying.
But how else was I supposed to get what I wanted?
If my parents knew what I was planning, they would lock me in my room for the rest of my life. No thanks. And part of it I could understand. It wouldn’t have been so much the whole I’m going to seduce a man and lose my virginity to him thing, more the oh by the way the man I’m seducing is my dad’s best friend thing.
Oops?
Look, it wasn’t my fault. And it wasn’t Cal’s, either. That was his name—Calvin Munroe. I had grown up calling him Cal, though. Just Cal.
Of course, there was something a bit creepy about the whole ‘grown up calling him Cal’ bit. He’d known me since I was a kid and I was just praying he would be able to overlook that when I made my move tonight. Sure I was still young, but I wasn’t a child anymore. I was twenty, a sophomore in college, and Cal hadn’t seen me since my high school graduation two years ago. My hope was that he would see me not as just the funny young daughter of his friend but as a mature, adult, and engaging woman.
Because God knew, I’d been thinking of him as a hell of a lot more than engaging for years now.
My crush on Cal had, I could admit, started when I was fifteen in high school. He was untouchable then, of course, for multiple reasons. Just take your damn pick: famous artist, my dad’s best friend, over the age of eighteen while I was under it, and a pretty good age gap besides. But that hadn’t stopped me from thinking he was sex on a stick and even now, five years later, I still couldn’t shake my desire for him. I ran into men in college and they were all just so… immature. They had no passion, no vision, or if they did, it was very… up in the air, they never did anything about it.
Cal was the kind of guy who not only had a vision for himself, for his art, but he had the dedication, hard work, and charisma to make it work. It took a hell of a lot to make it in the art world and Cal had done it. I admired him immensely for that. And he always spoke to me as an equal, never as a child, which I’d always appreciated. And his eyes, God his eyes. They could look gray, or hazel, or even blue depending on the lighting, but when you really looked directly into them? You realized they were dark green.
I wanted to drown in those eyes. So many times I had touched myself over the years, imagining him staring at me with those eyes, whispering instructions on how fast or slow to go, to tease myself, where to glide my hands over my skin. I’d had to swallow down pleads for him more times than I could count, his name on my treacherous lips. I couldn’t wait for the day when I could beg him for real.
Tonight—tonight if all went well, I would get to. Finally.
It was Thanksgiving, and traditionally, Cal would have it alone. I didn’t know the details, since I’d been a kid for most of it, but I knew that Cal didn’t really have any family and didn’t like to make a big deal out of family holidays. But this year my dad had convinced Cal to join us instead of just moping around on his own—my dad’s words, not mine.
“I do not mope,” Cal had said, but he’d agreed to come, and so now, here I was, helping to put the food on the table while Cal did the place settings and I tried not to climb him like I was a rabid squirrel and he was a tree.
He was as handsome as ever. Forty-six but aged like a fine wine. I’d seen pictures of him in his early twenties and frankly I preferred him now. In those old pictures, he looked kind of like a puppy. Like he hadn’t finished growing into himself and figuring out what to do with his large hands, his tall stature. His dark hair would flop all over the place and he had a goofy look to him.