So Good

An Alpha Dogs Novel

Nicola Rendell

© 2017 by Nicola Rendell

All rights reserved.

Editing: Síofra Ní Thuairisg/Aquila Editing; Lisa Hollett/Silently Correcting Your Grammar

Cover Design: Najla Qamber Designs

Cover Photographer: Sara Eirew Photographer

Cover Model: Justin Edwards

Cover Model: Bella/Nikki Sebben

Interior Paperback Formatting: E.M. Tippetts Designs

Publicity: Ardent Prose

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without written consent of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, brands, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, actual events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The author acknowledges the trademark status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

For Sam

“Love is friendship set on fire.”

Jeremy Taylor

1

Max

I wasn’t planning to see her naked—I swear to God, I wasn’t. The day was a scorcher, one of those godforsaken New England summer days that makes a guy wonder how he ever said fuck you to winter. I stood on the roof of her house, three stories above the Maine woods, with a far-off view of the ocean. It was pretty, yeah, like the kind of shit real estate companies put on complimentary calendars. But in that heat, it was like standing on top of a goddamned toaster, turned all the way to burned. I could feel that shit in my socks, straight through my work boots. At my feet was a stack of shake shingles, old-school, to replace the ones that were missing. Her house had a few slow leaks, and one over her bathroom that made the ceiling look like a huge Rorschach test. She said it definitely looked like a rose in bloom; I said it definitely looked like Batman. But I told her hidden meanings wouldn’t make shit for difference when the ceiling collapsed into the tub, so there I was. Fucking miserable work, but I was glad to do it. Glad to do anything for her—anything she needed at all.

In the forest on every side around the cottage, the cicadas screeched. It sounded like a needle squeaking off a record player. I knelt down by the stack of shingles, using my utility knife to score a line through one to fit a nearby gap. I snapped it with my hands and tossed the scrap end off the edge of the roof. A trickle of sweat ran down my forehead, and I wiped my face with my forearm. One droplet got away, sparkling in the sun. It caught my eye, and I watched it fall as it landed on the skylight window with a splat.

And that was when it happened. Boom.

There she was, right under me. She couldn’t have been more than six feet away, but she felt even closer. I had a direct line of sight down into her gorgeous, soft cleavage, bright and pure in the sunshine. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe it was the surprise of seeing her, but at first, I didn’t really process that it was Rosie at all. My dude brain said, I want that woman.

Then my regular brain said, Don’t be an asshole, man. It’s Rosie. Have some respect.

Respect I definitely had, but of course I’d thought about seeing her naked before. She was so fucking beautiful that any man would have thought about it. Sometimes, like right then looking down into her dress, I couldn’t fucking help it. Sometimes we’d be out doing something ordinary, like eating dinner or I’d be changing her oil, or she’d be teaching me to do shit I should have learned at some point in the last thirty-four years, like iron a dress shirt without screwing up the collar, and I’d catch myself watching her cleavage rise and fall as she breathed or admiring how nice her legs were, and I’d think, Holy hell.

Now she was directly underneath the skylight. The angle of the sun cast my shadow down the roofline, away from the skylight, so I didn’t give myself away. Like that, I watched her. I gave in to my dude brain and just took her in. Her light brown hair glinted, and a beam of light caught the curve of her shoulder.

That was when the goddamned striptease started, beginning with the left strap of her sundress.

Her movements were graceful, sexy, sassy—the sway of her hips, the shake of her shoulders. I realized I might be in real fucking trouble, because I loved that sexy sass. It wasn’t normal Rosie-cute. It was naughty, like nothing I’d ever seen her do before. I liked it so much, I couldn’t look away. She shimmied out of her sundress, and it fell to the floor in a pool at her feet. No big deal, I tried to tell myself. I’d seen her in her bikini a thousand times. This was no different from that.

Except it was, because then she reached around to undo her bra. Before I could tell myself, Don’t look, dude. It’s Rosie, don’t look, it was too fucking late. The straps slid down off her shoulders, and for one perfect second got caught on her nipples, swinging in the air before falling to the floor.

Holy…

I pressed my clenched fist to my mouth and groaned into my hand. All my blood was leaving my head. The roofline was getting wobbly.

It wasn’t like I didn’t know her curves; we’d spent whole summers on the beach—I knew her shape and her softness, I knew her lines and her freckles. Every curve of Rosie Madden was sacred in my book. Fucking douchebags on the beach giving her eyes had to answer to me and my eyes, right behind her. She did that to me—I was one punch away from defending her honor, always. But this? This was different. Seeing your best friend in a bikini at a clambake is one thing. Protecting your best friend from assholes with wandering eyes is part of the guy-girl best friend creed. But seeing your best friend, absolutely naked in her bedroom, without her knowing? That was a different deal.

…Shit.

Part of me knew I should keep my eyes off of her. She thought she was in private, and I had no business spying. Anyway, I didn’t want to be that guy. I hated that guy. But the other part of me, fuck. The other part of me was nothing but want.

Then she bent at the hips, and time slowed down, like some kind of stop-motion Jackie Chan kung fu sequence. All the cicadas went silent, at least in my head, they did. The wind stopped blowing through the trees. It was just her, and her perfection, in the sunshine underneath me. I felt like I was on one of those glass-bottomed boats, looking at a world I never knew existed.

She tossed her bra aside, and it landed on her neatly made bed. She shimmied out of her panties, shaking her ass as she did. I growled into my fist, and that’s when I went down into a crouch.

Because as she shimmied, I saw it in a V above her ass. My kryptonite. A skimpy thong.

All these years, all these decades, I’d had her pegged for cute cotton panties—pastel polka dots, thin stripes, shit that was sweet and sensible. But I was so fucking wrong. Black. Strappy. Tiny. Not sensible at all. Now it was in a rolled-up ball at her ankles. Using her toes, she plucked her panties from the floor and caught them on one finger.

Fucking A.

She was completely naked, not a thread on her. Every thought I’d ever had got sucked out of my brain, like dishwater down the sink drain. What was left was only one true thing, and it wasn’t about her ass or her skin or her breasts. It was the one thing I think I’d always known but never let myself feel. Until that moment.

She is the most beautiful woman in the world.

Part of the reason I thought that was, yeah, obviously, she was fucking stunning, every inch of her straight out of a dream. Not just my dream, either. Guys would slow down on Main Street to give her the elevator stare, and I’d quietly crack my knuckles and give them don’t-you-fucking-dare stares. But the other part, the part that wasn’t in my gut but was in my heart, was that I fucking adored her. Adored her so hard it hurt.

She crouched down to pick up her dress, lifting the delicate straps with her small, sweet fingers. She pivoted, so I had a view of the other side of her body for the first time. There it was.

The tattoo.

I groaned again. I wasn’t prepared for this shit. Three stories up, that body was dangerous. It was a rose tattoo, snaking around her hip, on the milk-white skin that was always under her bikini bottoms. The part of her I’d never seen. It was serious ink, real art, not some namby-pamby temporary tattoo or some amateur shit she might’ve gotten in an hour at a tattoo parlor on a dare on a cruise to Puerto Rico. It was complicated, detailed, and artful. Multiple visits to some tattoo artist, touching that creamy skin—goddamn.

It took every fucking ounce of strength I had, but I did manage to look away. I felt as disoriented as if I’d been sucker-punched. Not cotton—lace. Not cute—hot. Not my friend—my fucking fantasy.

She was so important to me, such an integral part of my world, that I’d never let myself think of her as more than what she was. She was like running water or electricity or the sunshine itself. She was one of those things that was perfect exactly as it was, and one of those things only an idiot would want to change. I never looked at her and thought, I wish I could have more of her than I do already. That would be like thinking, I wish I could turn that cold glass of water into a swimming pool. Or, I wish electricity came through the air. Fuck that noise. Perfect things are perfect things, and Rosie Madden was a perfect goddamned thing, from the tips of her toes to the freckles on her nose. And that rose, holy fuck, that rose.

I was strong, but not that strong, and I let my eyes move down again. She’d disappeared from view, mostly—except for the edge of her ass. I watched her rifle through her closet, and a few dresses fluttered onto her bed. On her bedside table, I caught a glimpse of the picture she always kept there, of the two of us together. The memories flew back at me like a runaway train. The first time I’d ever seen her was the day my parents and I moved to Truelove, at the start of middle school. The first time I ever saw her, she was volunteering at the community gardens. She had a smudge of dirt on her cheek, and I thought she’d looked super badass. I’d helped her dig up carrots and had been too fucking tongue-tied to say a goddamned word.

That’s how I felt, all over again times a thousand.

I’d never made a move. She’d cried on my shoulder through a line of guys who were never good enough for her. Jocks and pricks and a brief and seriously unfortunate stint with a guy who was a drummer for a reggae band that I hated so much it made me grind my teeth. But I never said shit about it. She was perfect even when she made mistakes. Tips of her toes. Freckles on her nose.

Never mind that rose. Like Banksy took on a temple.

One more time, I glanced down. Now she was sitting on her bed, and I saw that dark V shadow between her thighs. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. I watched her put on a pair of red panties. Equally skimpy, equally not-sensible, equally ballbusting. They were only tragic because they hid the parts of her I’d never seen before.

Christ. Almighty.

As the world started to spin, I realized fixing the shingles could wait. I’d been working on old houses long enough to know that if you found yourself on a dangerously sloping roof and felt like you might be less than 100% on the ball, you needed to reconsider your game plan. I needed to get my shit together—that body had me totally fucking derailed. So I made my way down the roof, basically bouldering down backward. I focused on my grip and my steps, like a climber coming down from Everest without enough oxygen. When I got to the gutter, I worked my way around the corner, standing on the eave, and hooked my leg over my ladder, making sure to put one foot after another and keep a tight grip on every rung.

When I stepped off the ladder, I grabbed a bottle of water that she’d left for me, filled up my palm and then splashed my face. My sweat stung my eyes through the droplets of water, and I rubbed away the tears. I heard the hinges on the screen door creak. “All done?” she asked.

I opened my eyes. They stung like hell, but I didn’t give a fuck. There she was, in a dress I’d seen before. Striped and sweet. But now I knew the secret. There were red panties under there. Red. Cherry red. My eyes fell on the part of her hip that I knew was inked.

“Max?”

I somehow managed to snap out of it. “Sorry. Getting there. Spotted something weird with the skylight.”

Rosie cocked her head. “Were you up there? Above my room?”

Awesome, dude. Smooth. “Just noticed it out of the corner of my eye.”

“I don’t like you being on the roof.” She pursed her lips. “Too steep. Promise you’ll get some ropes up there or something? Promise?” She reached out and put her hand to my arm, her fingers with their short pink nails pressing into my tanned skin. I had a quick but totally unavoidable image of her gripping my forearm in a very different situation. I want that. So fucking…

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

When I didn’t answer—I knew if I opened my mouth, the first words out would be, You. Me. Right Now.—she looked up at the roof and squinted into the sun. She peered suspiciously up at me and shifted her nose, kind of like a bunny. Adorable. She wasn’t very tall, so whenever she looked at me, she had to lift her chin, which used to be cute. But now looked…like everything I’d ever wanted. “Have you had too much sun?”

I was vaguely aware that she’d said some words, but I wasn’t hearing them because I realized I couldn’t see her bra straps, so that had to mean she was she was wearing a strapless…

Knock. That. Shit. Off. “I’m good.”

“Mmm.” She nodded and furrowed her delicate eyebrows, which had never looked as pretty as they did at that moment. I didn’t even know eyebrows could be pretty. They’re eyebrows, for fuck’s sake. But suddenly I felt like for the last ten years, I’d been looking at her through a standard definition television, with a shitty cable connection. Now someone had handed me an HDMI cable, and she was in 1080 dots per inch. Christ.

“Lemme make you a sandwich. You’re acting strange.”

Rather than answer her, I dumped the remaining half a bottle of water over my head, like Andre Agassi used to do between break points at the French Open.

“Ham? Or turkey? I’ve got both. Or chicken salad!” She clapped her hands together, compressing her cleavage. “Do you want a pickle?”

She means an actual pickle, you fuckwit. “Surprise me,” I told her and dragged my eyes off the curve of her cleavage. I grabbed the bottom of my T-shirt and pressed it to my eyes. I had to get out of there. I needed a cold shower or a call from my tax guy or an unexpectedly urgent trip to the DMV—anything to stop myself seeing her stark naked every goddamned time I looked at her. Anything to get my mind off that ink.

As I wiped my face, she cleared her throat, and I dropped my shirt. “What?”

She pressed her lips together and rocked back on her sandals. “Nothing!”

I followed her eyes and glanced down at my fly, but the stallion was still in the barn. “Come on,” I said, finding myself smiling right along with her. “What are you looking at?”

“Just…” She swallowed hard. “Looking good there, champ.” She glanced at my stomach, where I’d shown her my bare abs. She made a fist and gave me a mock punch, soft and sweet. “That P90X is working great for you.”

Here we go again with the fitness videos. For everything else she was—beautiful, smart, funny—she was also a fucking ballbuster sometimes. She’d worked up this whole narrative that I spent my nights with Tony Horton on my houseboat, getting cut and doing reps while I drank protein shakes with a straw, straight from the blender. It was her only explanation for why I didn’t have a girlfriend. P90X it had to be, she’d said. Or maybe, she’d whispered like a coconspirator, “Jazzercise.” Now, though, I had a better idea than ever about why I was so picky: not a single woman held a candle to her. I’d been fucking blind to it, but now the mist had burned right off. “I’ve never even seen the opening sequence. Never have. Never will.”

“They’re streaming now!”

“Christ.”

Rosie snorted and made a long wheeeeee. “Sure. Surrrrrrre,” she said, stifling her giggle. “One ham-and-turkey, coming right up.” She spun on her sandals and disappeared into the house. Hips swinging. Red panties invisible, but not to me.

Not anymore.

2

Rosie

Max had been looking at me really strangely, so I stopped on my way back into the kitchen to look at myself in the little mirror over the key rack. I checked to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently left a dusting of eyeshadow on my cheeks and then accidentally smudged it with my fingers, making myself look like an exhausted NFL linebacker in overtime. I hadn’t. Just to be extra sure, I wet my fingertips and swiped them underneath my eyes. Everything looked normal. I looked a bit flushed, but still like me. I checked my teeth. Nothing green. I looked down at my girls. Everybody in place. So, I figured that whatever was going on with Max had to be the heat. He’d been out there all day, and it was a hot one—out here, surrounded by the trees, it was like being in a huge greenhouse. I turned up the AC on the thermometer pad and made my way into the kitchen.

Which was a disaster. The whole place was, really. Not dirty, just chaotic. Not so very long ago, but long enough not to hurt me too much to think of it, the house belonged to my grandma. The plan was to get it turned around to sell, but it wasn’t going to be easy. It needed new windows, new doors, and electrical wires that weren’t wrapped in…wait for it…tar-soaked cotton, which had apparently been all the rage in 1891. Charming. The house was like a Pandora’s box of trips to Home Depot, because the more work I did, the more work I realized I needed to do.

The house needed more than I could do on my own—I wasn’t afraid of some shoddy wiring, I’m from New England, for God’s sake—but there was a limit. I was a children’s book illustrator, not an ancient-house rebuilder. But Max wouldn’t let me hire some cut-rate yahoo from two towns over to do the work—he absolutely would not let me. He got all fired up when I said I was thinking about hiring a company called Tom’s Handymen from Bar Harbor. He’d looked at me like I’d lost all my common sense—like I’d gone completely bananas. “Rosie. Give me a break. That guy would fuck up a planter box,” he’d said, swigging his beer one night when we were out for Wednesday trivia. “Let me have a look.”

“I can’t pay you, you know that.” I’d fished the last of the cashews from the beer nuts. “And I won’t let you work for free.”

“Just a look,” he’d said…

…Three weeks ago.

So now here I was, with my best friend fixing up my ancient Mother Goose house, and I had no way to pay him. So I did what I could. Snacks. Water. Moral support. The occasional splinter removal. Probably annoying comments about safety. Sunscreen. Insistence on him wearing a baseball cap. I couldn’t afford much, but lunch? I could always make sure he had a good lunch. It was free to fuss over him, so I did. Drawing pictures of tiny snails in shoes sailing to the moon on matchboxes didn’t pay much, but it definitely covered bread, ham, and turkey.

I laid out the sandwiches on the cutting board by the sink and put mustard squiggles on the bread, but I couldn’t find a knife that wasn’t waiting for me to wash it in the sink. In the three weeks since I’d moved in, I’d learned that my gram’s method of organizing was, in a phrase, completely haphazard, especially in the kitchen. I was as likely to find a butter knife mixed up with her dozens of wood spoons as I was to find a Cuisinart blade in the napkin drawer. Looking for the meat cleaver? Try the drawer with the extra lids. Need a fork? Probably in the pantry. Finally, though, I did find a knife, tangled up in some whisks. I spread the mustard evenly, and I made sure Max’s sandwiches had double meat. And that’s when I heard the other thing my gram had left for me, with heavy footsteps approaching from behind.

Julia Caesar.

Grandma’s will had been short and sweet. “I leave to my granddaughter, Rosie Madden, all my worldly possessions, and also my cat, Julia Caesar. Really sorry about that, honey. I thought for sure I’d outlive her. Love you. Cupcake recipe is in the pantry.”

As I cut the sandwiches on the diagonal, I heard Julia’s footsteps approaching with all the delicacy of a bulldog’s. She didn’t patter; she thumped. She didn’t creep; she trundled. She didn’t meow; she grunted. I glanced over my shoulder at her, and she stopped and looked away, contemplating a chair leg as if that’s exactly what she’d been doing all along. It was her standard MO: pretend to be doing anything other than looking at the human. She was completely gray, except for a small white splotch on her side, in roughly the same shape as Florida. Or a machete.

I turned away again, and the thump-thump of her paws started up once more. Rather than trying to catch her in the act—it totally fascinated me, could she feel me watching her?—I became mesmerized watching Max doing something with the saw outside. A spray of sawdust shot back at him, sticking to his sweaty biceps.

That wasn’t P90X sexy. That was 100% Max Doyle sexy.

Oh my God, that’s Max. Just Max, I thought as I rinsed my hands in the sink. But before I could sneak another look at Max—had his triceps always been that defined?—Julia leaped up onto the windowsill and hid him from view, sending a bottle of dish soap tumbling from the sill into the sink. Above Julia’s substantial bulk, not unlike that of a small, furry pig, I saw the glint of his tanned skin in the sun. Truthfully, it was getting harder and harder not to stare. Maybe he wasn’t actually doing P90X on the down low, but he looked it. He’d always been handsome, but now he was looking pretty much…perfect.

I watched him pull his T-shirt off his head and toss it aside, revealing a chiseled back and even more defined shoulders.

No, Rosie. No, no, no.

The saw squealed to life, and I leaned around Julia to watch his muscles flex.

Yes.

No. No.

Clearly, Julia didn’t think I should be secretly ogling him either. She was, right then, staring at me with all the intensity of a special ops CIA interrogator fired for using, you know, torture, and glancing slowly from the pantry to me and back again, and—I kid you not—at the oven clock. Lunchtime was upon us.

“PS: Honey be careful around 12:05pm. Julia is very serious about lunch. Okay, love you!”

My gram, for all her lovely qualities, had raised Julia to be only semi-domesticated. And she only ate three things: small pieces of banana, peanuts, and SPAM.

Julia tucked herself up into a ball, like she was ready to spring. I brandished my butter knife, more to point at her than to defend myself, but a girl never could be too careful. We’d been down this road, and I was out of Band-Aids.

“We talked about this,” I told her, waving the knife in the air like a gigantic finger. “No more SPAM. The vet told me your sodium levels are the same as a canned sardine’s.”

Julia swatted the sponge off the ledge, and it landed in the sink. Fools!

“I’m with you. But it’s for your own good.”

In response—Wait until the Revolution comes! You bipeds are so hosed!—she whapped the kitchen window with her tail so hard that Max turned to look. Julia’s tail had the same force as a pair of human knuckles. Intense.

Max shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun and leaned in, peering through the window at me. “You knock?” he said, his deep voice carrying right through the single panes.

Julia eyed me. Her tail made an ominous S. As in, S for sucker!

“PPS: If lunch is delayed, Neosporin is in the cabinet! Next to the Nu Skin!”

But not even my fear of Julia was greater than my desire to stare at Max. Glinting in the sun was the broken heart necklace I’d given him when the engraving shop at the mall had closed in high school. I’d bought it for 75% off, and it had been sort of tongue-in-cheek. We weren’t the people who wore broken hearts, but he’d loved it. Especially the engraving Max & Rosie Forever. His half had my name, my half had his. I hadn’t seen my half in years. But his still hung from his neck. Battered, almost illegible, and now almost seventeen years old. In all that time, he’d never, ever taken it off.

Julia opened her eyes so I saw both her irises were rimmed with white. She looked like a silent-movie version of Dracula, about to go in for the jugular.

I got back to making lunch and gave Max a single finger in the air to say lunch was coming right up. He went back to his chop saw, skin glistening, and the old chain of his necklace catching the sun.

A deep lion-like roar emanated from somewhere in Julia’s massive chest. A needlepoint my gram had ditched mid-project floated through my memory. Ask not at whom the cat roars. It roars at thee.

“I’m on it, General. Hold your fire.”

Her tail went around in a spiral, and she blinked once. I opened up a can of tuna in water and put it into a dish for her. She’d gone on hunger strike over Fancy Cat, and I’d decided that it was probably best to wean her off her salt-and-processed-meat diet slowly rather than to send her into renal failure by cutting out the salt all at once. So in the spirit of step-by-step, I offered her a small piece of deli ham as an appetizer. I placed it between her furry paws. “There, that’s low sodium.”

She lowered her pink nose to it, flattening her ears. And promptly swatted it into the sink with a splat.

“Suit yourself,” I told her, and I added two cupcakes to the lunch tray. Because in my book, nothing was complete without cupcakes. Nothing.

* * *

I sat in the grass with my feet in the sun, and Max sat on an old bench partly shaded by an enormous magnolia in flower. Julia lumbered outside and made a big dramatic thing of flinging herself into the old tire swing I used to use when I was little. She left her head hanging out in an over-the-top, I am starving to death, send help, protest.

I ignored her histrionics and considered the piles of lumber, the rows of power tools, and Max’s truck parked next to my Bug. What he should’ve been doing with his time, I knew, was paying work, for paying customers, with things like budgets and timelines and houses that didn’t eat money like a paper shredder that wouldn’t turn off. “We have to talk about this. I’m not a charity.”

Max took a huge bite of his sandwich, chewed a few times, and then wiped his mouth with his hand. “Will you stop it?”

I flopped back into the grass, looking at him upside down. “I don’t like it. It’s not a fair trade, and I know that whatever you say, you do need the money. Just think, right now you could be building a deck for a millionaire and overcharging him for labor. Living the dream!”

He shook his head at me, chewing and smiling. But even after he swallowed, he didn’t answer right away. He held my stare for a long time, longer than I was used to. Although, I could’ve been misreading that. I was upside down. Finally, he said, “Nowhere I’d rather be than here.”

“You could be fixing the trim on some sexy housewife’s kitchen island. I can see it now…”

“Stop.”

“Pounding some nails!”

“Rosie.”

“Drilling some holes!”

“Christ.”

I sighed and looked up into the pink and white blossoms. “I mean it.”

Max finished off his sandwich and bit into an apple. “So do I. I gotta make a run to the lumberyard. How about dinner?”

The dread of that word pelted me in the stomach like a bad clam. Dinner tonight was not something I was looking forward to. At all. But it was one of those things I felt, too, had to be done. Like getting my teeth cleaned. Or going to the gynecologist. “Can’t.” I shook my head, feeling the cool grass tickle the back of my neck. “I’ve got a date.”

Max’s eyes narrowed, and his expression got hard and focused. “If it’s Tinder, I’m going with you.”

“eHarmony!” I swatted his jeans. “Lowest incidence of unwilling abduction, guaranteed.”

But Max wasn’t laughing. He was still dead serious. He always got this way about my dating, especially when it came to the internet. Totally the overprotective older brother. “I don’t like it, Rosie.”

Neither did I. But I knew love wasn’t going to land in my lap. I wasn’t going to open my eyes one day and find the man for me, just standing there. He wasn’t under my nose. I’d looked. And I wanted to find someone desperately. If I didn’t, I had visions of Julia Caesar and me living together in a perpetual death match, eating our deli meats and staring at each other over the kitchen table, forever and ever amen.

Max tossed his apple core into the woods and turned his attention to the cupcake. This one was chocolate with pink icing, and he was man enough to make it look as natural as a cold beer. He peeled off the paper wrapper carefully and took a big bite and then perched the cupcake on his knee. “I’ll stay low unless you need backup. In which case…” He smacked his tanned fist into his massive palm.

“No, I’m okay.” I spread my toes in the sun and peeled back the paper on the second cupcake. “I’m a big girl. If it comes down to it, I can throw a drink in his face myself.”

* * *

As Max drove away from my house, I put on a pair of rubber gloves from under the sink. I turned the faucet on hot, but even over the running water, I heard my phone buzz. I tapped the screen with my elbow, and it lit up, showing me an alert from my bank.

My bank. God, I hated my bank.

I mean, not my bank itself. The place was nice enough—they had free mints, the chairs were pretty comfy, and they gave you a complimentary pen if you made a balance transfer—but the idea of money in general had started to be a real hang-up up for me. Because I had none. At all. I dribbled soap into the sink, and the tiny islands of grease scattered. Perfect example: my thoughts were the dishwater, the bank was the soap, and whenever the two came in contact, my mind scurried off to something, anything else. Because the news was never good. Every free mint in the world didn’t offset the truth.

The anxiety about the alert was enough to make me peel off my gloves and check what it might be about. My heart dropped as my balance lit up the page. I didn’t even attempt to make sense of the numbers—only the colors. Where once there had been a modest positive balance in green, there was now a fairly substantial negative balance…in red. A check I’d paid to the city for property tax had cleared, but I had no steady income to balance it out. I had finally moved into the red. I scrolled through my unpaid bill notices, and I felt sicker and sicker. I also felt the impending panic welling up in me that had become so very familiar. I flipped my phone over, stuck it on the windowsill next to Julia, and put my gloves back on.

Into the hot water, I plunged the cupcake tin, with chocolate batter all stuck to the top of the pan. The soap hissed and fizzled, and I wiped my nose with my forearm. My eyes moved up to a needlepoint my gram had made years ago. “May your soufflé rise up to meet you, may expiration dates be always at your back. May you remember the difference between baking soda and baking powder, and may every mistake you make be easily hidden under the miracle known as buttercream.”

Amen.

That was where I was, I realized. At miracle-hoping stage. Praying for a change of fortunes from a needlepoint hanging in a house that looked like a stage set for a movie version of The Old Woman Who Lived in the Shoe.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” I told Julia as I plunged my gloved hands into the hot soap and water. Her tail moved slowly through the air, and she met my gaze for one fleeting instant. She had weirdly pronounced eyebrows for a cat, and she used them all the time. Right at that moment, they were…kind of furrowed. Sometimes she reminded me of Henry Kissinger, but I never told her so. She knocked the Dawn off of the shelf into the sink again. It bobbed along next to a wooden spoon, and the label became wet and half-translucent.

I rescued the soap and thought about what to do next. I was stuck in that precarious and unfortunate purgatory between doing what I loved—children’s book illustrations—and what I knew paid better—commercial graphic design (also known as the most soul-sucking artistic work that ever was, ever). Designing smiling toilets, immediately recognizable corn cobs, and mind-numbingly dull logos for law offices sucked my soul away one sans-serif letter at a time. My love was in adorable illustrations of outlandish things—I could not exist on ten thousand minor modifications of a generic waste-management logo. I could not.

But I was starting to worry that I didn’t have any other choice. I tried to calm myself with washing the dishes, usually a surefire way to put me in a better mood, but today it had the opposite effect. And before I knew it, I’d damn near rubbed the logo off of a complimentary mug from the store where my gram always bought her tea. I noticed that in my scrubbing frenzy, I’d splashed the envelope that contained my electricity bill. It made the envelope look as if I’d spattered it with tears.

Looking out at Boston Post Road, I saw a plume of dust coming toward the house. I froze with my sponge scrunched into one of the cupcake holes. Max. Max would totally know what to do about this. He’d give me good, sensible, Max-like advice. Maybe now it was time to level with him about the money situation. He’d be appalled, and he’d try to stuff money into my wallet. But at least it wouldn’t be my own private nightmare anymore.

Only, it wasn’t Max. Through the dust I saw the front end, not of his big Chevy, but instead a different truck. Shiny white, no mud on the fenders, chrome that glinted in the sun, a front license plate that wasn’t rusted from the salt air.

I rinsed off my rubber gloves, turned off the faucet, and draped the gloves over the edge of the sink. As the dust cleared, I looked to see who it might be. There emerged a very, very pudgy man with a very, very bad comb-over, in very, very poorly fitting dad jeans. He didn’t know I could see him, so he didn’t know I was watching him as he spritzed something into his hair. Hairspray, maybe.

“Stay here,” I told Julia.

By way of a reply, she swatted the dish soap back into the sink with a plop.

“Good girl.”

As I stepped outside, I could smell the man’s cologne from way downwind. It was…terrible. I could feel it on my tongue, it was that thick. A gust of wind kicked up, and the odor damn near knocked me back into the house. But I hadn’t been raised to say things like, Good God, man, what is that smell? Think them, yep. But not say them. “Can I help you?”

He shuffled toward me. “Frank Bremmer.” He extended a hand. The handshake wasn’t too bad, actually. Not fish-like or limp or anything. Maybe a little sticky, but nice enough.

He pulled his wallet from his pants and thumbed through the compartments, looking for something. As he looked down, I realized it hadn’t been hairspray. It had been—I wasn’t even sure of the word—scalp spray, of some sort, to disguise his thinning hair. In the sunshine, it had a very, very strange effect. Like someone had drawn on his hair with a spray gun or a really thick Sharpie.

“Your real estate agent sent me over,” he said, without looking at me, but instead assessing the house. Still without looking at me, he held a business card out in the air. The logo was one I recognized immediately as a $39.99 pre-made from biznislogos.com

FRANK BREMMER

PROPERTY INSPECTOR

“Oh, geez.” Somehow, I’d imagined that this would happen later, after Max had more time to make repairs. But I’d also asked for quick sale, and I realized I couldn’t have my cupcakes and eat them, too. The image of my red balance flashed to mind. “Right. Please. Go ahead. Don’t hit your head on the door frames. They’re really low.”

Bremmer shuffled over to the side of the house and gave the siding a hard kick. The wood crumbled away, and what I recognized immediately as termites scampered out.

“You sure you wanna sell this thing?” He poked at some of the crumbling cedar shingles with a stubby thumb.

“That’s the idea.”

He scratched his head, and a small patch of his marker hair came off on his fingers. “This is what we in the inspection business call a gallon-of-gas-and-a-book-of-matches job.”

For all love. “I’m not in the insurance fraud business, if you can believe it.”

He sniffed hard and nodded at me somewhat sadly. “Understood. So I’ll have a poke around, shall I?” He took a pen from his front pocket and a clipboard from inside of his truck.

“Don’t poke too hard,” I said.

But he’d already started to make notes on his checklist.

* * *

By the time he’d finished, he was sweating so hard that his spray-on hair was coming down onto his cheeks like rivulets of watery mud. I handed him a bottle of water and a few paper napkins. I didn’t want to make a big thing of the hair situation, so I just said, “It’s a hot one.”

“I’ll say,” he puffed. He gulped down the bottle of water and dabbed at his hair paint. Then he unclipped the top sheet from his clipboard and handed it to me.

I looked at the list, and my jaw dropped. It was packed with so many notes, written in an aggressive, ballpoint, all-caps style that made it look like he was yelling, and so many checkmarks in the major issues column that I had to blink twice to make sure I was seeing it correctly. Re-anchor the banisters, replace the water heater, fix gutters, replace termite-damaged areas. Grandma’s fairy-tale cottage had gotten through inspection with a big fat F. “Is there any good news?” I asked as I tried to divert my eyes from the words suspected structural flaw—north wall of foundation.

He dabbed at his head with the paper towel and made a face like he was about to tell me I had a very inconvenient but not terminal disease. “No lead paint, no asbestos. But Christ, Miss Madden,” he lowered his voice like we were talking about my house behind her back, “I’ll give you the fifteen smackers for the gas and the matches myself. This isn’t a fixer-upper. This is a bringer-downer.”

Maybe so, but what good old Frank of the melting hair couldn’t understand, though, was that I needed to sell this house. I needed whatever it would pay me. And anyway, I couldn’t torch my gram’s place. Julia would never forgive me.

“It’s going to have to be a fixer-upper.” I folded the crinkly inspection paper in half.

“If you say so,” he said and dabbed at his hair a bit more.

3

Max

As I unlocked the door to my houseboat, I heard it. At first, it sounded like a duck paddling, but then I heard something else—a panting, or a gasping. For a second, it died down. It didn’t worry me, really, because the docks were full of weird noises, and boats were noisy as fuck. But as I turned the deadbolt, the sound got louder and more frantic. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound good, and it sure as hell didn’t sound like a duck. I let my work belt slide off my shoulder onto the deck and looked down in the water, gripping the taffrail. There in the shadows, gasping, paddling, and panicking, I saw something small and wet and terrified.

Holy fuck. It was a dog. A tiny, drowning dog.

Fully clothed, boots on, I jumped into the water off the sternside. I plunged in deep, submerged in a world of shadowy, barnacle-crusted dock pilings and chains holding anchors far below. Holding my breath and looking up toward the sunshine, through the bubbles that came down with me, I saw it. No bigger than a chicken, and kicking hard. I breaststroked toward the dog, aiming to come up right below it, but the salt water stung my eyes, and I closed them out of reflex. When I surfaced, it had gotten a few feet away. It was just a tiny thing, soaking wet, sucking in terrified breaths. It doggy-paddled in circles, slipping down into the water so that only its nose was above the surface. I did one strong breaststroke, but it was in full flight-or-fight mode, absolutely fucking petrified, and it paddled away from me, slipping out of my grasp. With one more big stroke, I had it, and I scooped it up into my arms to hold it up out of the water, the way people do when they hold babies in the air. I saw it was a girl, her tummy soft and much less furry than the rest of her. Her big black eyes bugged out for an instant, and then…

She went limp in my hands. Lifeless, with her feet dangling down, her tongue hanging out. Her eyes were closed. On my palm, I couldn’t feel a heartbeat where I was sure there should have been one thrumming along.

Fuck. Fuck.

I gave her a shake, but she dangled like a rag doll.

I held her out of the water, keeping her in a tight bicep curl over my shoulder. Carefully, I maneuvered under the jetty that led to my boat. I got a toehold on the old dock ladder, rusty and unsteady. Using one hand to climb up, and using both boots like climbing picks, I emerged from my boat’s shadow and out into the sunshine of the dock. I laid her down on her back, supporting her lifeless body. With every passing millisecond, my heart fucking broke more and more. I could not let this happen. I could not let her die. I pulled myself up all the way and knelt beside her. She was flat on her back, with no signs of life at all. Her arms were limp, and her paws dripped onto the dry wood beneath her. Still, her tongue hung out. Still, her eyes were shut. Still, she wasn’t breathing.

Somewhere, buried deep in my memory, I remembered learning the basics of canine CPR. I felt like maybe it was in my lifeguard class when I was in high school, but I didn’t fucking know and it didn’t fucking matter. All I knew was I had to do something—and fast. So I did. I wrapped my fingers around her tiny muzzle and brought my lips to her leathery nose. I blew gently, and as I did, I felt her chest swell up. I held my own breath and prayed for anything, any sign of life, but there was nothing. Lightly, with the tips of my fingers, I did compressions on her soaking wet fur. One. Two. Three. And then I did another breath. One. Two. Three.

“Come on, little lady,” I whispered and rolled her onto her side. I gave her a few pats, firm but not too hard. She was absolutely tiny—from scruff to tail, hardly bigger than the span of my hand. I rolled her over onto her back again and gave her one more breath, all the while going through the paces of what the fuck to do if this didn’t work. I had no goddamned idea whatsoever where the vet was. Did we even have a vet? Would she survive that long? What the fuck was I going to do?

But as I started the next set of compressions, she coughed. She actually coughed, like a tiny person, a gasping, choking hack, accompanied by a few mouthfuls of water spilling out onto the wood planks.

Holy shit.

I froze with my hands just above her tiny body. Her strange, buggy eyes opened up, and she started panting hard.

“Hey, hey!” I scooped her up in my arms, cradling her to my chest. I could tell by the way she was so limp against me that she was exhausted. Holding her close to my body, to keep her warm and safe, I scratched the fur at the back of her neck, and her tail started to wag. But she was also shivering hard, and I didn’t like that one bit.

Carrying her like a baby, her chin over my shoulder, her wet chest against my soaking T-shirt, I brought her down the jetty. I noticed that when I got close to the edge of the docks, she’d lean away, like she was terrified. But I kept her close and safe and brought her onto the lower deck of my place. I grabbed a towel from the bathroom and wrapped her up like a burrito, making sure she could still see out from the opening at the top. Though I loved them, I actually knew fuck-all about dogs. She seemed okay. She didn’t seem to be hurt. In fact, her breathing was getting much more regular, and her eyes were starting to close with what I imagined was the pure relief of not having to tread for dear life anymore. For a moment, I just sat there and stared at her. I touched the soft skin of her ears, and it reminded me a plant Rosie had in the garden—lamb’s ear, I remembered her telling me. I adjusted the towel so it was wrapped around the dog just right. Water dripped off my pants onto the floor of my boat, but I didn’t give a shit if I soaked the rug and warped the floorboards. In my arms, the little lady was sound asleep. She seemed fine…

But how the fuck would I know for sure?

Still holding her close to me, now swaddled up like a newborn and snoring softly, I grabbed my tool bag from the outside deck. By the fucking grace of God, I’d put my phone there and not in my pants. Using one thumb, I searched for vets in Truelove. I found myself rocking her like a baby, as natural as if I’d been waiting all these years to do it. Automatically, my thumb opened up the chat window with Rosie. The last handful of messages were me asking her the dimensions of this door or that window, and her replying with precise, clear answers, down to the eighth of an inch.

She was fucking perfect. It just took me having to see her buck naked to realize it.

Yet, while I knew I should just fucking man up and text her to ask her what to do about this tiny pipsqueak of an animal in my arms, I also felt suddenly…weird about it. Nothing had happened. It was only a glimpse.

Yeah. A glimpse. A glimpse that changed the whole ball game. A home run that turns around the whole goddamned season.

And I didn’t want to bug her. She was probably working. I hated to bug her when she was working. No, I could handle this without her. Totally. Me and Google had this shit covered. I flipped back to my browser and scrolled through the results.

There was a vet in Trulove. The logo was a dog’s head in profile and a cat’s in silhouette inside it. As soon as I saw that image, I remembered where it was. While the phone rang in my ear, I adjusted the towel around her, folding it at the top to make sure she had plenty of room to move her head.

“Truelove Emergency Animal Hospital. Doris speaking.”

“Hey there, Doris,” I said. “I rescued a dog from drowning, and I want to make sure she’s okay.”

“Well, aren’t you a sweetheart,” said Doris. “What kind is it?”

What kind? I barely knew my dachshunds—was that the wiener dog?—from my Dobermans. As for what this little thing was…I studied her and unswaddled her a bit. “Little. Funny toes.” As if she knew I was talking about her, her eyes popped open. She stared at me hard.

“Hi,” I whispered.

Her ears went down like Yoda’s. Then her eyes fluttered, and she conked out again.

“Supercute. Really little,” I told Doris in a whisper.

“How little?”

I bounced her gently. She felt like my niece when she was only a day old, or even smaller. “Really little. But she doesn’t have a collar or anything. I don’t know how she ended up in the water.”

“We get a few jumpers every year,” Doris said, like it was no big deal, dogs in the Atlantic Goddamned Ocean. “People on yachts, stuff like that, you know? Dog’ll take a fancy to a fly, and splash!”

Oh Christ. The very idea made me fucking sick. Somewhere out there, some family on a boat watched this little creature take a nose dive off the stern? Somewhere out there, some girl in messy pigtails was sobbing at the water? Jesus. One near-tragedy at a time was all I could handle. “I think she’s fine, but I don’t…” I looked down at her. Was her tongue supposed to hang out like that? Was that normal? I had no fucking idea. Her mishmash of cuteness confused me totally. Even worse, what if she had water in her lungs? What if she’d hurt herself, and I couldn’t tell? What if… Fuck, I didn’t know. What if I’d done so far wasn’t enough? “Can I bring her in?”

Doris made a smacking sound like she’d just put on some lipstick. “Come on in, hon. We’ll be waiting.”

* * *

I felt like an expectant dad as I sat in my soaking wet clothes in the waiting room, staring at an oddly friendly flea-and-tick poster on the cinderblock wall. A periodic drip of water from my work pants splattered on the linoleum underneath me, and I rocked my boot back and forth, the sole squelching. I thought about texting Rosie again, but I didn’t know what to fucking say, and I’d left my phone in the truck so it didn’t get soaked in my pants. But now the drama was over, and she’d be pissed she missed it. Damned if I did, damned if I didn’t. But one thing was getting pretty fucking clear: Since the day we dug up the carrots, I’d been hers.

“Mr. Doyle?” asked the vet, dressed in scrubs that were decorated with Dalmatian spots and a name tag that said DR. ALICE.

I stood up, with my boots sounding like two huge, wet sponges. “She okay?”

Dr. Alice had a tiny scar through her top lip, which made her look like a no-nonsense sort of a lady, and I dug it. “She is! She’s fine. But she’s extremely dehydrated, and she consumed quite a lot of salt water.”

“Oh, fuck.” I had visions of a book I read a while back, about those poor bastards on the Essex. Rule one of getting lost at sea—don’t drink the motherfucking water.

But Dr. Alice didn’t look concerned. “She’ll be okay, but we have to give her some fluids. We’re also giving her some antibiotics as protection against the water in her lungs. We’d like to keep her overnight.”

Now I really felt like a dad, whatever that must feel like. Worried and heartsick. I nodded and inhaled hard. I rubbed my temples and felt sick to my stomach. Suddenly, I felt a little choked up and cleared my throat. Christ. I was turning into a goddamned marshmallow over a chicken-sized dog that I’d known for all of half an hour. Man up, dude. Keep it together. She’s okay. You heard Dr. Alice. “Can I see her?”

The doctor nodded happily and signaled for me to follow. She led me back through a series of swinging doors marked Staff Only, into a back room with cages along one wall. Though it was all set up as nice as it could be, it still felt like a prison. They had her in the top cage, and someone had made a bed out of my bath towel. Her front leg was shaved, a bare patch hardly bigger than a stamp, and a pinprick dot of blood sat on her skin. Her ears were down and her eyes wide, but when she saw me, her ears perked right up and her tail started to wag again. “Hey, cutie,” I told her and stuck my finger through the cage door. She lifted up her head and gave it a lick.

“We checked her for an ID chip, but it hasn’t been kept current. We’re trying to track down the info that we could find, though,” the doctor said. “And you said there was no collar?”

I scratched its tiny nose. It was cold, smooth, and felt like a black olive out of a can. “Nope.”

The doctor took a Sharpie from her front pocket and a piece of paper from the table. “What do you want to call her?”

I stared at the dog, and then I stared at Dr. Alice. “Jesus, I don’t know.”

“Not much of a name, sir.” She grinned with her marker hovering over a line that said Name. She skipped that line for now and filled in the following line with, “Chihuahua mix. Female, spayed.”

But the name, Christ, what about the name? Yet again, another moment when I would have loved to have some help from Rosie. She was good at this stuff. She’d have had the perfect name. Daisy or Bernadette or Gertrude. I didn’t have a mind like that, and now it was up to me completely. Because the doctor was waiting. The little lady needed a name. Dr. Alice tilted her head, raised her eyebrows. So?

I turned back to the cage and looked her in the funny eyes. She was just so fucking cute that it made my heart ache. So sweet, so little. The thing that came to mind was also one of Rosie’s most favorite things. Bonus. “How about…”

The doctor inhaled and smiled as I said it. “Perfect.” She wrote it in big block letters on the card.

CUPCAKE

Dr. Alice put the lid on her marker. “We’ll scan her chip again and try to track down her owners. But for now, Cupcake it is.”

Cupcake’s eyes stuck on mine as a huge pit bull swaggered through, its nails clacking on the ground like a lion’s. She looked terrified. I felt her fear in my bones. I didn’t know how to dance this dance, but I knew I didn’t want to leave her to dance it alone. “What if you can’t find them?”

“We will cross that bridge if we come to it.”

“All right. But don’t let her go before I can come say goodbye.”

“We won’t, sir,” said Dr. Alice.

I stuck another finger through the grating. Cupcake mashed herself against the door. I was fucking powerless against that face, and I brought my forehead to the bars. Her small pink tongue found its way through the holes in the metal grate, and she gave me a kiss. On the lips. Which was awesome. I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. “Have a good rest, little one.”

It was as if she could actually understand me, because she blinked once and began to lay down again, taking a moment to rough up the towel like a nest. Then she snuggled in and tucked her nose into the terry cloth. And I swear to God, I saw her smile before she closed her eyes and went to sleep again.

But as I got back to my truck, the sun long and golden from the west, I realized I felt…sad. Oddly empty. That might have been the only legitimately heroic thing I’d ever done. What the fuck was I going to do with myself now? Go back to my boat and read? I was hopped up on adrenaline and dog kisses with no safety net at all. No Rosie. No dinner. Just me, on my own.

And chilling alone in my boat wasn’t gonna cut it. Not tonight.

Right across the street from me was the Anchor Nurse, our local dive. No way would Rosie be there with whoever he was. No fucking way. Way too dive bar for date night, in my book. But also in my book, there was no better way to unwind than some beers and a few games of eight-ball. It wasn’t Rosie, but it was something.

That was when I saw her car, and then her. Her Bug was parked in the corner, and she was walking toward the front door of the bar. Her beautiful hair caught the setting sun. Same color as the drugstore caramels she loved. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her, and I didn’t want to either. And then I watched her extend her hand, and out from behind a parked car emerged some guy with way too much gel in his hair. With pleated khaki shorts. And loafers.

4

Rosie

The Anchor Nurse had been my choice, because even though it was a sort of charmless cross between a down-and-out Cheers and a very sketchy episode of Murder, She Wrote, it was cheap, it was dim enough to flatter, and the food came out as fast as if it were the chow line at the state prison. I mean, the closest I’d ever gotten to a prison was a mishap with Google Maps on my way to Portland—but I felt like it was a pretty good guess. As soon as you said, No pickles on that burger, boom! It was on the table. Sometimes with pickles, sometimes without, but still—awesome! But the speed of the service was a good thing not only because I was hungry, but also for strategic bad-date purposes. This date might be bad, might be good, but I had to hedge my bets. The last thing I wanted was to get stuck in a four-course meal at the Admiral’s Table with a guy who was one or all of the below, a list that I had carefully curated down to four deal-breaking points, all completely, 100% nonnegotiable:

Some sort of investment banker who was “summering in Maine” and who wore loafers with his shorts.

Some sort of real estate agent who was “summering in Maine” and who wore socks with his loafers.

A man who picked his fingernails until they bled.

A man who looked at my general uterus area and asked my age.

Tonight’s date was named Jed, which was somehow hot in theory, when it was under a tiny low-res photo, but somehow less so in person standing out in the evening sun in the parking lot…mostly because he was wearing loafers with what looked like barely there socks, like I’d wear with a new pair of half-priced flats from Target. Uh-oh.

He caught me considering his ladies socks and wiggled his toes. I thought maybe I heard his toe-knuckles crack. “Kinda gay, right?”

I stared hard at him. I might have a new deal-breaker to add to my list. “Sorry?”

“Fucking things give me blisters,” he said. “Gotta do what you gotta do.”

Like buy flip-flops! “I guess.”

He made a move to open the door for me, but then… Walked through it first.

Oh, yay.

Fletcher, who was behind the bar and owned the place, cleaned out a pint glass and slowly shook his head at me as if to say, This again?

I pursed my lips and flashed my eyes to say, Stop busting my fanny. Fletcher turned his gum over in his mouth, and the glass squeaked.

On television, one of the Red Sox stole home, and the crowd went wild. Fletcher didn’t even turn to look. He kept his eyes on me, shaking his head. I’d known Fletcher just as long as I’d known Max, but while Max was a huge part of my life, my heart and soul, Fletcher was more the big brother who heckled my questionable decisions like a fed-up longtime fan with season tickets on the third-base line. For chrissake, Rosie. For chrissake!

He looked Jed up and down and locked in on the loafers. He paused his glass cleaning, closed his eyes, and raised his eyebrows. You can pick them. You sure can. “Table for two,” said Jed as he hunted-and-pecked for letters on his Blackberry.

Fletcher flicked his finger at the Seat Yourself sign, but Jed didn’t notice, so I led him across the bar to the table by the window.

Jed was slow on the follow-up, and I was already sitting on the booth side by the time he joined me. He put his Blackberry in his front shirt pocket and glanced around like he’d just been woken up from a dream. He sniffed hard. “Smells weird in here.”

It wasn’t the Anchor Nurse that smelled weird, of course, but the thousands of angry crustaceans being processed right outside. I glanced out at the fishing boats moored to the docks. “Not from around here, then?”

He shook his head. I thought maybe I saw some dandruff flake from his gelled hair. Then he looked at his chair with an undisguised horror and brushed off some nonexistent dust. He touched the table with his palms, like he was pretty sure it was going to be sticky. As he got Fletcher’s attention for a wet rag, presumably, I looked away—I don’t think I could be with a man who wanted clean tables at a dive bar—and that was when the door squeaked open.

And in came Max. Only thing that was missing was the theme song from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.

He was cocky, brawny, and not at all what I needed right now. Also, why were his clothes all wet? What had he done? Slipped off the deck? He gave Fletcher a flick of his chin, effortlessly masculine, and they did that handshake thing where they half hugged over the bar. Lots of biceps, lots of thumping of fists on backs. So many burly muscles, so much rugged, tanned skin. I refocused on Jed, who looked like he might own stock in a company that specialized in SPF 100. In my periphery, though, I could still see Max. As he left the man hug, he looked over at me, looping his foot around a barstool and taking a seat at the corner spot, watching me all the time. I met his stare, and he actually did the two-fingered point at his eyes and then at me.

Cocky bastard.

This was a first. He’d often threatened to come with me, to “show up and make sure the fucker didn’t cross any lines with my Rosie,” but he’d never actually shown up. He’d never actually gone this far. But now here he was, a little sunburned, in his favorite old jeans, which were dripping. I pulled my phone from my purse, but I didn’t see any messages about why he’d be soaking wet at five o’clock on a Friday, which was a real bummer. Even if it had been because he slipped on his deck, he’d normally have told me about it right away. But not this time.

Unless his phone got soaked! Had to be. He’d never intentionally keep me out of the loop.

But even that lame excuse fell away as soon as he took his phone from his pocket.

Suddenly I realized that while I’d been staring at Max, trying to assemble a reason for his wetness, Jed had been talking. I tuned in just in time to hear the words, “…summering in Maine.”

Not this again. “Your profile said you were an entrepreneur.”

“That’s right,” he answered, trying to do that man-chin-flick thing that Max did so well and which Jed did…so badly. “Half real estate, half investment banking.”

I tried desperately to catch Fletcher’s eye, so we could order some drinks—hard cider cured all ills—but he was having a powwow with Max, and no sooner had they parted than Max glanced at me and winked, to say he’d taken charge of our drinks.

I flared my nostrils in our universal signal of No.

Max just laughed and took a few gulps of his beer. Yep.

No, I could not be distracted by him. I would give Jed of the barely there ladies socks a fair shot. I would. I was getting too old to be picky. I’d shot all the fish in the barrel. I had to make chicken salad from chicken shit. All the adages combined, and that’s where I was. Making chicken salad from the dead fish in the barrel. I can do this.

Which was when Jed leaned back in his chair, looked at my uterus, and asked, “How old did you say you are?”

5

Max

Fletcher took the pitcher of margaritas over to the table where Rosie sat across from Loafers, and I did my fucking damnedest not to laugh out loud. I watched her in the reflection behind the liquor bottles and got a glimpse of this fucking killer scowl she’d never actually used on me before. I’d seen her use it for slow drivers and people who didn’t understand the express checkout at the grocery. For about two seconds, I felt like I’d pushed too hard. She was glaring at my back like I’d just unloaded forty items under the Twelve Items or Less Sign. But, c’mon. The guy was in loafers. His hair was gel-crisp. I couldn’t let her fight this war alone.

Not anymore.

I heard Fletcher make up some bullshit about Pitcher Fridays and that the first pitcher was on the house. Free booze in this bar made hell freezing over sound like a seasonal thing. Never free booze at the Nurse, never. Fletcher came back around the bar and went back to cleaning pint glasses. “Nail picker. Doesn’t stand a chance.”

Again, I forced myself not to laugh. Fletcher turned up the volume on the TV above the back corner of the bar, and I focused in on the Sox as best I could. It wasn’t easy because I was more aware than ever of her presence and how it was making me feel. I could smell her perfume, and that got me thinking about her bedroom, and that got me thinking about her panties, and that got me thinking about her tattoo, and that got me so fucking…

“You okay?” Fletcher asked.

“Yep. Totally.” I slugged back the rest of my beer and tapped the bar like I would’ve asked for another card in poker.

Fletcher put my dirty one in the rinsing sink and grabbed a fresh one off the shelf.

“What the fuck did you do? Go swimming in your clothes?” Fletcher asked, pulling me another pint.

“Rescued a Chihuahua, if you really wanna know.” Fletcher slowed the stream on the tap and started to smile. The thing about Fletcher was he was totally a dog guy. Fucker had been trying to get me to adopt a yellow Lab for as long as I could fucking remember, so if I were going to tell this story to anybody other than Rosie, it would definitely be him.

“Fuck you,” he said. “You’re shitting me.” He let the head overflow and cleaned the side of the glass before putting it on my coaster.

I raised one hand, scout’s honor. “From drowning. True story.”

Fletcher shook his head in that way he’d done to me a million times before. “Knew it. I fucking knew that under there somewhere you had a heart.”

Ballbusters. I was surrounded by them.

It was a pop fly to right field, and though I pretended to be paying attention to the game, I was eavesdropping to see what kinda bullshit Loafers might be spinning. I was pretty sure I heard the words, hedge, fund, and regatta. “She’s not gonna make it to the seventh-inning stretch,” I muttered to Fletcher as I put my elbows on the bar. I had visions of her storming out of this place, and me following her, calming her down with a beer on the beach, and then we could go to back to her place where I could show her just exactly how much I…

But before I could get too far into that one, I noticed Fletcher’s face change from a skeptical, serious, don’t-fuck-around-in-my-bar perma-scowl, to an openmouthed grin.

A table clattered, screeching on the floor as someone pushed it aside. I spun around on my barstool, beer in hand, and for the second fucking time that day, the world went into a slow-mo Jackie Chan fight sequence. Rosie had both hands on her hips, and there was an angry blush in her cheeks. “Excuse me?”

“What!” barked Loafers, lifting his arms and tipping back in his chair, like those assholes who sat in the back of every class in every school. “It’s just a question! Your profile says you’re thirty-four?” He actually pshawed. “Doubtful!”

I heard Rosie bellow, “Listen, you asshole…”

“My guess is thirty-nine. Forty, maybe.”

The air rippled with her growl, and then she picked up the pitcher of margaritas and dumped it…

Right.

Over.

His.

Motherfucking.

Head.

* * *

If I hadn’t stopped her, I was sure she’d have kneed him in the nuts. It would’ve been awesome, but no way was I letting her wildcat herself right into an assault charge, hell no. Loafers had the look of a guy who had his lawyer on speed dial, top of his favorites. Probably even had a special ringer for him—“Back in the Saddle” or some shit. No fucking way was I letting her go headlong into her first bar brawl, even as truly epic as that would’ve been. So, damn near before the margaritas splashed to the floor, I’d scooped her up in my arms from behind, lifting her right off the ground, and feeling her body—every curve—as if for the very first time. Her hips, her stomach, everything. Fuck. She gave me a few solid elbows to the gut, but she was way out of her league now. Welterweight to heavyweight. I proved it, tightening my embrace on her. After a few more elbows to my abs, she did start to give in. Her body relaxed into mine, and she stopped fighting me quite so hard. But still, I kept her close. As close as fucking possible, and not just because I thought she was still mad enough to go for his balls either. That too, though.

Fletcher could barely keep the laugh tears out of his eyes as he stepped out from behind the bar with a dish towel over his shoulder.

“This is going on my Yelp review!” squeaked Loafers, stepping out of his tequila-drenched shoes and standing there in these superweird little socks.

“Dude, are those womens socks?” I asked, my cheek right next to Rosie’s, the intoxicating smell of her perfume making me feel doped up and stoned.

“They are, aren’t they!” Rosie barked. “Those are Peds! Liner socks! In nude!”

Loafers wriggled his toes. “I told you! Blisters!”

“Out you go,” Fletcher told Loafers as he gripped the back of his neck in a horse bite. He showed him the door and then tossed his shoes out behind him.

Fletcher turned around and shook his head at the two of us, me behind Rosie like I was about to…

Anyway. With Loafers out of the bar, the tension dropped instantly. A tremor of laughter and a honk filled Rosie’s body as Fletcher slapped his bar towel into his hand. “What are we gonna do with you?” Fletcher said, pretending to be angry with Rosie—which none of us ever were, ever.

I felt Rosie’s full-body laughter against my chest. Then I caught the laughter, and Fletcher gave in completely. He steadied himself on the bar and wiped a tear from his eye. “Fuck. That was awesome.” He headed around to the back of the bar, lining up three glasses on the rubbery mat next to the taps. “If that ends up on Yelp, it’ll be the high point of my career.”

“You good?” I said into Rosie’s ear, close enough now to see she was wearing the earrings I’d given her for her birthday—small pink rose studs I’d found at a shop downtown. I could see her smile, and she nodded. “What’d he say?”

She sighed, and at the same time she held on to my forearms tighter, so I could just feel the tips of her nails digging into my skin. Yeah, I wasn’t going to be able to hold out on this very long. Ten minutes more of this, and I’d have to lock her in the bathroom with me and show her what kind of man she never knew I was. For the moment, though, I was holding it together. Sort of. Except then she answered, “He told me I should freeze my eggs. I could’ve killed him.”

Rage actually does have a color. Just like blood in the goddamned water. I let myself feel it for a count of three and shook it off. What a fucking asshole. “You don’t look a day over thirty. Fuck forty.”

“You say that because you like my cupcakes.”

Jesus Christ, you’ve got no idea. Yet, no matter how much I wanted her, or maybe because I wanted her so much, I knew it was time to put my foot down. In the puddle of margaritas on the floor. “No more guys in loafers, Rosie.”

“Never again.”

“You gotta knock off this internet dating. It’s killing me.”

She nodded, and I felt it more than I saw it, that’s how close we were. “All right. Okay.”

“Promise me.”

“Promise, Max. I’m done. Tapping out. Closing up shop.”

“You deserve better than some motherfucker telling you to freeze your eggs.”

She hung her head, and the sunset off the bay lit up the curve of her neck and shoulder. “I know.”

There were a thousand things I wanted to say then. That she was beautiful and perfect and whatever she wanted to do with her goddamned eggs was her business. And that no man, ever, would treat her like that again. It was like seeing her naked had unleashed me, but I kept a lid on it. This wasn’t the time. This wasn’t the fucking time. “If I set you down, you’re going to stay here. Got it?”

“Give me a steak knife, and I can go deflate his tires. C’mon! Live a little!” She bit her tongue as she laughed. A sultry laugh, though. Not a giggle. Something saucy and dark and fucking delicious.

“Cool it, hot stuff.”

She took a few deep breaths, and I let her feet come back down to the floor. “I hate men.”

“Nail picker. Forget that shit.”

She shimmied out of my grasp but stayed close, now facing me. “I hate them. I hate them all.”

I was standing with her in my arms, like we were about to tango. I didn’t step away. “Yeah? All of us?”

Rosie’s big brown eyes moved over my face and down my shirt. “Maybe not all,” she said, her voice tamer now, but almost…dangerous, somehow. Not so sweet. My thoughts unraveled so fucking fast in the direction of where I shouldn’t let them go. “Max…”

Jesus Christ. Maybe she did know. Maybe she was thinking the same fucking thing that was stuck in my head, like an endless GIF loop. Her and me on her kitchen table. “Rosie.”

“Why are you all wet?” she asked.

“Sit down. I’ll buy you a drink. I can tell you all about it. How’s that?”

She shifted her lips to one side. They were sparkly and a slightly darker pink than normal. The lipstick was enough to take her out of sweet and into naughty. It was all mesmerizing—her blush, her fury, her beauty, her feistiness. For the first time ever, I thought, Kiss her. Right now. But before I could make my move, Fletcher came over with the shots. We clinked glasses, straight tequila, which Rosie downed like a fucking champ. Fletcher gathered up our glasses and headed back to the bar. When we were alone again, I flipped my chair around backward and took a seat. “Betcha never knew I knew how to do canine CPR.”

Rosie’s jaw dropped, and she planted her hand on the booth seat. She slowly lowered herself down with knees pressed together. Cleavage perfect. Lips perfect. Everything perfect. “Shut the front door!”

I clicked my tongue. I liked making her wait. I liked drawing it out. I also liked being with her, heroic dog story or not. I didn’t want this night to end, not now that I had her all to myself, not now that I knew what was under that dress. “Nachos?” I asked her.

“God, yes.”

Super nachos it would be. And another pitcher of margaritas for sure.

* * *

She got so wrapped up in the Cupcake story that she didn’t touch our nachos, so she got tipsy quicker than usual. Not going to lie, I fucking loved it. I noticed something I’d never let myself notice before, which was that when she got a little drunk, she touched me more than normal—she’d reach out and touch my forearm or shove me when she was kidding. But every touch now was fucking electric. After what I’d seen that morning, there was no going back.

“Eat up,” I told her, pushing the nacho platter toward her.

“You named her Cupcake! I love cupcakes!”

Exactly. I picked out a choice chip, piled high with chicken and once melted but now cooled cheese. I added a dollop of guacamole and some sour cream and brought it toward her like parents do when they’re trying to get their kids to eat a spoonful of peas. “Open sesame.”

She didn’t even bite it in two, but ate the whole thing at once, and then kept on spraying me with questions, while shielding her full mouth with her hand. How big is she? How much does she weigh? What color is her fur? Finally, “Is she okay?”

I nodded. “So they said.”

But Rosie didn’t look convinced. She looked seriously at our side order of onion rings and picked out a crispy one. “Seawater can be very dangerous for dogs.”

I took an onion ring, too, and turned my margarita on the coaster, spreading the condensation so it made a circle on the cardboard. “They told me she’d be fine. Said they’re going to try to track down her owner.”

Rosie frowned, disappointed like I’d just hosed down her parade with a power washer. But as usual, when something didn’t quite line up with her plan, she ignored it. “When you adopt her, we can go to Petco! Just think! You picking out pink blankets for a dog that weighs as much as an organically raised chicken!”

I loaded up another chip and brought it to her mouth. “Who says it has to be pink?”

She pointed to her lightly tanned chest. “This girl! Right here,” she managed to say around a mouthful of nacho, with guacamole on her lip.

That girl. Right there.

In that moment, I knew that what had happened hadn’t been a fucking one-time sucker-punch lightning strike. It hadn’t just been that I saw her naked and got swallowed up by desire. It was real, and it wasn’t sudden at all. She really was the most beautiful woman in the world. I’d always wanted her. Only now, I knew what I wanted.

Rosie pulled out her phone and looked up something, typing away with her thumbs. She turned her screen to face me, and it was covered in screenshots of Chihuahua mixes. She flipped through one after the other, and I shook my head, until she landed on one that was a dead ringer for Cupcake. “That’s her. She’s cuter, but that’s the idea.”

She slumped back in the booth and pressed her phone to her cleavage. Christ. “Oh-em-gee, Maxie. Think of how the ladies will fall all over you. You!” she said, with a gentle press of my shoulder. “With a Chihuahua! Maybe we could even put her in a dress!”

“One step at a time.” Ladies? There are no ladies. Only you. “Anyway, I can’t be going shopping for dog dresses. I’ve got to fix your porch.”

Rosie dropped her phone in her purse and loaded up a nacho. “I told you. I can’t pay you. I can’t have you working for me for free, Max. I just can’t.”

I hovered the pitcher over her almost-empty margarita. “Down that one, skipper.” She gulped it back and then smacked her lips, nibbling on the bottom one like it was numb. I topped her off and added, “I’m the one doing the work. If something better comes up, I’ll tell you. Until then, better to be busy than bored, yeah?”

She flicked the salted edge of her glass with her tongue and savored the salt with her eyes closed. Naughty and she didn’t even realize it. “You’re a terrible liar, Max.”

True, of course. But on the other hand, I’d made it a whole six hours without telling her what I was really thinking. “And I’m not taking no for an answer.”

“Fine, fine, fine.” She took a long sip of her margarita. “But at least let me buy you a few rounds of pool. Have a heart, Max. I might be broke, but I’m not a damsel in distress. Let me keep my dignity.”

There were six thousand things I wanted to say back to her, lobbing them like unsmashable volleys. You’re some kind of damsel. I’ll show you distress. But nah. For now, I’d take whatever I could get. Even if I had to let her think she’d won to get it.

Fletcher would put the games on my tab. She wasn’t paying a penny, even if she thought she was. “You buy, I break?” I tipped my head at the pool tables.

The ice in her margarita tinkled. She smiled and said, “You’re on.”

* * *

There was a very real possibility that she was the worst pool player on the planet. It was unbelievable. For someone so graceful and so precise—someone who’d spend half a day perfecting the shading on the spiral on a snail’s shell, someone who made baked goods like she was a professional chemist—her pool game was absolutely fucking beyond the pale. For every shot she made, she blew at least two. Less-than-half odds, about the same as if she were blindfolded. It was pretty much a riot. But I never laughed.

Her blindfolded, though, now…there was an idea.

I gulped back my drink to try to recenter myself. She thought I wasn’t watching as she moved the cue ball a half inch to the right with her stick. I almost always let her beat me, but sometimes I couldn’t find a way to play that badly. She bent down over the rail, trying to figure out how to make a straight shot and sink the seven.

Which meant that I was standing right behind her, looking at her ass.

I grated my fingers down my stubble and tried as hard as I fucking could to ignore what was happening. Her. The feeling. The fact that my cock was responding in spite of my brain telling me not to be a douche. “Don’t think too hard.”

She did some practice passes of the stick over her finger. She shimmied her ass up farther onto the rail. I could almost see the spot where her thighs met her ass.

Yeah. I was a goner.

She brought her left arm back and hit the ball with the cue, totally whiffed it, as in, didn’t even make any contact at all. Her signature shot. When she realized she’d blown it and I had her beat, she made a big dramatic show of splaying herself out on the felt, laughing into the crook of her elbow as her feet came off the ground, her flip-flops dangling, as the eight ball popped out from under her stomach.

I bent down over her and took the pool cue from her hand, spooning her for one blissful second up against the rail. “Well done,” I told her.

“Why don’t I ever get any better at this game? It’s like a mental block. Like long division.”

I chalked up the cue. “It’s all a hustle. I know it. You know it. You secretly drive to Bar Harbor when I’m busy and make pool sharks cry. No need to lie. We’re all friends here.”

She looked back over her shoulder at me. “Maybe I should take up darts.”

“Christ.” I blew chalk residue off the end, watching her all the time. “You’re dangerous enough on the felt. Give you a pointed object, we’d all be missing an eye.”

She snort-chortled but made like she was pissed off and shoved me. I didn’t budge, but I felt the heat of her hand through my T-shirt. The bar was packed, and I used it to my advantage. The table behind me was getting rowdy, but I only noticed it in the way that I’d notice anything that was the opposite of my own reality. Like when you dive into the water and everything goes quiet, and then you notice how fucking loud the real world is all the time. She was like that—looking into her eyes was like that—like a deep dive into the ocean, where all I could hear was my heartbeat. But all I wanted to hear was hers.

I was aware of the guys behind me, getting aggressive with each other, and instinctively, I wanted to protect her from their bullshit. But more than that, I needed to be close. That was the instinct that I couldn’t ignore.

“You’re acting strange, Max,” she said. She plucked at my T-shirt, like she was pulling a piece of lint off me. A tiny gesture, but flirtatious as hell, different from how we were normally. She was tipsy, and I was hungry for her, and it felt like we were feeding off each other.

Strange? She had no fucking idea. I put down the chalk and leaned into her farther, compressing her body against the table, making her feel how much bigger than her I was. Rosie’s breathing quickened, I watched it happen, and I could see her pulse fluttering away in the hollow of her neck. “Listen. We don’t have secrets, do we?” I asked her.

She shook her head slowly. “No. We don’t…”

“If I saw something, if I realized something,” I said, all husky and almost hoarse, “you’d want to know?”

Rosie nodded and blinked.

“You’re fucking positive?”

Just a blink this time, and a whispered, “Yes.”

Here goes nothing. “I saw you naked today. Through your skylight.”

Her eyes popped open wide. A fast, embarrassed blush spread across her cheeks, of a redness and intensity that I’d never seen on her before. “You did? Naked-naked?”

I put my hand to her hip and let her feel what I wanted. “Fucking naked-naked, yeah. And it’s got me all fucked up, because now, every goddamned time I look at you…” I didn’t fucking know how to finish that sentence, so I let it lie. I’d let her finish it. I’d let her feel it, because I was hard already. And getting a hell of a lot harder.

If she was tipsy earlier, she didn’t seem it now. Her eyes were wide and clear and certain. Her hand came down to my forearm and gripped me more tightly than I expected. That tiny gesture, that flexing of her hand that told me yes, set off a fucking chain reaction inside me. She wasn’t touching me like her best friend now.

So I went with it. Rode that wave to the breakers and hoped like hell I came out whole at the end. “I’m not sorry, either. That I saw you.”

“You saw…all of me? When I was changing?”

I nodded at her, getting closer and closer with every fucking second. “Down to the tattoo.”

She swallowed hard. “Max…”

Now I really gave her a press with my hips, driving my belt into her stomach, driving my cock and balls against her enough to be fucking clear about it. “You deserve to be treated right…”

It was a turning point, and I knew it. I could step back, I could walk out of the bar. I could deprive myself of my air, my water, the voltage that kept me going.

But she had me burning hot, and there was no fucking way I could turn away. I took that beautiful, perfect face in my hands. I looped my fingers into the hair at the nape of her neck. I pulled her close. I felt the softness of her skin against my stubble. And then I looked her right in the eye, telling her, “… I want to be the one to treat you like you deserve.”

And kissed the hell out of her.

I wasn’t a gentleman about it. With my tongue, I made her understand all the shit I hadn’t yet said. I want you. I adore you. I need to be inside you.

At first, she pulled me closer, and the head of my cock pushed against the inside of my zipper. Her hands made fists of my shirt, and she leaned back onto the pool table, damn near hooking her legs around me.

Fuck yeah, fuck yeah.

I tipped her back onto the felt. I came down low on top of her. I felt the lamp above the table brush against my shoulder. Somewhere a guy whistled. Another guy catcalled. But then her grip on my shirt tightened, and she started to push me away.

6

Rosie

I couldn’t do it. I wanted to do it because he kissed with such passion and such aggression that I felt like every single bone in my body was saying, Rosie, this is a table, just lie down and let him have you. But this was Max. My Max. I didn’t kiss Max; I needed Max. But now here I was, liquored up on way-more-than-two margaritas, and losing all my freaking common sense.

Idiot. Idiot.

Summoning up all my strength, and resisting the gravitational pull of the pool table too, I pushed him away. I turned away and slipped off the rail. I grabbed my purse from the hook underneath the corner pocket and hustled for the door. I could hear Max saying my name, I knew he was trying to make a grab for me, but I had to get out of there. The taste of him had been intoxicating, disorienting.

It had been heaven. And he could not be my heaven.

He was the gallon of Rocky Road I should not have. He was the box of chocolates I should not eat.

So without saying goodbye to Fletcher, without even paying my part of our tab, I beat a quick exit for the door, or I tried to anyway. The place was packed, and I had to squirm my way through a whole slew of enormous fishermen, all broad shoulders and barrel chests, like extras from some Viking documentary kicking back after a long day of Hollywood pillage and plunder. Each step was perilous, all their steel-toed boots mere inches from crunching my bare toes. Finally, I did get to the exit and hurled myself out of the door into the dark quiet of the gravel parking lot. Chirping crickets and the buzz of a slowly dying Summer Shandy sign filled the air. The hot air of the bar was swept away by the warm breeze off the water. I inhaled hard, trying to clear my head.

My mind spinning and my feathers decidedly ruffled, I grabbed my keys and tottered to my Bug. But no sooner had I put my key in the lock than the bar door squeaked open and there was Max, coming for me. “No fucking way,” he said, pulling my keys from my hand. “Don’t you dare, Rosie. Don’t you dare.”

It hadn’t even occurred to me what I was doing. I couldn’t drive, for God’s sake. I wasn’t tumble-down drunk, but I was far too tipsy to be going anywhere at all. So I went for Plan B and started to march down the street.

“What are you going to do? Walk?”

“It’s not that far!” I swatted a huge mosquito that had attached itself to my arm like a jungle dart. “What is it, three miles? Four?” I flapped my hand in the air to say, It’s nothing! But honestly, I don’t think I’d ever walked three miles in my life. I’d have to call a cab. I’d have to hitchhike. Still though, still!

Max grabbed my hand and spun me into him. Our bodies collided, and I became acutely aware of his brawn. “Seven miles. Jesus. Let me take you home at least,” he said, his voice all growly and sexy and…

Rosie!

“I don’t want you out here by yourself,” Max said. “It’s not safe.”

“It’s Maine, for God’s sake! What’s going to happen? A moose going to mug me?”

“I know what these mosquitos do to you.” He swept his big, rough hand over my bare arm, letting his fingers move lightly along the bend in my elbow.

My breath got caught up in my throat. It was like a hiccup interrupted a cough. For the first time, I understood what it meant to have someone’s touch light you on fire. And not just that either: the kiss was still lingering, the taste of him still on my lips. Sweet and salty. Delicious. He trailed his fingers down the inside of my forearm and back up again. As proof of the fact he’d made alphabet soup of my brain, all I could think to say was, “I don’t know why they never bite you.”

He laughed a little and smiled as he stepped into me. “Because you’re way fucking sweeter.”

He kept his hand there, on my arm, and his other cradled me at the small of my back. Even in the semidarkness, I could see him perfectly, because I knew everything about him. His rarely seen right dimple, his smile lines, the salt and pepper that was starting to show in his sideburns. The necklace with half my name on it. The curve of his delicious bum. Even in the dark, I knew him. Even in the dark, I wanted him. But even in the dark, I knew it was a terrible idea.

So I stepped back again.

He raised his hands up, like a surrender. “Get in my truck. I won’t touch you.” The gravel crunched under his feet as he moved even farther away. He ran his hand through his hair and reached for his keys. “I’ll be good.”

* * *

He was good. And it was agony. We drove back to my house in a painful, awkward silence. The radio was on the fritz, so we didn’t even have that to break the ice. I clutched my purse in my lap and stared out at the dotted centerline disappearing under the truck as we drove, the flashing mile markers and the deer crossing signs. I’d driven down this road, in his truck, like this, thousands of times, but it had never felt so…off. So strained, so difficult, so uncomfortable. I felt as if, with that single kiss—that single, powerful, sweep-me-off-my-feet, lay-me-down kiss—it was possible everything might have changed.

Also, he’d seen me naked. Not part of my grand plan. At all.

But I desperately, desperately didn’t want anything to change. He was my rock. He was my compass. Our friendship was my anchor. I glanced at him, the cab dimly lit by the old radio. His forearms rippled, his big, manly hand gripped the top of the wheel. The muscles along his jaw made his temple pulse. Rocks are so sexy…

Rosie!

He turned down my driveway, and the flecks of quartz in the gravel shimmered in the headlights. I could tell from the position of his knee that he’d totally come off the gas, and the old Chevy was just doing her slow forward idle. “Sorry,” he said as he came to a careful stop at the end of my driveway, his lights shining over his power tools on my porch. “I am so fucking sorry.” He pinched his temple with his thumb and forefinger and hung his head.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s fine. These things happen.”

Even as I said it, I knew it was totally absurd. People said these things happen when they burned a pizza or offended a relative or forgot to pay their gas bill. Nobody said these things happen when, after twenty years of knowing one another, two people finally kiss and it’s amazing. That’s not even to be filed in the same file cabinet with these things happen. That kiss deserved its own filing system. Its own office. Its own building.

He leaned back on the bench seat, letting his head rest gently against the window at the back of the cab. I remembered I once shimmied through the window behind his head right now because he’d locked himself out and his shoulders were too broad to squeeze inside himself.

Those shoulders. I now knew what it was like to hang on to those shoulders in a moment of unbridled, panty-melting…

No. Absolutely not. I clutched my purse in my arms and shouldered open my door. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Thank you for the ride.”

“You’re welcome. Sleep tight.”

As I pushed the door open, the dome light popped on in the cab, cutting through the pleasant darkness with its handful of piercing watts. I dangled my feet out into the darkness and turned to him. He moved his hand to the gear shift, and the keys jingled.

Might as well have been the theme song from Jeopardy. Because somehow, I just knew, this was it. If I turned him down, I’d never passionately embrace any part of him ever again. I’d never taste his lips. I’d never, ever know what it would be like to know him not as a friend, but as something so, so much more than that. I’d never, ever know what I almost knew at the Anchor Nurse. I’d never know what it was like for Max Doyle to lay me down…and take me.

Max held my stare as his keys swung back and forth. I felt butterflies flapping deep in my stomach. His long lashes cast shadows on his cheeks, and his expression was dark and serious. He broke the stare with a smile, but I could feel it was only for show. “See you tomorrow,” he said and put his hand on the gear shift.

But still, I didn’t close the door. “It was amazing, you know. That kiss.”

He growled, a noise I’d never heard him make. A deep, primal noise that sent my butterflies up and down in unison. I’d once seen a documentary about monarchs and how millions of them flew together, how they made a breeze with their wingbeats that shook the trees. Just like that.

I tucked my feet back into the cab, and the door swung shut. No slam, just a click, but it plunged us back into darkness and silence. Out here, it was even quieter than on the shore—no passing cars, no clanging ropes. We were all alone. Together.

“I’m gonna say this once, okay?” Max said.

I swallowed hard and gripped the door handle for dear life. “Okay.”

I could hear him breathing, and now I knew how that breath felt on my skin. “I’m not going to lie to you. If you tell me to come inside with you right now, I will. I won’t fucking regret it.”

A patch of moonlight made an angled square on the old bench seat. His hand was right in the middle of it. Brawny and strong and now—I knew, from how his palms had felt against my skin—rough. Exactly like I’d always imagined.

“Do you think it would be a mistake?” I asked. I let my hand meet up with his, our fingers like puzzle pieces in the moonlight.

“Fuck no, I don’t.” He scissored his fingers closed, enmeshing them with mine. Just like that, we were hand in hand.

Off went the millions of butterflies into the sky. With them went all my hesitation. All my worry. This was it. “Me neither.”

7

Max

It was like I’d been fucking unleashed. I popped open my door and dragged her across the seat, my hands to the backs of her knees. Her skirt rode up her thighs, and it took all my fucking willpower not to undo my belt, unzip my fly, and take her right there and then, halfway out of the goddamned Chevy. Like she was made for me, like she knew what I wanted before I knew it myself, she hooked her ankles around my waist and wrapped her arms around me. The plan in my head was to carry her straight upstairs. But I didn’t get any farther than the front fender.

I cupped her ass to position it above the wheel well and got her on her tiptoes. I kissed her, hard, to get us back to where we were when she stopped the kiss, with my lips on hers, me pushing her tongue aside. I kissed her rough, rude, and messy to show her exactly what I wanted. She did this thing where she’d kind of gasp through her nose, hold her breath almost, and it made me fucking wild. Her purse fell from her shoulder, and she let go of me just long enough to let her bag fall to the driveway. I planted my hands on her ass and hoisted her up on that good old American steel.

I felt a lacy edge of that red thong. Unless she’d changed it before her date, which meant I was in for a surprise. Pink maybe. Or white. Fuck. Fuck.

Keeping her close, I swept her hair off to one side of her shoulders and kissed a long line up her neck, to her earlobe, and over the earrings I gave her. “I love that you wear these all the time.” I could taste her perfume on her skin, and I tipped her back slightly and gave her a long, dirty kiss on her throat. She answered by hooking her legs together around me and arching her back so that her curls swept along the hood of my truck.

When she found her words again, she said, “I love that you still wear this.” I felt her fingertip slip beneath the necklace I wore. The heart she’d given me. She’d lost her half long ago. But not me.

“You can take it off, can’t you?” she asked. “That thing about your thumbs being too big is bull…”

I went back to her throat, on the other side now, and stole the rest of that sentence.

Of course she was right. It was bullshit, and we both knew it. I could get the thing on and off, but I never wanted to. Once I’d worked her up into more gasps and more arches of her back and a tighter hold behind my neck, once I’d gotten her needy, I pulled away. “Maybe I liked it. Having half your heart there.”

She’d never been one for sappy shit, but this moment was different. Instead of sass, I got a moan. Fuck yeah.

I kissed her again, but this time she gave as good as she got. She dug her fingers into the short hair at the nape of my neck. I could smell her—her wetness, her heat. It was something I’d never let myself even think about. And now, I couldn’t think about anything else.

We got into it. Grinding, biting, gripping, moaning. So into it that the next logical thing was for me to skip all the fucking foreplay and just take her. But I wasn’t gonna fuck Rosie Madden quick and dirty. I was gonna fuck her long and slow and make her remember every goddamned thrust. “I’m not going to take you on the hood of my truck.”

I watched her smile up at the stars. “But you’re gonna take me?”

“Oh, yeah.” I ran my fingertip along the lace right by her pussy. She was soaked. She was perfect. She was mine. “I am.”

I was going to take this slow—as slow as my cock would let me, anyway. I only needed a taste; I needed to understand what was coming. I needed to know her now, before I got to know her for real. Keeping my eyes on hers, I pressed inside her with two fingers. She was slick and warm and every fucking good thing on the planet. She wasn’t the one who moaned first. I was. Her wetness was like the drug I’d always wanted to get hooked on. “Jesus Christ.”

She made a long nnnnnnnn kind of a groan up at the stars as I found my way to her G-spot. Her body bucked when I did, and she whacked the hood of the Chevy with her palm.

“Attagirl.”

I slid my hand along her abdomen, imagining the ink under there, and told her, “I’ve wanted this for so fucking long. I just wouldn’t let myself feel it.”

She straightened up, her eyelids still fluttering. Still in that place where I was pushing her. “I don’t know how it hasn’t happened before,” she whispered.

“It’s going to happen tonight. So hang on tight.”

I knelt down in front of her, lowering myself into a crouch. I slipped my fingers out of her, and she hissed with disappointment, but I didn’t make her suffer for long. I moved her panties aside and licked from her opening up to her clit. Again, she banged the hood of the Chevy, harder now. Ferocious. But not nearly as fucking ferocious as she was making me feel. She tasted like salt water, like the thing that made the earth habitable at all. When I’d had a solid hit of her, enough to survive on for a few minutes, I pulled my mouth from her pussy and said, “Upstairs. Right now.”

* * *

We didn’t make it upstairs. Not even close. Walking up the staircase, I had one hand on her hip, and the dim light from the bulb over the stove showed me the skin of her inner thigh. Taking hold of her from behind, I gripped her hips hard to stop her from getting even one more step away. I turned her around on the stairs, which put us eye to eye. I kissed her again—kissed her until she hung on to the banister, kissed her until she had to sit down. I went right down on top of her, right there on the stairs. I moved her skirt up again, the cool skin of her ass like a magnet to my hands. Her fingers undid my belt, and I undid my fly. When my cock came free, she wrapped her hand around it and groaned. With the other hand, she gripped one of the old carved balusters.

I straddled her on the staircase, so fucking close to entering her I could feel my balls constrict already. “I need to get inside you. Right now.”

“Do it.”

“No condoms.”

“Hell no.”

Jesus Christ. With my knees to the staircase, I got down low on top of her, no distance between us at all, and then pressed right into her. Into that soaking wet paradise that was hers alone. And mine, too. “Fuuuuuuuck,” I said, pinning her hand back to the staircase, gripping her fingers between mine.

“Slow, slow, slow,” she gasped. “Fuck. Slow down.”

The idea that I was hurting her stopped me cold. “Shit, you okay?”

But she was smiling still, beaming even. I could see it by the oven light. “Oh, yeah. I just want to savor every single second.”

There were things happening in my head that felt like fireworks. Like a collision of universes. What could never happen exploding into the inevitable. Like I had a fast-forward button in my head, I saw my cum inside her, her coming on me. “Fuck slow, Rosie. I’ve waited long enough.”

She laughed, raising her head from the step. “Fuck me like your best friend first. Think you can do that?”

From the way her pussy was making me feel, my balls answered first, with an instinctive fuck no. But yeah, I could. I could savor it. I could go slow. Anything for her. “But you gotta let me fuck you hard after.”

She nodded, her eyes twinkling. “Deal.”

I pulled out of her for one second and yanked my pants down my ass so there wouldn’t be anything between us except her panties—more like a bow on a present than a barrier. My knees ground into the steps, and I pushed myself up over her. She looped her hand around the back of my neck and gripped the staircase for support again. “Okay. Slow.”

Slow. Slow. Quarter inch by quarter inch, I opened her up. Like a flower, like a safe. I wasn’t a guy who got emotional about fucking—but this? This was different. This was all that shit I never knew sex could be. It was sexy and sultry and fucking beautiful.

“You’re huge,” she said when I was halfway in. I felt her fingernails dig into my neck, and I had to resist the urge to slam into her hard enough to make her roar.

“Can you take it?”

Her eyebrow arched. “What do you think?”

The way she talked, the way she felt, made me feel like I wasn’t even on the planet anymore. In my head, I panned out to what I couldn’t see—her adorable feet, her toes curled, her pink toenails shimmering. Being inside her was like that, a fucking out-of-body experience. I undid the bow at the front of her dress with my teeth, freed her left breast from the cup of her bra, and brought my mouth to her nipple.

Fucking fuck. The rest of her was soft, but her breasts were even softer. Her nipple tightened up as I ran my tongue around it. Underneath her, the risers groaned as she writhed.

The steps had seemed like a sexy idea at first, but now I knew I needed her horizontal, I needed her on her knees, I needed her every goddamned way I could get her, and I couldn’t do that with risers digging into my thighs. So I summoned up all my strength, pulled out of her, and carried her to her room.

* * *

In the moonlight from the skylight above, she stripped for me again, like she had when I was standing above her. This time, though, she meant it. This time, she worked it like a pro—like she’d stripped on poles and driven a thousand men insane. She stepped toward me, running her finger up my forearm, and then back down again. “You’re so sexy, you know that? Sexier every day, somehow,” she said

I fucking loved her this way—raspy, naughty, dark. She tugged my T-shirt off over my head, sending it flying into the shadows. It sounded like a bottle of something fell over—one of her zillion lotions, and she turned away. While she was distracted, I shoved her back onto the bed, hard, and she squealed. She scooched up toward the pillows, every valley and curve highlighted in the moonlight. She crossed one leg over the other, bent at the knee. Then she rolled onto her left hip and traced her finger over her tattoo.

“When did you get it?” I ran my finger along the thorns, and she propped herself up on her elbows.

“Last year…” She trailed off, like she was teasing me to try to figure it out.

Last year. I tried to think back, but I was in the tunnel with her. There was no time before this goddamned moment. But then it hit me. Maybe it was in the summer. “When you were in the city?” I traced the edge of one of the bright red petals.

“Yeah. I had a thing with a tattoo artist named Francisco. He put it on me.” She laughed softly, pure vixen with her tongue pinned between her teeth. “Said someone so pretty should have some art on her. Said it would be a shame to stay pure.”

The idea made me fucking jealous. Some guy, crouched down beside her on a tattoo chair—after hours, lights low, talking to her about being beautiful. About being perfect. About being exactly what she was. I hated it, and I loved it all at once. There was no word in the English language for that goddamned feeling. “Hurts, right?”

She nodded. “Like a son of a bitch.”

Somehow, that got to me so deep in my bones it made me sick. The idea of her suffering, with that needle on her skin and me not there to hold her hand. Goddamn it. But then again, no way in hell would I have let another man spend so much time on these hips. Not now. “He was from the Dominican Republic. He used to be a prizefighter, and he took me out for arepas every night.”

“I want to know, and I don’t want to know,” I told her and caged her in, straddling her with my legs and boxing her in with my arms.

“I’ll tell you whatever you want.”

I was slowly moving down her body with my tongue and stopped right above her belly button. “You said a thing. What kind of thing?”

“A passionate thing.”

I moved to the left and kissed her hip bone. Dirty, though. Rude. Wet. “You love him?”

She raised her fingers, like she was showing me the size of something tiny. A BB, maybe. A ball bearing. “A little.”

I moved past the ink, along the curve of her hips, into that dark and perfect V between her legs. “Can’t believe you never told me.”

“You don’t know everything about me, Max,” she said, sliding her thighs against one another, squirming with anticipation. “Not even close.”

Her smell was on my stubble and welling up in her pussy, so fucking close I could almost taste it. Honey sweet, and so much more. Maybe I didn’t know half of what I thought. Maybe I didn’t know half of what I needed. Maybe all these years I’d been running my engine on low-octane fuel. “Don’t I?”

She shook her head and gracefully moved her hair over one shoulder with a roll of her neck. “Maybe you don’t know anything at all.”

Awww, fuck. I answered her first with a dirty suck of her clit that made her gasp. I let it go and said, “Maybe you don’t know anything about me either.”

Again, I moved my tongue along her, pressing into her opening, parting her lips with my fingers, getting in as deep as I possibly could. I could have lived on that taste and nothing else forever. When I’d gotten her worked up, gasping and grabbing the sheets, I pulled away. I made her suffer, and her eyes narrowed in the dim light.

“I want you inside me again, Max. I need it. I need to feel you there.”

Regular Rosie was polite. Sexy Rosie was bossy. Seeing her bossy and sexy was like being shown the back room at Blockbuster back in the day. I knew I’d never be the same again. “Say please,” I told her as I climbed on top of her. I positioned my cock right at her opening. She squirmed for it. She pawed for it. She licked my ear.

“Say please,” I growled at her.

She groaned in a way that told me I’d hit the spot with that—that she liked it. I knew she was right; there was a whole lot about her I didn’t know at all. She was apple pie on the surface. But even apple pie can get molten hot.

“Say it.” I edged into her, but not far, not even enough to lose my head inside her, and pulled out. Fucking torture, but it was worth it, because she was dying for it. Same as me.

“Say it,” I told her again, gripping her hand and pinning it over her head onto the pillows. I took her nipple between my teeth and bit down. With her free hand, she gripped my ass, trying to pull me in, but no fucking way was she winning that. I kept her pinned and told her, “Beg for it.”

Again, she made that low nnnnnn, like a purr.

She squirmed. She bucked. She panted. She laughed. Then finally, she said, “Please. Please. Please.”

Yeah. Fuck. Yeah.

8

Rosie

Max was an alpha. I’d always known that. His default resting expression looked like a pissed-off bouncer at a club where you had to have a special handshake to get in the door, and you didn’t know the handshake. He never used two words when he could use one. He was aggressive and loyal and quick to use his fists. I remembered him getting in schoolyard brawls when we were younger, to defend kids who were too scrawny to defend themselves. More than all that, he was also a sweetheart, at least to me—he didn’t show that to anybody else. It was like I knew the dark side of his moon. But now, his aggression was coming at me, unchecked and hard-charging.

It was ahhhhhhhmazing.

He caged me in underneath him, his hands to my ass, and pressed into me. I sank my teeth into his shoulder, and he took me even harder. He didn’t go slow this time—it was like he couldn’t, like he was nothing but instinct and need. As he drove into me, my back arched right up off the mattress, and he held me close to him. I clung to him hard, keeping my thighs so tightly clasped that they trembled. I wasn’t petite, not by any measure. But he made me feel small—that’s how he took over. Like a boss. He slipped his hand underneath the curve of my back so that when the roll of pleasure let me relax and I came back down onto the sheets, my pelvic bone was tilted up toward him. Everything felt even better than before.

With each drive, the headboard smacked the wall behind us. Pound, thump. Pound, thump. I found myself pressing my hand to the wood to quiet the noise so I could focus on him and only him. But it didn’t work. Pound, thunk. Pound, bang. But as he powered into me with another thrust, this one so intense that I really did feel my eyes roll back into my head, the thump changed to more of a…crumbling noise. And it was then that I felt something…powdery, almost. And it was coming down on top of us.

I looked up, and I realized he was taking me so hard that he was cracking the plaster. He was breaking the house. That was how passionate he was. It came down on us like fine sand, and a bigger crumble landed on the edge of the headboard.

“Wall…cracking,” I gasped, because it was all I could manage between the mind-blowing drives.

Max looked up, but he had no response. With one quick tug, he yanked me out of the line of the dust, into the middle of the mattress, so my head was off the pillows. He put his forearm in its place, a perfect fit under my neck. Deep inside me, he paused for a second. He moved my hair off my cheek, he sank down as if for a kiss, but didn’t kiss me. Lips touching, no kissing. “Fuck this house. Fuck everything. Fuck the world. Fuck everything but you.”

I squeezed down on him hard. “Or maybe fuck me, especially.”

He groaned and put the Y of his thumb and forefinger under my jaw. “Dirty talk. But you look so sweet.”

I rolled my belly to make him shift inside me. “Not sweet.”

“Not fucking sweet at all.”

He planted his knees and drew me up to sitting in his lap, my legs hooked around him, my ass to his massive thighs. He plunged into me so deeply that all I could do was roar.

He licked along the line of my throat, and his scruff scratched the cool line he’d left with his tongue. When he got to my ear, he turned my face to the side. He tugged at my earring with his teeth until the back slid off, and he let both parts fall to the mattress. “I don’t want to lose that,” I told him. His grip on my jaw was so tight, I could feel my own heartbeat against his fingers.

“I’ll buy you new ones. Hundreds of them. Spoil you fucking rotten until you’re insufferable.”

This man. How had I not seen this underside of him? This filthy gorgeous talk that made me so crazy? “I love you like this.”

“I love you like this,” he answered with a thrust. “I don’t want anything between us,” he growled and then tugged at my earlobe with his teeth. “Not an earring.” He moved his thumbs to my lips. “Not a secret.” His other hand gripped my hip. “Not a strip of lace. Nothing.”

The words, the feeling, the overwhelming, intoxicating high that was Max sent me spiraling. The position was absolutely perfect, absolutely what I needed, and I started to feel the flicker of my orgasm take over, the first rumble deep inside my body. Max is doing that to you. Max’s cock. Max’s body. Him. It’s him.

“Oh Jesus,” I whispered.

“Yeah?”

Max. Your Max. He’s got you. He does. And he’s going to make you come so hard. I couldn’t even speak because I was heading so fast toward the rapids. “You’re going to make me come.”

“Again and again. Count on it.” He situated me a little higher so my clit was pressing against his pelvis with every drive from below. The hand that had been to my jaw moved down between us, the front of his forearm to my stomach. And then his fingertips met my clit.

Class V rapids. Oncoming. No life vest. No turning back. My walls started to flutter, and my legs started to shake even harder. “Can I come?”

“Do it,” he said, putting a long kiss to my chest and then moving down to my nipples. I watched him in the moonlight, and as soon as he put his lips to the left one—oh sweet baby Jesus—his eyes closed, and that aggression washed away. Total peace, total calm. Total happiness because of me.

The flicker shifted to a tremor in my clit, and I felt myself heading into the falls.

“I’m going to let go for you, okay?” I knew it was my voice, but it didn’t feel like me at all. I felt him smile into my breast, and he nodded into me but didn’t stop sucking, not even for a second.

His touch was perfect, like mine but better, and he made steady circles around my clit. Didn’t experiment, didn’t screw around with fancy stuff; he just gave me dependable, confident, continuous spirals that made my whole reality spin like a top.

“Come on my cock, Rosie. Do it. Now.”

With that, left became right. Here became there. The ocean became the forest. The leaves turned into the waves. I was diving. I was falling. Crashing through the rapids into him.

9

Max

Rosie came like a woman who wore naughty lace even when nobody was looking. She came hard, and she came loud. She came like a fucking queen. She didn’t whimper—she fucking roared. She gritted her teeth and dug in her nails, and all I could think was, Naked was nothing. This was what I’d always needed to see. It was tough as hell to stop myself coming as she did, but I needed to see how she finished before I pumped myself into her. I needed to see her all the way through it—until that happened, I didn’t give a fuck about myself.

The muscles of her neck tensed, and she held her breath between moans. Her pussy gripped my cock tight. I’d planned to get another one out of her, or maybe three. Except just that first one went on and on and on, like waves in high tide. From the way she writhed, from the way she stayed gone, I knew they weren’t coming at her back to back; it was one long, perfect orgasm, the most beautiful goddamned thing I’d ever fucking seen.

As soon as her wetness thickened, as soon as it slipped out of her and onto my balls, I knew I didn’t stand a chance of holding out. The full-body writhes lessened, and she started to come down off of it. She gripped her inner thighs with her hands and dug her fingers into her own flesh. “Fuck. Fuck,” she growled. As her pussy unlocked from my cock, enough for me to think in actual sentences again, her legs fell open for me. I gripped her inner thighs hard, fingers on the wetness that had spilled from her pussy, and my precum, too. I gripped her hard enough to see the depressions where my hands had been, outlined in shadow. I stayed inside her as she panted. I stayed inside her as she whimpered. I stayed inside her as she said, “Thank you, Max, thank you.” Only when she opened her eyes did I let myself start driving into her again—slowly at first, because I knew she’d be sensitive.

She blinked hard. “How can anything feel so good? How can anybody be so amazing to me?”

“You’re the amazing one, Rosie. I’m just here worshiping at the altar.”

“God.”

She was in old-school missionary, but it was like I couldn’t get deep enough. I thought about putting her on her knees, but this time—this first time—I knew I had to look into her eyes as I came. It had to be that way, no fucking doubt. So to get deeper, to get every inch of my cock into her that her body would allow, I put her right leg between my thighs and pinned it down with my weight. Her left leg, I raised up so that her heel was past my shoulder. When I drove into her like that, she whined, this fucking desperate noise of pleasure that made my cock pulse in response. She turned her head back and forth, and I watched her goddamned toes curl again. “You coming again?”

She smiled, eyes still closed. “Still coming off the last one.”

Fucking yes. She was confident, sexy, feminine in her movements in a way I’d never seen her be out in the world. Her gaze met mine, and she raised her arms above her head. Then she brought her mouth to the skin of her inner arm and lightly nipped her own flesh, drawing that perfect silk back slightly between her teeth before letting it go.

“Fuuuuuck, Rosie.” I’d never seen anything so hot in my whole fucking life.

Hotter than her actual body was the way she acted about it. Like she knew she was a bombshell, knew she was right off the charts. I loved it, and I wanted to punish her, not because she was so beautiful, but because she’d never let me see this beauty before.

I drove into her hard again so that the bed whacked the wall. The head of my cock, engorged from edging back and forth through her orgasm, made the tip even more sensitive than usual. She squeezed, and I pounded her with everything I had. The fucking plaster sprinkled down, but the house could’ve come down around us, and it wouldn’t have made shit for difference to me.

“I’m gonna come inside you unless you stop me,” I told her.

Her hand gripped my knee, and she nodded.

“You better be sure,” I told her as I felt my balls tighten up, slapping against her ass, almost painful with every drive. The good kind of pain, though. The pain that gets you where you need to go.

“I’m sure.”

“You want my cum inside you?”

“Inside me first and always.”

I gave her everything I had, and she took it like a motherfucking goddess. She squeezed me, she held me, and when I’d fucked her so hard that my balls ached, she filled the darkness with a whispered, “Please, please, please, please.”

And I filled her pussy with every last drop I had.

10

Rosie

A throbbing hangover and fuzzy teeth were waiting for me when I woke up, and then it all came back to me in flashes, like a flipbook of Instax photos held together by an office clip. The pool table, the moonlight hand puzzle, the stairs, the striptease, the plaster, the begging. The growling. The banging. The coming.

Max.

Maxwell Benjamin Doyle. Born August 21. Favorite color: blue. Favorite food: nachos. Favorite beer: Double IPA. Least favorite food: grapefruit. Favorite movie, according to what he told the rest of the world: Blade Runner. Actual favorite movie: Legends of the Fall. Favorite song, when he talked to everybody else: Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Actual favorite song, as only I knew: U2, “With or Without You.” Total softie, 100%.

Also, the fifth man I’d ever slept with. The very best, hands down, no comparison, not even the same league. Unless I’d dreamed it.

I pried my eye open. There he was, the man about whom I thought I’d known everything, in bed with me. Naked. My thighs were still burning like I’d spent all night on the stair stepper.

Definitely not a dream.

Quick on the heels of my heart-melt at seeing him in my bed was the overpowering regret at having made a decision that remapped my entire reality. It wasn’t hangover regret either—I’d been tipsy, but not stupid drunk. Tipsy enough, though, to have no self-control at all. Normally, that manifested in eating a whole pint of Cherry Garcia in bed while I watched Felicity over and over again.

Not this time.

This time, it was Max. Over and over again, Max.

I’d thought that my dread at meeting Jed of the Loafers was like a bad clam? This felt like I’d helped myself to a second helping of a very haphazardly prepared paella. So I clapped my eye shut like a mosquito had just flown into it and tried to hit a mental reset button, like there used to be on the first Nintendo, the button that would fix everything. Reset. Reset! I could not have done this. I could not have slept with Max. There were three billion men on the planet, and I slept with the one who knew I still slept with a stuffed rabbit that I won at a fair when I was five. There were eligible men all over the Eastern Seaboard, and I managed to get entangled with the one who knew almonds gave me hives on my tush, the one who knew I shouldn’t eat sauerkraut unless I planned to be in solitary confinement for a day afterward. One of the very few people in my life that I knew I couldn’t live without.

I could not have done this. I could not.

Except I had.

The sun was rising, and a tiny sliver of light accentuated the ripples of his abs. He slept with his hand behind his head, and the sheets were draped over him like he’d been set up for a love scene in a soap opera. All the naughty bits were covered. Just barely.

Except, of course, for the morning wood. That was covered, sure, but very hard to ignore. It was huge. Absolutely huge. And perfect. And with the outline of his balls just visible. As if my fingers weren’t attached to me, they moved to the sheets, plucked at the fabric, and revealed the dark hair in a sexy patch. The pink, taut skin of the head peeked out. Then those veins, oh those…

I sort of hiccup-gasped, let go of the sheet, and tried as hard as I could to stop myself from moaning out loud. Again, though, bad paella! It all came flooding back to me. Every dirty word, every thrust.

An endless, amazing night of lovemaking. With my best friend.

I yanked my eyes away from the rumpled sheets and moved them to the window. The sunshine stung my retinas, and I watched a bumblebee hover outside, like a plump-winged grape. This wasn’t my first trip to the regret rodeo. I was thirty-four years old. I had about as much sense in choosing men as a roulette wheel. I had seen this movie before.

But one movie I hadn’t seen was… I let my eyes move over to his hard-on again, now actually getting bigger and actually shifting the sheets.

Lord.

Mercifully, Julia Caesar stumbled into the room with about as much grace as a man in a bear costume. I wasn’t usually glad to see her, not unless I was wearing long pants and had a sofa between us, but this was different. She was a living, scowling, hungry distraction. But she looked away when she saw me and stared at my bookshelf with one paw in mid-step. I made soft kissing noises, and she gave me a quick glance. Oh, please. Don’t be absurd.

She wore her signature grimace, the result of a pretty pronounced underbite, which pinned her top lip under her bottom incisors, making her very bulldog-like, and contributing to her general air of feline, apathetic invincibility. Another day with you staring at me and trying to force-feed me low-sodium luncheon meats. Happy Monday to me.

Julia gripped the carpet with her claws, making a snagging, ripping noise as the fibers succumbed to her talons. I made more kisses to try to stop her from waking Max with her claw sharpening. She swaggered over to the windowsill to take her morning sunning position. Outside, a row of unsuspecting sparrows danced around, happily fluttering eventual murder victims.

I turned my attention back to Max and took a deep breath, and it wasn’t particularly…pleasant. A whole night of nachos and onion rings was taking its revenge. Even my figurative bad paella would’ve been more palatable. The whole situation was bad enough, but to think of him waking up, pulling me into his arms, and finding the human equivalent of an onion blossom…

I couldn’t handle it. Too close to home, too embarrassing. I was nowhere near poised enough to handle a mistake like this head on, and certainly not without minty fresh breath. Carefully, and trying not to get too wrapped up in the girth of his forearm, my gosh, I moved Max’s arm off of me and slipped out of bed, tiptoeing into the bathroom. Julia trundled along after me, making the floorboards creak. I turned and stared at her, and she froze, snapping her face toward my dresser. I held my ground, though, and pointed at her slowly. As I did, her big, gold eyes glanced up at me, and I put my finger to my lips to tell her to shush it with the trundles. Like this was some sort of game of chess, she lifted one huge paw and dangled it tantalizingly over the floorboards. I pursed my lips and zeroed in on her weirdly human eyes. Don’t you dare, Caesar.

Her paw came down a millimeter. Or what, Brutus?

Once, I’d seen a nature show with mountain goats about to face off, so I summoned up my inner Rocky Mountain cloven-hoofed fury and I turned my head like that, like I was about to charge her. Much to my utter astonishment—Is this what a successful hostage negotiation feels like?—it worked. She placed her paw softly on the ground and twinkle-toed her way along. In the bathroom, she leapt up on the back of the toilet seat, pretending to hide behind my towels. I drew the door shut behind me, careful to make sure the click of the knob didn’t wake him. I stared at myself in the mirror. There was a very, very clear hickey on my throat, in the exact shape of Max’s mouth. There was even a hint of teeth marks. I planted my face in my hands.

After I’d taken a few breaths to steady myself, I turned on the faucet to a bare trickle, and Julia leapt from the toilet to the countertop. She stared at the water and extended a furry gray paw into it and then snatched it back, offended by the shocking wetness of the water…or something.

As I wiped off the weird black glops of makeup that I always had in the inner corners of my eyes in the morning, I tried to come up with a strategy. What was I going to do to make this less awkward? I couldn’t blame the booze. I was now officially older than Jesus, which meant I was also definitely old enough to know better. I couldn’t blame the bad date, because that hadn’t been such a huge surprise—he’d listed hanging with my bros as one of his hobbies. All the fish in the barrel were most definitely dead. The chicken salad was spoiled.

All I could do was blame the obvious. The temptation of Max Doyle had been too much. And I hadn’t been able to resist. On the list of Huge Life Mistakes, this one was right up there at the top.

But I can’t pretend it didn’t happen, I thought to myself as I splashed my face with some water and put a dollop of toothpaste on my toothbrush, while Julia investigated the water with one paw and then the other, wax on, wax off. As I turned on my toothbrush and put it to my teeth, the bathroom door opened. Max stood there and leaned dreamily on the doorframe. Messy-haired. Buck naked. Hard. Perfect.

Slowly, I made circles around my top molars and blinked at him. He adjusted his balls and smiled at me.

I couldn’t fake business-as-usual. Could I?

11

Max

She had a serious case of the babbles. She was always pretty chatty, way more talkative than me, but never like this. I’d never seen anything like it—she was talking ten thousand miles a minute about the most mundane possible shit: the weather, her feeling on her new toothpaste, whether or not to repaint the kitchen cabinets, lamenting the situation with the water pressure, Julia Caesar’s slow transition away from nitrates. All the while, she was rushing around her room, opening drawers and rifling through the closet. Each piece of clothing she put on covered up that perfect body—first a pair of stretchy exercise pants that hugged her just right but hid her tattoo. Then a pink sports bra that made her cleavage look double-hot but covered the nipples I’d bitten. One tragedy after another. She was like a whirlwind, and she wouldn’t let me get near her. I took a step toward her, and she staggered back against the closet. I reached out for her, and she scurried over to the mirror on the wall and began braiding her hair. Babble, babble, babble. Deli turkey. Lead paint. Something wrong with the lock on the back door.

“Rosie.” I reached out to pull her toward me, grazing the side of her abdomen with my fingertips.

She yelped and put a rubber band in her hair, even though the braid was only half done. She still had fucking sheet marks on her cheeks, for God’s sake. There was no part of this that made any sense. I wanted to get inside her. Again. This morning. At least three times before lunch. “Get back in bed with me.”

She swallowed hard, and her eyes darted from the bed to me and back again. She shook her head fast, as if I’d just asked her if she wanted to go see the large beetle display at the Maine Botanical Gardens. “I’m gonna go for a run,” she said, producing a pair of new-looking tennis shoes that I’d never seen her wear, ever.

“A run?”

“Yes, it’s very good exercise. We’re not getting any younger!” she chirped, like ten notches too loud. “People in their thirties are supposed to get thirty to thirty-five minutes of good solid cardio a day! Two and a half hours a week! I saw it in Cosmo!” She added a Tony the Tiger cross-body fist pump. It’s grrreeeeeat! And then she trotted out of the room. I noticed a white tag poking out like a tail where it should’ve been smooth spandex.

“Your pants are on inside out, beautiful.”

But she’d already put in her earbuds and acted like she didn’t hear me.

* * *

I waited for her for a while. A long while. She wasn’t a runner, and I was banking on her coming back to me in a matter of minutes in this heat, but she didn’t. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. Thirty. I made her bed, I sized up the plaster situation—it was like we’d rocked the foundation. I fixed the lock on the back door. No sign of Rosie anywhere.

In the kitchen, Julia was waiting for her breakfast, lying on her side in a patch of sunshine on a rag rug. I gave her furry stomach a scratch, and she purred, nuzzling her nose against my foot and stretching out her legs to full length. I’d always liked Julia, and I’d told Rosie about six million times that cats aren’t like dogs, sure, but they’re smart and loyal, and they probably were shy around her because they could “smell her fear,” which was always met with a wide-eyed stare that said, Why would anybody want a pet that can smell fear?

Point taken, but Julia and I were on the same level. Usually. Except I wasn’t going to enable the SPAM addiction. At the same time, I wasn’t about to put a twenty-year-old cat through the horrors of figuring out what to do with something called Fancy Cat Slow Stewed Beef in Gravy with Peas or whatever. To me, canned salmon seemed like the best compromise. I found some on the bottom shelf of the pantry and got a can opener out of the drawer with about sixteen rolling pins. Totally normal for this place where shit only made sense if you said to yourself, Where would I have put something if I were ninety-five years old, blind in one eye, and gave no fucks?

Put the can opener with the rolling pins, obviously.

I put the blade of the opener on the rim of the can and broke the seal. Julia made figure eights around my legs, but way down at the end of the driveway something caught my attention. Rosie, sort of power-walking, not running at all. Her skin was shiny with sweat, her hair looked like she’d just been in a tussle with some wildlife, and I was pretty sure I saw some mud on her leg. But as I made a move to go help her—was she limping?—she seemed to realize my truck was still parked where it had been last night. When she saw it, she stopped short and clapped her hands to her face. She pivoted and scampered into the woods, hurling herself into a row of rhododendrons so that the only evidence she’d ever been there was the huge shiny leaves shimmering in the sun.

I finished opening the can. “I think she’s avoiding me, Julia.”

She rammed her face into my calf and purred.

Yeah. Thought so.

12

Rosie

I hunkered down like a guerilla fighter behind a huge granite boulder that looked to have been assaulted by generations of birds with very serious gastrointestinal issues. Part of me just couldn’t believe that I was hiding in the woods from Max, nor could I believe that I had used jogging as an excuse. Me! Rosie Madden! The closest I ever got to exercise was a halfhearted downward dog when my calves felt crampy. But now here I was, dripping with sweat, getting accosted by an array of terrifying New England jungle insects, which looked like maybe they were migrating from the jungles of Far Away, and covered in mud from where I’d slid into a ravine. Because even more than not believing I was running and hiding, I still couldn’t believe what I’d done with him. I was terrified of it. Embarrassed about the way I’d talked to him. Horrified by how…unfiltered I’d been. I touched the spot where he’d left the hickey, still tender. Not like he’d been particularly filtered himself.

God.

The noise of a truck filled the air from down the drive, and I hurled myself into the underbrush for cover. It was Max’s truck, I’d have known the sound of that engine anywhere. But I stayed low. I couldn’t face him. Not yet. Not until I got my wits about me and this hickey healed enough to go out in public. Or I found a summery scarf.

The gravel crunched under Max’s truck as he slowly rolled past the point where I’d taken cover in the bushes. I saw the rusty hubs of his tires. I flattened myself against the dirt and shifted a leaf that was in front of my nose with one fingertip.

Which was when I realized that leaf was attached to two others. Broad leaves, small center stem. Shiny, waxy green.

Poison ivy. Everywhere.

Was this just a big joke? Was someone in the heavens looking down, with laugh-tears streaming down their face?

A bird flew over and deposited a package on the boulder. A droplet of wet poop landed on my arm.

Awesome.

But I maintained position. I didn’t move, or even start scratching my already-itchy skin. Once I heard Max’s wheels leave my driveway and get onto the asphalt of Boston Post Road, I extricated myself as carefully as I could. It was like some ludicrous game of Twister, with only one person playing. And then I limped on home. Forcing my mind away from the thought of Max, I concentrated on the second most pressing issue: figuring out where my gram kept the calamine lotion and antihistamines.

* * *

Go figure, they were in the medicine cabinet. I dosed myself with non-drowsy allergy meds, and then I peeled off my poison-ivyed running clothes in the backyard, along with my shoes, and ran up the steps naked, with Julia charging after me like a potbellied pig. I took a cool shower, barely warm enough to get a fresh bar of soap to lather. Over and over again, I rinsed my skin and the soap too. With every touch, I thought of Max’s kisses all over my body. On my tattoo. Over my hips. Down my legs.

Fact: He was an absolutely fantastic lover. He hadn’t screwed around with any sort of how does that feel nonsense, but he seemed to know exactly what I liked. There were a couple of spots—on my ass, on my inner thigh—where there were bruises from his teeth, from the way he’d sucked and bitten.

Oh, how I wanted his bites.

But I would not eat his pint of ice cream. I would not. I toweled off and dropped the bar of soap into the garbage. I got a fresh one and put it on the rack under the shower head, along with a new bath puff. Julia watched from her spot on top of the toilet.

As I put lines of lotion on the non-itchy parts of my legs and over my tattoo, my thoughts went right back to Max. He was like the marshmallows floating on the top of my cocoa. I couldn’t avoid him, even if I’d wanted to. But what exactly was I going to say? Let’s pretend that didn’t happen, let’s pretend we didn’t have the best sex of our lives together. Or maybe, even less plausible, Yes, we had sex! But it was just sex.

Pffffffft. I scrunched the water from my curls. That was anything except for just sex. Out of sheer habit, I tapped my phone to wake it up. There he was again. He’d sent me a text as he left that said simply:

Call me.

I wanted to. So much. But I didn’t. I put on my big-girl pants instead. I did my makeup, I dotted my itchy spots with calamine. I got dressed in a clean pair of yoga pants and a tank. Then I trotted downstairs barefoot. As I passed the steps where he’d had me on my back, I felt a pinch in my ankle. And my heart.

The pain in my heart was beyond my control. But the ankle was different. That, at least, I knew how to treat. So, from the freezer, I grabbed a bag of frozen peas. I turned up the AC to max and got situated on the couch with Julia and my sketchbook. I put my feet on the coffee table, and she draped herself over my shoulders like a slightly inflexible mink coat, periodically swatting my cheek with her tail. I was just getting into a new illustration when my calendar popped up with the notification I’d been pretending I wouldn’t have to deal with ever.

GRAY MOOSE PORTFOLIO DUE

I groaned a little. It was a tiny notice that encompassed the big looming question that had been facing me for months.

The future.

It was too much to think about at the moment. I was tired and frazzled, and I tried to drown myself in work. It actually helped, for a while, and I busily focused on the Kingdom of Somewhere, with its castle and Matterhorn-like peaks. But my thoughts were jumbled, and my stone walls turned out terribly. My trees looked parched, my valleys too empty and bleak.

Max was one part of the problem. But so too was Gray Moose Books. In New York.

See also, my dream job.

I erased my stone walls and started again. The odds of me getting the job were laughably small. I knew I wasn’t experienced enough; I knew I didn’t have the right pedigree. But Max and I had talked about it a lot. He said yes, I said no. He said try it, or you’ll never know. I said, but I already know what they’ll say. I blew some eraser rubbings off my sketchpad and glanced at my computer.

Try it…

As if I were taking tentative steps across an icy lake, I slowly moved the attachments off my desktop into my email, one by one. I dragged over my most polished portfolio. I double-checked that my cover letter had my phone number and address and the right date. I wrote my professional subject line. I wrote my professional email. I read and reread the words out loud to make sure I hadn’t blundered into some very unfortunate typo. My heart was pounding so hard, I could feel it behind my eyes. For a long time, I stared at it—long enough for my screen saver to pop on. Streaming back at me were pictures of me. And Max.

…or you’ll never know.

Max was gutsier than me. He was a risk-taker, and I wasn’t. But it was as if some of his energy and rubbed off on me. Last night had been like a B12 shot of confidence. For one instant, I truly believed I could do it—that I could do anything. That I was that amazing, fearless woman I’d been with him last night. So I held my breath, hovered my cursor over the paper airplane logo, and pressed send, filling the room with that weird swoosh of a sent message, so loud that it sent Julia scrambling.

With my palm, I slapped my laptop shut and put it on the coffee table. I flipped back a few pages in my sketchbook, from when I’d had a conference call with the author. “How about the prince?” I’d asked.

And she’d answered, “The sort of guy who’d rescue a kitten from a tree no matter how dangerous, the sort of guy who you’d die to see wearing a Baby Björn. That guy. You know the one.”

With every draft, the results were the same. The broad shoulders, the thick, dark hair, the general air of delicious impossible man-of-my-dreams-ness. Apparently, I knew just the one. The fairy-tale prince in my head looked exactly like Max.

13

Max

Just as I was pulling into my parking spot at the marina, my phone buzzed in my pocket, and my heart fucking somersaulted. I put the Chevy into park and pulled it out. But it wasn’t Rosie calling. It was a local number, no ID. Normally, I’d have ignored it. But maybe she was stuck in a pay booth somewhere. Maybe she’d dropped her phone on her jog, and she was calling me from the bait and tackle shop for a ride. Maybe, just maybe, it was her. So I hit the answer button.

“Hi, this is Doris from Truelove Emergency Veterinary Hospital. I’m looking for…”

Oh, fuck. The dog. The dog. I’d completely fucking spaced about the dog. “Yeah, yeah, this is me. Is she okay?”

“She’s fine, sir, but we can’t find her owner. We’ve done everything possible, but her chip comes back to an out-of-service cell phone, and there’s no physical address on file. We’ve taken photos and put them on the website. We’ve also sent them to the newspaper, but nobody has claimed her.”

That poor thing. Fucking hell. Takes a flying leap after a dragonfly, dog-paddles to safety, and now she’s got nowhere to go. My heart gave me a hard pinch in my chest. I did manage to man up, though, and kept my hand off my chest. I put it to my forehead instead. Way more manly, even if my heart did fucking ache.

“So what do we do?” I looked out at the docks as two fishermen in orange vinyl waders sorted crabs by length, using an old plastic caliper attached to a rope.

“Well, we’ve got two options, sir. We can hand her over to the pound…”

With the mention of the word, I flashed to the place in my head. I’d donated my labor and supplies to fix their roof. Though they did their best—I was sure of that—the place was a fucking hellhole. Seemed like every half-crazed fighting dog that animal control picked up in the state ended up there. It was like an ASPCA fundraising ad in living color. The very idea of that pipsqueak of a dog in the middle of all the pit-fighting, half-starved… But she’d said two options. Calm down, dude. One step at a time. “Second option…”

“Well…” said Doris, and she cleared her throat. In the background, some dogs barked, howled, woofed, and yapped. “You could foster her. Just for a short while!”

Foster her? I couldn’t even keep a goddamned houseplant alive for more than a week. I’d once fish-sat for a buddy of mine, and the fuckers almost ended up exploding from too much food. I wasn’t qualified to care for a two-dollar betta, never mind a sentient mammal. “I can barely take care of myself, Doris.” I looked at myself in the rearview mirror. My eyes were red, I hadn’t shaved in days, and I’d fucked Rosie so hard that my balls still ached. Goddamn it. And also—I inhaled deeply and tugged the fabric of my T-shirt—I could still smell her on me. Her. Sweet, salty, fucking perfect. “I’m just barely getting my shit together as it is.”

“I understand that, sir, but you might be her only hope.”

Christ. Rosie would know what the fuck to do about this dog situation, totally. She’d fly into action. She’d be making phone calls, doing Google searches on missing dogs, calling the goddamned radio station. Making flyers, knocking on doors, the whole deal. But I looked down at my phone. She hadn’t replied to me yet. There was nothing but a big gray space after Call me.

Last night had been fucking magical. But really good magic? It could change things, and maybe not for the better. At the very idea of losing her, I felt bummed out. I felt worn out. I felt sick about it. But that didn’t fix the problem. On the other side of town, there was a Chihuahua named Cupcake in one of my bath towels, waiting. Rosie might not be answering me, but that dog needed me. Right then, I needed…to be needed. “If I foster her, then what?”

“We ask that you foster her for seven days. If nobody claims her, you can either put her up for adoption or keep her.”

“Christ, Doris,” I said, staring at myself and pulling my eyelids down with two fingers as I did. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s start with the foster care. Seven days?”

“Seven days.”

I sniffed hard against my hangover and fired up the Chevy. “I’m on my way.”

* * *

The first thing Cupcake and I did together was go to Petco, where I drowned my heartache in some serious retail therapy. I’d never done it before, and it was fucking awesome. She rode in the front of the cart, where I’d made a bed out of her towel. She put her little paws on the bar and held her head high, like a gutsy little explorer, cruising through a brand-new universe on her spaceship. I leaned down, and she gave my lips a little kiss as we trucked through the aisles toward the dog beds. That was when I saw them.

Dog sweaters.

They were so weirdly misshapen, so funny looking on their little hangers, that I couldn’t help but hold one up to Cupcake. A half-priced Christmas sweater with snowflakes on the chest. Behind that, though, there was another one. Blue and white stripes, fuzzy yarn. Rosie had one almost exactly like it. She’d worn it when I’d helped her go chop down a Christmas tree last year. She’d spilled hot chocolate on it, a trickle right on her breast.

I took it off the hanger and slipped it over Cupcake’s head. I helped her awkward little legs through the equally awkward sleeves. The thing fit her like it was made for her. “How’s that?” I asked. I straightened the collar.

She lifted up her chin, proud and confident. Love it!

Never in my whole fucking life had I ever thought I’d be looking at dog sweaters, but she just looked so fucking cute in it that I felt like I wanted to buy a hundred of them. My thoughts got caught up in a vision of the two of them together, matching. In front of a roaring fire. Christmas tree in the corner. Snow falling. Mulled cider.

I’m so fucked.

We retail-therapied our way through the beds, the bowls, the leashes, and harnesses. I didn’t know what was best, so I bought all of it. I went heavy on the pink and heavy on the sparkles, exactly like Rosie would have. Because if I was going to do this thing, if I was going to take care of a funny little Chihuahua, I was going to do it for real.

In canned food, I stocked up on the top-of-the-line boutique stuff, top-shelf venison and sweet potato. I considered the bags of food and noticed the matching brand touted being grain free.

I looked at Cupcake. “Grain free is probably good, right? You’re not a cow or a chicken.” I scratched the underside of her chin with one finger. It was soft and slightly wet. “No grain, right?”

She wiggled her nose. Definitely not a chicken! Then we headed to cookies. I let her sniff the bags on a bunch of different ones, and noticed she really went crazy for peanut butter. My kind of dog. We went through the toys. I would’ve gotten every fucking one on the shelves, but she didn’t seem to want them. I offered her a fuzzy snake, hardly bigger than an earthworm, but she didn’t want it. A miniature duck? No takers. But then I offered her a tiny hedgehog, no bigger than a lemon, and she gave it a happy little death shake. Sold.

When I got to the register, the big guy behind the desk, whose name tag identified him as JERRY. GROOMER couldn’t keep the smile off his face.

“I got a theory, man. Real men are okay with pink,” he reassured me as he carefully freed the price tag from the sweater and scanned it without even asking me to take it off her. “And dog sweaters, too.”

I sniffed. I adjusted my belt. I gave Cupcake a pat. “Totally.”

Exactly $212.73 later, I pushed Cupcake out to my truck and bundled her into the passenger’s seat, which was way more difficult than I’d imagined. First, I had to take off the sweater, because it was like seven million degrees. Then, I had to figure out the harness. Who the fuck knew two buckles and a few nylon straps could be so goddamned complicated? But she was a supergood sport about my total ignorance over where to put her legs and what strap went where. Finally, I got her squared away. I thought. Mostly. Good enough to get her back to my boat safely, anyway. I hooked her harness to the seatbelt so nothing awful would happen to her if I had to come to a sudden stop and got her snuggled into a little bed-box that I’d hung off the headrest. I put my keys in the ignition and turned to her. She gave me a happy puff of her nostrils, as if she was actually saying, Thanks so much!

Every goddamned thing inside me told me to take a picture of her. Just one. For Rosie. I hesitated for one second. I didn’t want to push, I didn’t want to go over the top. I didn’t want to come on too fucking strong too fucking fast.

Cupcake leaned out of her box for a kiss, and I couldn’t resist. As she licked my face, my heart swelled right up, same as it had with Rosie, in a way. That pure, simple happiness—the thing that makes life worth living. As Cupcake licked me, and I smelled that sweet dog smell, I knew I couldn’t turn my back on these feelings. Fuck it. I’m gonna keep at this. I’m not gonna lose Rosie’s friendship, I’m not going to stay quiet, I’m not going to play the gentleman. If she wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened, fine. Fine. But plaster-cracking, mind-blowing, earth-shaking sex or not, I was fostering a tiny dog in a sparkly collar, I was motherfucking stoked about it, and there was no way I wasn’t going to share it with Rosie. I snapped a selfie of Cupcake and me together, and it popped up on my screen. I looked happy. She looked happy. It was a happy fucking selfie, and there was nobody on the planet that I wanted to send it to more than Rosie.

So I just fucking did it.

And then prayed, with my thumb over the send key, I hadn’t overstepped. I prayed we hadn’t crossed past the point of no return. Within seconds, the typing dots popped up, and there was her answer:

OMGGGGGG!!!!!!!

The relief. Fuck, the relief. It was a goddamned good thing I was already sitting down. I let myself relax against the steering wheel. Cupcake squeaked a tiny pink ball, hardly bigger than a big gumball.

THAT IS THE BEST PHOTO EVERRRRRR

Did you adopt her?!?

There you are.

Fostering her. Taking her back to my place.

I couldn’t wipe the smile on my face, and I actually laughed out loud when Rosie replied with a whole handful of clapping-hand emojis. I didn’t think I’d ever laughed out loud reading a text, even from her. It was like my heart was wide open, bursting at the seams. I felt my nose sting as a sheen of relieved tears made my vision sparkle. It was okay. Maybe we’d be okay. For a second, I thought about pushing her about earlier. We need to talk about last night, or You didn’t need to run away. None of it seemed right, and all that was way too important for a text. I needed to be content with her having answered at all. The rest, that would come in time.

I’ll take more photos when I get her settled.

Yes, please!

Tucking my phone into my pants, I looked out at the coast once more. For the first time since I woke up, I felt human again. I felt okay. Maybe things had changed, but at least she was talking to me again. At least she wasn’t radio silent. Because I might not get a chance to have her again like I had her last night, but I’d take her however I could get her. Even one visit to heaven was enough.

Cupcake put her little front paws on the edge of her box and looked out at the world. I liked her style. A lot. She was gutsy, with her chest puffed up and her ears perked. I gave her a pat and she wiggled her tail, but she didn’t turn toward me—all of her attention was centered on something outside. I followed her gaze and saw Fletcher, walking his dog, Captain. I beeped my horn, and he gave me a wave when he saw my truck.

“Hey, man,” he said, coming up to my window as Captain lifted his leg on a garbage can. “Holy shit! That her?”

I scooped her up and unhitched her from her harness. “The lady herself.”

Fletcher told Captain to sit. After a ten-second delay, he actually did. I watched his huge nose open and close, catching whiffs of lady Chihuahua in the air.

Fletcher cradled Cupcake in his arms like a baby. The juxtaposition of all his tats with a tiny chicken-shaped dog in pink was a fucking riot, and I thought about taking a picture of him for Rosie, too. But then maybe not. Maybe that would be too much. Maybe. So many fucking maybes.

“You good?” Fletcher asked. “You look pretty rough, man.”

I rubbed my face. “Just hungover. But yeah, good. I think.”

Fletcher didn’t look convinced, though. The guy was like a goddamned human lie detector. “Grab a coffee with me, and we can take these two to the dog park.”

* * *

Cupcake stood by a clump of fuzzy dandelions in the shade as Captain began to make his move. It was ridiculous, like one of those YouTube videos about unlikely animal friends. A guinea pig and an ox or whatever. But Captain didn’t care. Neither did Cupcake. She held perfectly still as he took a few big, slow steps toward her and then carefully lowered his head to her underside. She lifted her front paw to make room for his snout underneath her.

“I don’t know, man,” I told Fletcher, ready to spring into action at any moment. One snap of those jaws and Cupcake would be a goner.

“Chill out,” Fletcher said and sipped his coffee. “She’s got him wrapped around her finger already. Speaking of that…” He gave me a mock-dead-arm punch. “You and Rosie?”

I tried to level him with the most serious stare I could muster, and I shook my head. “Not talking.”

“Don’t pull the tough-guy routine with me, dude. I know how you feel. I’ve got eyes. I saw the lamp swinging when you kissed her.”

I scratched my forehead and looked up at the leaves, where a squirrel was gnawing on some type of nut. It froze with it clenched between its paws, mid-nibble.

“So did you…” he said, raising an eyebrow in place of some godforsaken fucking euphemism.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” I snarled.

Fletcher lifted his hand, a shit-eating grin on his face. “All right, all right.” He adjusted the button on his polo and pretended to do something with his phone. But I could feel his eyes on me, every few seconds, double-checking, triple-checking. The guy was the best poker player I’d ever met. He could skin any card shark alive. He ran a pool bar for a living, for fuck’s sake. He knew bullshit, and he had me all figured out. Because I was full of it.

Still, though, I wasn’t a guy who kissed and told, or fucked and talked. Most definitely not about Rosie. So I sipped my coffee and watched the dogs. Captain had lowered himself down on his front paws, ass up in the air, bobbed tail wagging. Cupcake had her ears back, and her little tail was perfectly still. Captain thumped the grass with his forepaws.

“You did though, didn’t you?” Fletcher said without looking at me, coffee cup halfway to his mouth. “I can see it on you, like a fucking glow.”

Captain let out a low, closemouthed bark. It sounded like he was underwater—a half-volume woof.

Which Cupcake returned with a feisty, piercing marf that made Captain spin in a crazed circle.

“I don’t glow.”

“Yep.” Fletcher tucked his phone into his pants. “Now you do.”

And the dogs took off in a figure eight around the park, with dust flying behind them and dandelion fluff floating on the wind.

* * *

After Captain and Cupcake ran around so much that I thought Captain was going to have a heart attack, Cupcake and I headed back to my boat. But as I pulled into my reserved spot, I realized that in the last couple hours, shit had gone seriously tits up. It looked like a crime scene. Caution tape, guys in reflective vests, official-looking dudes with clipboards—and right in the goddamned middle of it was my boat.

With a mini yacht lodged in the side.

But it wasn’t just my boat. It was my house. The Rose Marie, named after… Guess who?

Yeah, maybe I’d always been fucked.

Now the Rose Marie looked pretty fucked, too. Two guys in a tug were trying to dislodge the yacht’s bow from my sternside. One of them made a slicing motion across his throat, and the diesel engine on the tug went silent.

I got out of my truck, leaving Cupcake buckled up and cool in the AC. The dock manager, Rich, waddled down to me, with his jeans swishing and his ancient Adidas sandals flapping. He smoothed his T-shirt over his barrel chest and beer belly. “Well, son, we had a bit of an incident! One of the renters got their portside mixed up with their stern.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Hell of a thing!” bellowed Rich. Twenty years working at the marina had totally obliterated his conversational voice. Every word he ever said was loud enough to be heard two boats over. “She’s taking on some water! Not a lot, but enough that I reckon you’d best find yourself somewhere else to sling your hammock!”

I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger and thought about it. I could get a hotel, but I hated hotels. People everywhere, and I always felt like I had to keep my room tidy so the maid didn’t think I was a pain in the ass. I could try to crash with Fletcher, which wouldn’t be so bad because he had literally the most awesome man cave ever. But still, it was a big imposition, especially now with a dog. I had visions of Cupcake and Captain running up and down the steps nonstop. Twenty-four hours ago, this would’ve been a no-brainer—I’d have gone straight to her. But now that was different. Because the idea of being in her house, one room over, with this feeling that I had in my bones? And my cock? And my head? I’d never fucking sleep. I’d be like a moose in the rut.

“Hear me, son!” Rich yelled. “Find somewhere else to sling your hammock!”

I gave him a pat on the arm and put my sunglasses on. “I’ll go take a look.”

I stepped from the jetty onto my boat and opened the door. Where my kitchen banquette used to be, where I sat yesterday with Cupcake, was now the fiberglass front end of a boat. Christ. Rich was right, the Rose Marie was taking on water—not a ton, but enough, and more coming in. So I grabbed my duffel from the closet and packed up some shit—jeans, T-shirts, shaving cream, razor. Boxers. From the bottom of my bookshelf in my bedroom, I grabbed a shoe box full of important stuff. I had a safety deposit box, sure, but this shoe box was the sentimental stuff. The stuff that really mattered now. I took a peek inside and saw a row of old mixtapes, some with Rosie’s handwriting on the brittle, yellowing stickers, some with mine. SUMMER 1998, one of them said, with little hearts she’d drawn all over and colored in with pink highlighter. Mine was simpler and said To Rosie, From Max (Copy) and had my writing. But it was weird, because it was the writing from the younger me, almost like a different guy. That writing had been mine when life was simple, when I had nothing to worry about at all. Yet Rosie’s writing was exactly the same now as it had been then—identical, even the shape of her hearts. Those I knew from doodles I’d seen. She hadn’t given me anything with a heart in decades. But fuck, how I wished she would now.

Rosie’s tapes never had the tracks listed, and I remembered listening to them on my old Walkman in my bedroom, fucking dying to see what she’d put on next. I remembered they were like a window into her mind, and after I’d finish a tape, I’d listen to it again and again, memorizing transitions from songs so that when I’d hear one of them on the radio, it sounded strange that a different song followed. In my head Live’s “Lightning Crashes” was always followed by Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight.” That was Rosie’s music logic, and over time it had become mine too.

I closed the box, tucked it under my arm, and grabbed an old photo album from back in the days when we still took actual pictures, which I put in my bag, too. As I did, a photograph of Rosie and me slipped out from between the pages. We were young, just teenagers. Probably the summer of ’98 or earlier. I looked as pissed off as ever, but she’d already started to bloom into the beautiful woman she was now and had been for so long.

It was a prom picture. We hadn’t gone together, but we’d double-dated. In the photograph, she was planting a kiss on my cheek. I was trying to play the badass, looking uncomfortable in my tux, but she was all joy and happiness and love.

Memory lane. It hurt.

Before I could get much farther down it, I heard the noise I’d know anywhere—the sound of her lurching into a parking place in her Bug. Again, my heart somersaulted, went fucking wild in my chest. Zipping up my duffel, I stepped out onto the deck and saw Rosie on the jetty. She had an Ace bandage on her ankle, and there were chalky smudges of something on her legs and arms.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked as I planted my hand on the taffrail and jumped down onto the docks. “And how’d you get your car?”

“Word spread like wildfire! Took the bus,” she said, beaming and squinting in the sunshine. “I had to make sure you were okay!”

* * *

I blocked the sun from her, to make sure she was in the shade. Her hair was damp from a shower, and I recognized the chalky smudges—calamine. “That poison ivy?”

“Had an encounter with the woods,” Rosie explained, but then turned her attention to my boat. “What a mess!” She was wearing a little scarf around her neck—old-fashioned, almost. Fifties, Marilyn Monroe. All to hide the hickey I’d given her.

Fuck.

I stood closer than I might have yesterday, because I couldn’t help it. I had to be near her; I had to keep her close.

“You okay?” I asked, glancing down at her ankle.

She wiggled her pink-painted toenails. “Running is dangerous, Max.” She wagged an admonishing finger at me and smiled.

The commotion of the docks made a strange space of calm between us. Everybody bustled around, but I felt like we were in our own world. I took another half step toward her. “You ran away from me. You didn’t have to do that.”

She exhaled long, slow, and dramatic. “Sorry. You know how I am with awkward conversations.”

I did. I’d noticed that when it came to uncomfortable things, she practiced what I’d call a policy of aggressive avoidance. I’d just never been on the receiving end of it before. “It’s all right. I get it.”

Her eyes looked sad, almost full of regret, and it made me feel like she’d punched me right in the sternum. I didn’t want her to regret it. Even if we never did it again, I’d cherish it forever.

“I’m sure I can find an Airbnb,” I said, reaching for my phone. “Can’t imagine it’ll take that long.”

From one jetty over, Rich boomed, “Wouldn’t count on it! Insurance, dry dock? Could be weeks!”

I watched Rosie swallow a laugh. It was one of our many running jokes, Rich’s bullhorn voice. Sometimes she’d do impromptu impressions of him out of nowhere. I’d call her up to see how she was doing, and she’d scream, “Doing fine, son! Red sky at night, sailor’s delight!” But now was no time for joking around, clearly. She collected herself and shifted her lips off to one side. No lipstick today, but sexier than ever because now, I knew what they felt like. Everywhere.

“Come on,” she said, placing her hand on my arm. “Don’t be silly. Come stay with me.”

Holy shit. Yes. That. Yes. “I don’t want to be a pain in the ass.”

“Max! I don’t want you wasting your money on some place with mildewy towels, polyester sheets, and a bad Wi-Fi connection.” It was like she’d just rattled off the three deadliest sins. “You can use my guest room.”

Which was right next to her room. Christ. “It’s too much trouble. Thanks, though,” I said, raising my hand. “I’ll figure it out.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. This is no time to assert your masculine independence. There’s a hole in your boat.” She put her hand on her hip. “All right? My house is your house. Same as always.”

Her house. Her staircase. Her bed. Her body. Mine.

But of course, she was right. It was the only logical thing, and it was what every single fucking fiber of my being was telling me I needed to do. “Positive?”

She nodded, serious and certain. But then I realized that beyond the obvious complications—her, me, sleeping in the same house? Shiiiit—there was yet another layer. John Denver singing “Yesterday” played in my head. “Rosie, what about….”

She took a deep breath. “Max. We have to put that behind us. It happened,” she said in a hushed whisper. “It was amazing, but we can’t. We just can’t.”

Amazing wasn’t the fucking start of it, but actually… “I meant, about Cupcake and the little dictator.”

“Oh!” Rosie gasped. “I thought you meant, you know.” Her eyes moved up and down me, and her fingers moved to the scarf tied around her neck.

I ran my fingertip up the back of her hand, careful not to let anybody see it, but sure to let her feel it.

She watched my finger, breathing hard. Then she straightened her shoulders, blinked once, and stepped back from me. She reached out her hand, like we were shaking on a bet. “We’ll figure out the animal situation. But you agree? Roommates? Back to normal?”

I didn’t know how the fuck we were gonna do it—I could imagine the rose snaking around her hip, I remembered how her nipple tightened in my mouth, I remembered her telling me she was coming, that she was going to let go. I had to try though. One visit to heaven would have to be enough. “Deal.”

14

Rosie

All the way home, I kept glancing at Max and Cupcake in my rearview mirror. At one stoplight, he fussed with her harness. During a two-minute delay when a construction guy with a spinning stop sign made us wait for oncoming traffic, I watched him adjust her window twice and the air conditioning once. At another stoplight, he took a toy and made it dance across the dashboard and into her bed, while he smiled so wide that it made my cheeks hurt. Until I saw Max with Cupcake, I’d never in my life known what it meant when women commented on sexy photos of men with, My ovaries just exploded!

But now I did. I suuurrrrrre did.

Except I was going to have to put that all behind me. I had to. For our friendship, for our living situation, for my sanity. I shifted my thighs together. It wasn’t going to be easy. It was like he’d unleashed something inside me, like he’d popped the cork right off the champagne bottle that I never knew I was.

In the rearview, he was talking to her and petting her head, his massive bicep flexing, his beautiful smile glinting.

Groan.

Somehow, I managed not to drive off the road, though, and I pulled into the driveway and hopped out, giving him a wait one second finger. I unlocked the front door and was met by Julia, leering at me from under the bench where Gram used to put on her shoes.

“Hello!” I said, trying as hard as I could not to let her, you know, smell my fear.

We were making progress, though, amazingly, and she came out from under the bench without even a clawed sideswipe at my shins. I placed my hand at her level, and she passed underneath it, arching her spine as she moved under my palm. Her fur was soft and a little staticky. “So listen,” I told her. “We’re going to have some company.”

Tentatively, I moved to scoop her up—a maneuver I’d never actually successfully executed without coming out of it like I’d rolled around in the rose bushes. But either Julia was becoming dangerously deprived of sodium and her reflexes were slow, or we were making actual human-cat progress. Either way, I soon had all twenty pounds of her in my arms. I moved the drape back from the small sidelight. “That’s her.”

From the side, her clear eyes looked like marbles. As she realized what she was looking at, her whole body stiffened, and she let out an almost puma-like growl that made her rib cage vibrate against my body. It was like holding a boom box that only played bass. Then the growl turned into a hiss, and she bared her teeth at the window. Her arms and legs shot out at right angles from her body, and her claws extended like razor blades.

Oh, great.

It would never work. If that was her reaction to a glimpse of Cupcake from twenty feet away, I couldn’t even fathom what it would be like claw-to… Cupcake didn’t really have claws. Toes. Claw-to-toe. Whatever it was, it wasn’t going to be pretty.

Julia was four-parts dead weight to one-part fluff, and I lugged her up to my bedroom. Her favorite place in the house was on the window seat that looked out into the yard. I could move her kitty litter into my bathroom for the time being, I figured. If she wanted to use the window as her cat flap, we could make that work. Maybe. It was worth a try. God help those sparrows, but at least Julia would be happy. And not eating SPAM.

I locked her in my room and then ran back downstairs where I gathered up a little stuffed mouse she liked to do unspeakable things to and a feathery ball that was weighted inside so it moved on its own, along with her bed and a little cat-sized afghan that Grandma had knitted for her. In my bedroom, I turned up the AC to full blast, and I put her bed on my bed. She, meanwhile, was busy considering the complete works of Hemingway and nuzzling The Old Man and the Sea.

From my window, I watched Max dislodge Cupcake from her little bed that hung from the passenger’s seat. He slung his duffel over his shoulder and then picked up Cupcake in the crook of his elbow, bouncing her along, and he headed for the front door. Cupcake gripped his broad chest with her funny little feet and rested her head on his shoulder. The whole thing was incredibly infant-like, down to the duffel…as a diaper bag.

And kablewy went my ovaries, all over again.

* * *

While Max fussed with more repairs, all sweaty and sawdusty and deliciously hard to resist, he insisted that I work. I still felt awkward. I felt like we’d put the thing between us on the back burner, but now there was something steaming up the kitchen. But work was a distraction, and I plunged into it, with both feet and holding my breath. I was deep into a sketch of my handsome Max-prince joining forces with his potential princess to fight a fire-breathing dragon named Rufus when I heard a menacing rumble of thunder outside. Cupcake shivered next to me on the couch, and her little googly eyes met mine. “Just thunder,” I told her.

But not to Cupcake it wasn’t. Her whole body trembled with another roll as the skies darkened, plunging my living room into heavy afternoon shade. With tentative, awkward steps, she climbed into my arms and clung to me in a very monkey-like sort of way. She shifted her weight to one back foot and made gentle efforts to climb up onto me even higher. Her bony little elbows pressed into my chest. I supported her little tush with my palm. She put her muzzle to my neck, and I felt her hot breaths, accompanied by another shiver of terror. She tried to nose her way into my thin summer hoodie like a little kangaroo.

I closed my sketchbook and carried Cupcake over to the window. I pulled back the thin, lacy drapes and was met with a perfect view of Max’s crotch.

I pulled a total Julia Caesar and looked away at the nearest stationary object: a dead plant in a macramé plant holder. Cupcake’s tail wagged furiously, and in my periphery, I watched her paw the air, signaling I want that nice man to come inside.

Trying to avert my eyes from his package—goodness gracious, that package—and trying hard just to focus on his thigh or something—so sexy, those thighs—I knocked on the window. I busied myself with pulling off the crispy leaves from the plant. He bent down and smiled. “Hey! How’s the dragon?”

His cheeks were sunburned, his bare chest shiny with sweat. He had a hammer in one hand and two nails between his teeth. In actual comparison, my fairy-tale prince was kind of a weenie compared to the real thing.

Using the arm that wasn’t wrapped around Cupcake, I pulled down the top half of the window. A fresh breeze blew in, smelling like summer rain. “Grumpy. You should come inside.” I pointed up at the storm, and he looked up at it, too. From where I was standing, I got a glorious view of his abs and his pecs and his neck, as well as the rippling columns of muscle on either side of his Adam’s apple. A few raindrops splatted down onto his skin, and he ran his palm over his face.

“I’m good,” he said and wiped the sweat off his forehead with his shirt, which he’d hung on the ladder. I caught a glimpse of his boxer shorts. It was a different pair from the plaid ones that I had pulled off of him last night. With my teeth. This new pair had tiny red lobsters on a navy background. He was like a walking testament to why everybody should move to Maine. Like, right now.

Rosie! “Don’t be a hero. Take it from Ben Franklin and get off that ladder. Come eat a cupcake.”

Max sniffed and nodded. “Fair enough,” he said as his heavy footfalls rattled the ladder. “You want me to run and get something to eat for dinner?” He picked up his shirt and wiped the sweat from his face again. I could almost feel the ripples of his abs under my fingers. He was the stuff of bronze statues in huge atriums, of marble competitors in Olympia. He dropped his shirt and took a long swig of water from a bottle on the windowsill, such manly force that it made the plastic crinkle.

“I’ll figure out something. And I have beer.”

Max smiled hard, looking from me to Cupcake and back again as he drained the bottle and crunched it in his hands. “Perfect.”

* * *

Except it wasn’t. For the first time in all the years I’d known him, things between Max and me were very, very awkward. We couldn’t even make small talk without blurting out things at the same time, and even physically, it felt like we were mismatched magnets. Just a few days ago, we’d been able to move around this tiny, strange little kitchen like we were anticipating each other’s every move, like a perfectly choreographed dance. Now, every single time I moved to get something, we’d collide. I’d reach for the forks, and he’d reach for them at the same time. I’d try to grab some plates, and he’d be trying to cross the kitchen to grab the glasses. Over and over again, we were skin-to-skin. Face-to-face. Body-to-body. Like maybe we weren’t mismatched magnets at all, but drawn together so powerfully that we couldn’t stay apart.

“Sorry,” I said, backing away and wedging myself up against the drawer pulls of the cabinets behind me.

He raised his arms like it was a bank robbery. “It’s me. I’ll get out of your way.”

“You’re not…”

“I didn’t mean…”

I clutched a breadboard to my chest. “Can we just get this out of the way now?”

Max nodded, like he was resigned and even a little bit sad. He looked at the floor and sighed. Then he glanced up at me. “You first.”

I clutched my breadboard to me like my princess, using her pink shield for her dragon slaying. “It was amazing. It was the best sex I’ve ever had. And I hope you know how I love you.”

His mouth actually fell open. He took a few slow breaths, and his eyes flickered as he watched me. “Rosie…” His voice was strangely gruff, like when he’d first woken up that morning. At least an octave lower than normal.

But I stopped him before he could say more. “It’s true. I do love you. I love you like nobody I’ve ever loved in my life.”

His eyes focused in on my face, searching for something else, something more.

“As my friend, I love you.”

He inhaled hard and ran his hand through his hair. Again, he looked at the floor and put a little more distance between us. An inch, two. “Yeah, I know.”

“We can’t be more than that.”

His expression hardened as he studied me, and as he studied me, he bit his lip, and as he bit his lip, I felt my whole body say, Rosie. You know what you want. “Why not?” With one thick finger, he lifted my chin to raise my face to him. His rough thumb moved over my bottom lip. I felt a warm shudder pass right through me as the thunder rumbled again. It was inside me, and outside me too. Echo, echo, echo.

“Because we…” We. We. We.

Again, he searched. Again, he touched my lips. “We what?”

He took yet another step closer, pushing his hips into my stomach.

My breathing became suddenly shallow, and I was so very aware of how my cleavage bulged as I breathed. So did Max, it seemed, because his eyes fell down onto my breasts and stayed there. He groaned like he’d groaned last night. Primal and aggressive.

He wants you, Rosie. He wants you really, really bad.

He brought his face down to mine, brushing my cheek with his. Into my ear, he said, “We what?” once more.

My eyes fluttered shut, and I slumped back against the countertop. As I reached out to support myself, he wrapped his arm around me and compressed my breasts against his body.

I could feel myself getting wet again, actually dampening my panties, that telltale trickle. You know what to do. Just do it.

For one long, last moment I savored it. I felt his body against mine. Warm and hard. I inhaled him. Clean laundry, musk, sawdust. Sweat. Heat. Desire. I memorized him. The navy-blue edges of his eyes, the strong line of his jaw. My heart said yes. But I had to be more than my heart. I just had to be. “You go spend some time with Cupcake. I’ll get dinner ready.”

Max turned his cheek, as if I’d slapped him. He stepped back and crouched down to give Cupcake a pat, his hand as big as her back. Her big eyes slid shut, and she toppled over onto her back in pure doggie bliss.

I could see his temples flexing, his jaw clenched with tension, and when he stood up, he wouldn’t even look at me. “You know what? I’m not that hungry anymore. I’ll go take a shower. You go ahead and eat. I’ll leave you alone.”

“I don’t want you to leave me alone,” I told him. “I want things to go back to the way they were. Yesterday. When everything still made sense.”

He looked me in the eye, hard and serious. He shook his head very slowly and rasped the stubble around his mouth with his palm. “There’s no fucking way that’s going to happen.”

He turned to go and left me alone in the kitchen without looking back. His strong footfalls moved up the stairs, but they lingered for one second on the step where he’d first taken me. Same as I’d lingered there, too.

15

Max

Everything in the fucking place reminded me of her, including the bar of soap in the shower. I kept the water cool, because I was hot and pent up and kind of pissed off because I couldn’t stand the goddamned tension, and I thought I would burst. Couldn’t she feel it? Didn’t she understand it? Apparently not. Or if she did, she was way stronger than I was in resisting it. So I was either going to be the dickwad that came on too strong, or the douchebag that kept dwelling on earth-shaking sex. What I really needed to do was cool my goddamned jets.

Which was definitely not going to happen with this soap I was holding—it smelled just like her, vanilla oatmeal or something. It smelled like her skin, I knew that smell now, and as I lathered up with her soap, and her shampoo, I planted my hand on the shower wall. I let the water run down my body. I stroked myself a few times, aching with the thought that I was washing her off of me.

A cheap-ass motel would be better than this. A weird Airbnb would be better than this. A Days Inn with a shitty mattress—anything would be better than this. There was no fucking way I could handle being twenty feet from her, no fucking way I could be so surrounded by her and not have my way with that perfect body.

Outside, it started to rain hard, and the water pelted the trees, roaring off the roof and against the window. To vent the little bit of steam that had gathered, almost unbearable because it was so humid, I opened the window and then rinsed myself off. As I turned off the shower, I could’ve sworn I heard a creak in the hallway outside. I grabbed a towel from the rack and listened close as I wrapped it around my waist.

“That you?” I said softly.

No answer.

I glanced at the back of the bathroom door and saw one of her bras hanging on the hook, half hidden behind her robe. I stepped out of the tub, grabbed my pants off the floor, and woke up my phone. I couldn’t take this shit anymore. If I couldn’t have her, I couldn’t stay here. So I opened up a chat window with Fletcher and typed out, Trouble on the boat. I need somewhere to crash. But before I could hit send, a message came through. From Rosie.

Max…

That was all it said. I fucking stared at it, astonished, and then became aware of the telltale little bubble pop noises to say that she was somewhere very nearby and typing. In her room, I guessed. Right next door. Plaster dust still on the headboard. Sheets still smelling like the two of us together. Fuck.

I just need some time to figure this out.

My heart walloped my rib cage, and I kept my thumbs over the keyboard, just waiting to see if she’d say some more. A droplet of water fell from my face, and I wiped the phone off on the towel, sliding it over my thigh. I sat down on the toilet and waited. And waited. What she’d given me, though, it wasn’t fucking enough. I’d lose my mind not knowing. So I gave her a tiny shove. A nudge in the right direction. Same as I did when we were playing pool—an accidental roll of the cue ball to give her the advantage.

Just tell me what you need, and I’ll do it.

A rapid-fire succession of bubble pops followed, and the tap-tap-tap-tap of her erasing everything she’d just written. There was another creak in the hallway, right outside the bathroom door.

“I’m not sure what I want,” she whispered. “But please don’t go.”

I set my phone down on the sink and thought seriously about opening the door, but I didn’t want to push too hard now. She was coming back to me, and I needed to be smart about this. If I opened the door now, we’d be one terry cloth towel and one pair of stretchy pants away from getting involved in it all over again. Made my balls ache to think of it. I’d never be able to resist her. Never.

“How did you know I was thinking of leaving?”

Her laugh was an exhalation, but it was so familiar to me that I could imagine her doing it. She did it when she was embarrassed or feeling awkward. She’d have closed her eyes, almost shy, shifting her weight to one leg, moving her hair off of her shoulder. “Because I know you pretty well.”

It took every ounce of willpower I had to keep my hand off the doorknob, to keep myself from flinging it open, pulling her into my arms, and saying, Let me show you how I want you to know me. “Better than anybody.”

I did resist her, though. Because this wasn’t about me. It was about her. So I rested my elbows on my thighs and brushed some water out of my hair with my fingers. The next move would be up to her. I wanted to push her, yeah. But she’d have to come to me first.

The door thumped lightly, like she was putting her hand to the wood. Or maybe even her forehead. I imagined what I could see through the door. Her sexy lines. Her curves. Her.

“Please don’t leave.” And then the floorboards creaked again, and the door of her bedroom squeaked as she pulled it closed.

* * *

She’d left me some cold roast chicken and a salad in the fridge. I ate it standing up at her kitchen island, while the rain battered the windows. I opened and added it to the running tab in my head of stuff I’d used and that she wouldn’t let me pay for, but that I’d pay her back for somehow. In lumber or hardware or labor, or just by putting cash into her wallet when she wasn’t looking. I’d done it before, and I’d do it again. It was easier than bickering with her about it. I always took care of her, whether she knew it or not.

I polished off the salad—spinach, blue cheese, cranberries—fucking delicious like everything she made. I rinsed out the bowl and put it upside down on the drying rack. Cupcake sat in the corner of the kitchen, just a little smudge, trembling with the storm. I pulled off a piece of chicken from near the bone to give to her. She stopped trembling and sniffed the air.

Sniff. Sniff-sniff. Tail wiggle.

I held the little piece of chicken down at her level—roughly even with the baseboards, she was so tiny. She leapt up onto her hind legs like a ballerina and took it gently from my fingers.

When I’d finished the chicken, and given Cupcake a few more choice pieces, I put the bones in the garbage—locked up tight behind a child lock that I’d installed for Rosie’s grandma to keep Julia Caesar out—and picked up Cupcake. We watched the rain tumble down, battering the forest and splashing off the hood of my truck and the closed convertible roof of Rosie’s Bug. Seeing a summer storm in Maine never, ever got old to me. I scratched Cupcake’s chest and took a swig of my beer. She licked the condensation off the bottle, and I turned to take her to the couch with me. But just as suddenly as the storm had started, it stopped. Like someone turning off a garden hose that had been spraying on the window.

“See?” I whispered to her. “All better.”

In response, Cupcake squirmed up and gave me a big lick on the cheek. Magic!

I put on my flip-flops and carried her to the door, placing my beer on the bench in the entryway. I got her suited up in her pink harness and clipped the retractable leash on, and then we headed outside, me with my beer and her with her tiny tennis ball. Outside, it was cool and fresh, and the puddles on the sidewalk posed a huge challenge to Cupcake, who stared at them like they might be twenty feet deep for all she knew. I picked her up and carried her out into the grassy area under the magnolia. I set her down, and she plucked her way through the grass, which was almost too high for her to see past. But step by step, she got braver and more certain, even bounding through it for a second. So goddamned cute. Automatically, I turned back to the house to see if Rosie had seen it.

There she was. In her bedroom window. The night had closed in around the house, and she was framed by the light of her bedside lamp. In that moment, I was every heartbroken guy who’d ever yearned. I was every man who’d ever ached. I was every Romeo since the beginning of time. She was so fucking beautiful, I forgot to think. I forgot to breathe. I just took her in and thought, Goddamn it.

I held her stare for a second and smiled up at her. She smiled, too, and turned away.

Cupcake munched on some grass, and I whistled softly to get her attention. She bounded over, and when I picked her up, I felt that her feet and chest were wet with rain. She didn’t seem chilly, not yet, but I didn’t want to chance it. I thought about the woodshed and the fire pit, which Rosie hadn’t used yet this summer. I thought about how to tempt my very own Juliet out of her room.

And then I gave Cupcake a little nuzzle that made her groan and asked her, “You know what Rosie loves even more than cupcakes?”

16

Rosie

S’mores. He had to be making s’mores. Lying on my bed, I’d heard him gathering things from the pantry. I’d heard the screen door squeak open and closed. When I smelled the wood burning in the fire pit, I launched myself off my bed. The light from the flames danced on his rippling biceps, showing off his silhouette. I saw he’d gotten Cupcake comfy on one of the old Adirondack chairs that were beside the fire. He’d moved it back slightly, to keep her away from shooting embers. On the arms of one of the chairs sat what I’d have recognized from a mile away: an extra-large bag of double-puffed marshmallows. In his hand, one of the telescoping marshmallow forks that I’d gotten for my gram.

“Oh, Julia,” I whispered. “What a man.”

Her tail swished side to side like a snake and whapped me on the arm. Max placed the handle of the marshmallow fork carefully on the edge of the fire pit. He adjusted the logs with the fire tongs, to keep the flames low. As two logs collided, a spray of sparks arced through the darkness, mirroring the fireflies on the edge of the tree line. He was just so manly and sexy—he could’ve been a blacksmith just then, with the sparks and the flame and the brawn, using his hammer to pound…

God. I flopped back down on my bed backward, snow-angel style. The headboard banged against the cracked plaster. A sprinkling of dust came down like a handful of dry brown sugar. I blinked hard to get a few stray flecks out of my eyes.

For a long moment, I stared up at the ceiling. A little bit of the leak from the bathroom had seeped over the wall, and it reminded me of the tide coming in. What I wanted to do, of course, was be with Max. I always wanted to be with Max. I’d wanted to be with Max when Loafers took me out, and I’d wanted to be with him every second since.

But then there was the land of Should. I hated visiting Should. That was where regrets lived, like piranhas in the water. That was where embarrassment lived, a funny smell from the gutters. I’d never known why I spent so much time in Should, but I hated it there. What I should do was resist. What I should do was forget. What I should do was be good. What I should do, should do, should do…

What I should not do, probably, was throw myself passionately into my best friend’s arms, saying all sorts of dirty things that I’d never, ever imagined saying to anybody, let alone to someone I’d known my whole life and who teased me for how rarely I uttered the word fuck. Who’d once seen me with my face dotted all over with Clearasil while I was wearing headgear and never even cracked a joke about it. I should not throw myself at that man.

I sat up, propping myself on my elbow, and scratched my nose with my palm. On the bottom bookshelf at the far end of the bedroom were all my old yearbooks. I tried to think back, asking myself if Max had ever—even once—made me feel crappy for anything. If he’d ever made me visit Should.

Only one memory came back to me. We were seniors in high school, and I still hadn’t been asked to prom. I figured I wouldn’t be, and that was okay with me. I wasn’t exactly the most popular girl in our class. Max hadn’t asked anybody either, and I thought maybe we could go to the movies, drown our sorrows in sour gummy worms and The Matrix. But one day, in fourth period, I did get asked, by a guy who was nice enough, all in all. Yet before I could tell Max in the five minutes between periods, he asked me himself.

He’d looked so sad in the eyes when I’d turned him down. And yet, even then, he hadn’t made me feel crappy. I’d made myself feel crappy for the hurt I’d seen in his beautiful eyes.

I scooted off my bed and crawled over to the bottom shelf. I hooked my finger over the binding of the biggest yearbook, from our senior year when our school used a fancier printer than they had before. It was a shiny black volume with slippery pages that smelled like a new magazine, even all these years later. On the inside cover was Max’s letter to me, with strong masculine letters, the most important thing in the whole book. Other friends from that year had signed around it, but nobody had encroached on Max’s spot. It was almost as if I couldn’t get my eyes to move over the note—I’d never read it, I’d never had the courage. I always felt funny when he said nice things to me, so I tried to avoid it if I could. But though I couldn’t bring myself to read all that he had written, I did let my eyes pass slowly over a few lines. The best friend anybody ever had. And I’m the luckiest guy in the class of 2000. Maybe ever.

At the bottom, he’d signed it Love forever and always,

Max.

I pulled my eyes off his writing and thumbed through the yearbook. From the pages, old memories flashed back at me. People I’d lost track of, people who I knew entirely too much about from Facebook. People who had moved on to crazy and wonderful adventures, and people who had been happy to stay in Truelove. In the superlatives section, right after Most Likely to Get Arrested (which went to Fletcher!) was Most Likely to Get Married. There, in the middle of the page, was a black-and-white of the two of us in front of a bank of lockers. Max Doyle and Rosie Madden. Underneath, the yearbook staff had added, Just kidding.

Next to that, someone had written, by hand, not!

I let the book fall open on the floor and put my elbows on the carpet, cradling my chin in my palms. Not. Had everybody seen it coming except me? Was I the only one blindsided by what might’ve been inevitable all along?

A whistle filled the air—quick and sharp. I got up off the carpet and looked out my window. Now, he wasn’t even making a show of looking busy with the fire. Instead, he’d approached the house, and he was looking up at my window, with a bag of marshmallows in one hand and a box of grahams in the other. At his feet sat Cupcake, at attention. A proud little lady in a white and navy sweater that looked a lot like one I owned.

Max asked, “You coming?” I could hear his voice through the thin panes, even from a floor away. “Or am I supposed to eat all these alone? Because you know I will.” He shook the box of grahams, and I saw his heavy, beautiful eyebrows go up and down, lit by the frail beams of the porch light.

“He’d never,” I told Julia, who’d turned her face away from me and mashed it into the spine of A Moveable Feast.

“Oh yeah, I would,” Max said, either because he’d read my lips or knew me well enough to answer without knowing what I’d said. Or both. “I totally would.”

I opened the window, not quite wide enough for Julia Caesar to escape. The smell of the smoke wafted inside, and I felt my stomach start to growl right away because I hadn’t eaten since lunch. My whole plan had been to wait for him to go to bed and then douse myself in bug spray, get a pint of pistachio ice cream from the freezer, and go eat the entire thing while lying in the grass and I listened to The Cranberries on Spotify. It was gonna be magnificent. But this?

This was much, much better.

“Where’s the chocolate?” I asked. I didn’t raise my voice, really. It was quiet enough out there that he’d have heard me from fifty yards away.

Now his smile got even bigger. Unapologetic, manly, flirtatious. Gorgeous. Perfect. Max. “In my pants.”

There were tragedies, and then there were tragedies. “Brute! You’ll melt it!”

“Am I that hot?”

Groan. Without even thinking, I put my hand to my forehead like I was checking for a fever.

He laughed, but then got serious again. “Get down here, Rosie. I promise I won’t make a pass at you.” He held up the marshmallows at full extension, like some sweet variation on the Hunger Games pledge. May the marshmallows be ever in our favor. “Promise.”

* * *

We got Cupcake tucked in for bed in her crate and headed out toward the fire pit. Just as we stepped out of the pool of light from the porch lamp, Max let go of my hand. “Hang on,” he said, and within a moment he’d returned with one of my gram’s quilts over his arm. He draped it over me where I sat in one of the Adirondacks, took the warm chocolate bars from his back pocket, and then turned his attention toward roasting duty.

He always did it just right—not too burned on the outside and plenty gooey inside. He handed me one of the telescoping forks, and I pushed the button to make it retract. I pinned it between the grahams and the chocolate. The cracker didn’t snap, and it stuck together beautifully, just as it should. Normally, I couldn’t get this kind of melt on the chocolate unless I preheated the grahams. “Your pants are the perfect temperature.” I licked chocolate from my fingertips. He tipped his head back in a silent laugh and poked at the fire with a stick. I held the s’more out to him, and he took it, meeting my gaze. He looked at me differently now, I could see that for sure, but not in a bad way. Just with a new intensity that made me tingle. “We should remember that. Two minutes in your back pocket to the perfect s’more.”

He nodded without taking his eyes off mine. He took a big bite of the graham sandwich, and a little smudge of marshmallow fluff stayed on his lip. I tucked my feet under me and came up on my knees. The boards ground into my shins, but I hardly felt it. I reached out and cleaned up the fluff for him. His eyes followed my fingers, and he stopped chewing when I touched him. I froze, utterly captivated by the feel of his skin on mine. I stayed there for one second, then two.

“Fluff,” I explained and sucked on my own finger to wash it away.

Max cleared his throat and looked into the fire, wiping his mouth with the meaty part of his thumb. From the forest, the crickets chirped, and I imagined a book I’d once illustrated about a nighttime forest orchestra where a possum conducted, the frogs sang tenor, and the crickets played the strings. “I’m going to try to get back to normal,” Max said.

“Okay.” I took a deep breath. My heart was doing the thing that I could only really equate with how it had felt to wait for my very first boyfriend to pick me up for a date. It felt like in place of my heart was a clothes dryer, spinning and spinning.

“And ask about normal things.”

“Right.” It wasn’t spinning on the gentle cycle.

“Just for the record, I don’t want to ask about normal things.”

“Noted.” High heat, for cotton and sheets.

He nodded once. “How’s the book?”

The book. What book? The yearbook? How did he know about the yearbook? Was I so transparent that he even knew that while wallowing without my ice cream, I’d looked for him in our… Oh Jesus, Rosie. No. He’s trying to get back to normal…just like you asked him, just like he said he would literally one second ago. “It’s okay! The author’s great. But fairy tales are hard.”

Max’s eyes darted over to me.

“Just, to get out of the standard trope,” I babbled. “Pink frills don’t really cut it when the princess is a hired dragon slayer.”

He smiled, still looking into the flames. “I’d love to see it,” he said.

Not unlike that moment when he crashed my date with Jed of the Lady Socks, I was filled with two competing yet equally strong emotions. First, joy. I loved showing him my work. Nobody was more exuberant or delighted—nobody noticed my favorite details like Max. You’re so good at their emotions, Rosie. I don’t know how you do it. You make a whole world spring from nothing. But two, horror. Merely hours ago, I’d found myself modeling the ratio of waist-to-chest of the man sitting in front of me right here and now. “Full disclosure, the prince looks just like you.”

Max froze with his teeth half sunk into the second half of his s’more.

“Not on purpose. But every time I sit down to draw him, boom.” I crunched into my own s’more. “There you are,” I said, though it came out as little more than a spray of graham crackers, but Max understood me. I think if we’d been on opposite ends of a tin-can telephone, we’d have understood each other just fine.

“So I’m your prince?”

I leveled him with a stare, trying to fake seriousness. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, champ.”

He clicked his tongue against his teeth and then went back to stoking the fire. “The princess look like you?” he asked, looking sideways at me.

I thought about it, scrunching up my nose as I imagined her. “Yes. Kind of. Sundresses and Converse.”

Max bit his lip and smiled into the flames. He jabbed at the smoldering fire with the poker. The friction of the logs sent an ember cartwheeling through the air. It landed on the quilt in my lap and sprang up into a tiny blaze.

17

Max

I slapped my hand to her inner thigh to extinguish the fire, and Rosie stared at me.

“Fuck, sorry. You okay?” I asked, but I didn’t take my hand away. In fact, I gripped her tighter, and it had fuck-all to do with putting out fires.

“I’m okay. Are you okay?” Her eyes were wide and innocent almost. If not innocent, then maybe shocked. The fire crackled in the pit, and for one slow-motion second, I gripped her thigh to show her I wanted—so fucking much—for her to be mine again. To show her that the way I was burning for her was even hotter than anything that fire pit could throw at us. For that thigh to be the one I and I alone would grab and kiss and worship. For that body to be mine. For her to be mine. I’d seen her smiling self in the photographic negative of the world that used to make sense. I’d seen the depths, and I wanted to dive deep again.

I didn’t let myself be tempted for longer than I could stand it. She’d made it crystal fucking clear, and no way was I going to cross that line again. So I began to pull my hand away.

But she fucking stopped me. She placed her hand over mine. She stared at me. And God knows how much time passed—an eternity, a millisecond. Whatever it was, it was Rosie time. Ordinary time had nothing to do with that moment. It was just her and me, face-to-face in the dark.

“Wait,” she said and pressed a little harder.

A totally primal growl snuck out of me. It was like my animal senses were warning her, Tell me yes now, and you’ll never tell me no again. “Rosie.”

“I was reading our yearbook, from when we graduated.”

Christ. I had to stifle a cringe, not because I was ashamed of what I’d written, but because it was so exactly how I felt, and so exactly the opposite of what she’d made clear. Love you always. “I never look back at those.”

“Really? Never?”

“Never.” But that was bullshit. I looked back at them all the time. I’d rescued them from my fucking sinking house—that’s how important they were to me. That was how much she mattered and always had.

“Max, do you know we were voted Most Likely to Get Married?”

Did I fucking know it? At seventeen, I’d savored that shit, night after night, falling asleep with the goddamned yearbook on my chest like preachers did with bibles.

She slipped her other arm out of the blanket and hooked her finger over my waistband, pulling me closer to her. The heat I felt on the back of my jeans from the fire was nothing, fucking nothing, compared to the heat that was burning for her from inside me. Closer and closer she drew me, finally placing her hand to the back of my neck to bring my face down to hers.

The fire made her eyes sparkle, and I tangled my fingers into her thick curls, soft as down. “I want you so fucking badly.”

Rosie swallowed hard, and she smiled, shy almost. Her eyes narrowed, and a hint of that dirty girl—the girl who’d made a tattoo artist wild enough to ink her for the principle of the thing, the girl whose body was so sexy, it would break down walls—rose up to the surface. “Tell me.”

“I want to take you hard, and I want to make you mine. Tonight and every night.”

“Who says I’m not yours already?” she said, all breathy, as her hand slid around to my ass, and her fingers moved into my pocket. “Who says I wasn’t yours all along and just never knew it?”

“If that’s true, we’ve got a shitload of time to make up for. I don’t want to waste another fucking second talking about it.”

She didn’t answer right away, but she nodded instead. I felt the cool curtain of her hair brush against my cheek. “No more talking.”

Oh. Fuck. I slid my lower lip along hers. I inhaled her breath; I felt her fingertips along the back of my neck. “I’m gonna kiss you.”

“I wish you’d do it already.”

So I did. I kissed her hard, a fierce and intense kiss that forced her head back against the chair. It squeaked under her, the nails groaning as I got on top of her, straddling her on my knees. She tasted sweet, like chocolate, and her tongue felt cooler than mine. Like something frosty on a hot day. I pulled back from the kiss, which made her whine. “When was the last time you fucked outside, Rosie Madden?”

Her eyes twinkled in the firelight. She gripped my wrist and lightly caressed the inside of my forearm with her thumb. “Never.”

“I think we better fix that.” I stood up and took her by the hands, and then I walked her into the grassy clearing, under the magnolia. I laid her down in the cool grass, surrounded by petals. If I’d been a photographer, I’d have photographed her. A painter, I’d have made her stay like that for hours. A poet, I’d never have found the words. But I wasn’t any of those things. I was just a man who wanted a woman, and who’d never felt so happy in his life.

I put my knees on either side of her, the dampness of the grass seeping through my jeans. I pushed her shirt up over her bra. I kissed every fucking inch of her that I could. As my stubble dragged along her stomach, I felt her laugh with the tickle.

“Fuck, I forgot you’re ticklish,” I said.

“Don’t be cruel,” she whispered. “Not right now. Tickle me later.” Her voice was sultry and low. Teasing was over, sass was gone. It was just pure, beautiful desire that I heard there. She’d never sounded more like herself.

But I was calling the shots now, not her. So I played it up. I took her wrists in my hand and bound them tight in my grip as I bent down over her abdomen. With the tip of my tongue, I ran a line down her stomach, around her belly button, along the edge of her panties. With the edge of my tongue, I made a circle around the spot just below her ribs. She hissed and groaned and squirmed. She tried to push me away, but I didn’t let her. I drew one of her nipples out of her bra and brought my lips to it. I closed my eyes and took her in blind—the way her nipple tightened between my teeth, the way her back arched when I bit down. I felt the fine ripples of her ribs under her skin, and as I touched her, goose bumps followed. “You’re so fucking sexy.” I unhooked her bra at the clasp in the front, and the light from the fire sent a golden cast over her creamy white skin.

She came up to sitting, slipped her hands from my grasp and pawed for my belt, but I pushed her back down.

“Let me decide how this goes.”

In answer, she bit her lip. Fuck. “Okay.”

When I had my pants undone, I pulled her panties down, tugging so hard that I heard a thread snap. These were purple, or maybe blue. I couldn’t quite tell in the dark, but whatever they were, they were fucking perfect. Just like her.

In her eyes, I saw the woman I’d always known and loved. But deep down in there, I saw a woman I’d only just met last night and didn’t yet know at all. That woman, the naughty one, the rebel, the bad girl in a sundress, tatted-up American Pie, she was the one who cupped my cock and balls in her hand, licked a long line up the edge of my ear, and answered, “Get inside me, Max. Please.”

I pulled her panties to one side, pushed her back down onto the grass, and parted her thighs. “Wait for it.”

18

Rosie

Max was doing things with his tongue that made the Big Dipper rearrange itself in the sky. He had one hand on my ass, making greedy grabs that made me groan, but with his tongue, he made small, expert circles. Then he licked a long, tantalizing line up from my opening, until his stubble moved across my clit and made me gasp. He pulled his face away from me and looked up my body. “Take these two fingers,” he said, pressing into my thigh with the fingers he meant me to use, “bring them down to your pussy, and part your lips. Don’t argue.”

My breath got caught in my throat. He’d never talked to me like this. And I found I just…loved it. “Okay.”

“Good girl.”

I did exactly as he asked. Exposing my clit to the cool night air made a whole new sensation, amplifying everything. With the tip of his tongue, his eyes on mine all the time, he worked me up and up with concentric circles. Barely taking his mouth off of me, close enough for my skin to be warmed by his breath, he added, “Touch yourself, feel how swollen you are.”

I moved my finger half an inch to the side. My clit was twice its usual size, twice what I was used to when I did this myself. It was full and plump and so sensitive I could hardly stand it. He licked along the edge of my finger, and my clit, too. I pressed down a little, compressing the right edge, and he focused on what I hadn’t yet covered. His eyes slid shut as he sucked and teased and undid me bit by bit.

I parted my fingers again, and I let him take over. The hand that had been on my ass slipped down, and he penetrated me with one finger, and then two.

“Oh my God.” I gripped his shoulders and drove my fingers into his muscles. He laughed a little and teased me with his stubble, sending everything into overdrive all over again.

I was close and getting closer. I was losing track of thoughts and reality. I knew I was gripping him tight, and I knew my toes were curling. But beyond that, things were getting blurry with pleasure. Orion was getting mixed up with Ursa Minor, and I couldn’t see the North Star anywhere. It was all just streaks, like shooting stars, like comets. “You’re heaven. You are.”

He shook into my pussy, and that just made it all so much more intense. “I’m nothing. You’re everything.”

His grip on my thighs tightened, and he parted them farther, spreading me wide so he could get to all of me. The fingers that were inside found my G-spot. He shifted to using the flat, wide, strong part of his tongue, giving me steady, regular pressure. And then it was happening. The comets were shooting down. It was all meteors and asteroids. All I could do was say his name over and over and over again.

Before I was even done coming, while I was still falling and falling, he pulled away just long enough to take his cock in his hand. He didn’t hesitate, he didn’t give it to me slow, he drove into me like I was his and I always had been. I pressed my mouth against his shoulder and made something that sounded like a sob.

“Keep going,” he said as he drove into me harder and harder. “Keep coming. Don’t stop.” The ground was unforgiving—there was no bounce from the mattress like there had been last night. It made me feel his power, and his ruthlessness.

I never wanted it to end. I’d have stayed out there with him all night long. Forever. I wanted to make it last as long as I could. So I ran my fingers lightly through his hair, making him slow down, making his drives less ruthless, making him focus on something other than the magic we were making inside me together. I whispered into his ear, “Let me be on top.”

He growled. “No fucking way.”

I nodded, because I knew how he was. He’d always say no at first. But then, I’d get my way. “Please. Please.”

His eyes were inches from mine, a strange blue from the light of the flames. “I’m not pulling out of you.”

“Definitely not,” I said, and I leaned to the right to show him what I wanted. He let me have it, and we rolled closer to the fire, ending up with me on top, and putting something very important within reach.

19

Max

She eased herself down onto my cock slowly as she opened up for me. “You okay?” I whispered, sweeping her hair off over the shoulder farthest from the sparks and embers. It had died down quite a bit, but no fucking way was I letting anything harm that body. Never, ever, ever.

“Yes, perfect,” she said. She had her hands planted on my chest, side by side over my pecs, and as I hit her cervix, she tightened her grip on me slightly, but then relaxed.

“Your knees okay?” I asked, glancing down, running my hand down her bent leg, slipping my fingers between her calf and the back of her thigh. “Want me to put down a blanket?”

She pursed her lips and shook her head. “Oh, you. Stop worrying. Just let me have a little fun.”

She reached past me, over my head, to a chocolate bar that she’d left on the deck chair. She unwrapped it slowly, her eyes downcast, carefully unfolding the shiny foil wrapper until it was on the paper, flat in her palm. This she put on the warm rocks at the edge of the pit. Every fucking time she moved—every half inch of an adjustment—made me want to roll her right back over and fuck her until she couldn’t take it anymore, until I’d given her everything I had, until I had filled her with my cum, until she was dripping with me. “You’re not making this easy,” I told her, reaching up to pinch her nipples between my thumb and forefinger. My middle finger fell on a depression on the side of her breast, where her bra had been. There was so much I’d never thought about—things like that, how tight her bra was, the angry places where the underwire dug into her. I ran my fingertips over that. “I don’t like this. I don’t like anything that hurts you.”

She laughed. “You got a better idea for all-day support?” she asked. As she did, she maneuvered her feet so that the tops were flat on my thighs, so that she was in a kind of nameless and sexy yoga pose. The Kneeling Queen, The Worshiping Goddess. I ran my hands up her ass, up her back, and then trailed them back down her arms. “I just want you like this. No bras. Maybe no panties. Just you naked forever.”

“Make me a kept woman? Ready for you any time?” she asked as she broke off a piece of the chocolate bar.

“Yeah. Kept. Safe. Mine.”

She answered with just her smile, which said, You beast. Then she turned her attention to the chocolate. She dipped her fingers into the melted rectangle, like a block of finger paint. All five fingers, thumb to pinkie, got dipped like strawberries. When they were all covered, she placed her fingertips to my sternum and then made a long, five-lined streak down my chest. Like war paint, like graffiti. She dipped her finger into the chocolate again and put it into my mouth. I sucked it clean in an instant, greedy for her. Fucking desperate.

I started to find my rhythm inside her from below. I took hold of her ass, which fit like it was fucking made for me to grip. Every drive made her nipples bounce. And then she fucking painted those in chocolate, too.

She took her hair into a ponytail and bent down over me. My cock began to slide from her, but I was big enough to keep my head in all the time. She licked the line that her pinkie had made off of my chest—a long, ballbusting, openmouthed lick with wide eyes, cast up to mine.

“Fuck, Rosie,” I said, freezing where I was, buried deep inside her. She was soaked from her orgasm, and I could feel her wetness coming down onto my balls. I drove my first two fingers between our bodies until I touched the lips of her pussy. I got my own finger paint from her, and I added it to my chest—a fine, shiny streak next to the chocolate.

She placed her tongue to my chest, and in one fucking mind-blowing sweep, licked up herself and a streak of chocolate. Fucking A. I just couldn’t take it anymore, going so slow. I took her by the shoulders and straightened her up. The shift in position made my balls tighten, and I took her nipple in my mouth.

“Greedy.”

I didn’t take my mouth off her as I nodded. Because fuck yeah, I was greedy. Greedy for every single thing she was.

When I’d licked her clean, I pushed her up to sitting. She took all of me, and I could see a little flicker of pain in her face. Made me fucking crazy to know I was in her so deep that it hurt. “Listen,” I told her, running my thumb over her cheek. She pressed it into my palm and put a kiss to my fingers. “If you let me come inside you again, we’re doing this thing for real. One time is one time. But twice, that’s for keeps.”

Her body stiffened slightly, and I liked that, too. I liked feeling that she understood I was dead fucking serious. That she was my best friend, and those were the goddamned stakes.

“What does that mean?” she asked softly. She put one of her fingertips in her mouth and used that wetness to clean some more chocolate from my chest.

“It means I’m not just fucking you to fuck you,” I told her, increasing the intensity—but not the speed—of my thrusts. I felt her cervix at the end of my cock with every drive. “It means that nothing will ever be the same for us.”

“I can’t lose you,” she said, almost through a gasp.

“You won’t.”

“Promise?”

Ten thousand words wouldn’t have done justice to how strongly I felt, so I didn’t say a single one. Instead, I flipped her back over away from the fire and bore down on her hard, until my balls slapped against her ass. When I had her panting, I slowed down and pinned her neck back with the Y of my thumb and fingers. I nudged her cheek with my nose. “Means I’m serious. It means you’re mine.”

“I am. I’m yours.”

The fire crackled, and somewhere out in the woods an owl shrieked. She looked up at the stars and smiled, and then pulled me close to her. My natural instinct took over, and I began those possessive, ceaseless drives that had busted the wall. All I could think was, this is how it was always supposed to be. Her pussy tightened around me, and I felt the first wave of precum spill into her. I inhaled that pure, sweet smell that was hers, and hers alone. I caged her in and fucked her like I loved her. Because I did. And always would.

As I growled with the first wave of my orgasm, as I roared out her name, she placed her lips to my ear and whispered, “For keeps, Max. For keeps.”

For fucking keeps.

* * *

We lay in the grass under the stars for a long time, until the fire died down and I felt Rosie shiver in my arms. “Bed?”

She got up on her elbows. Her eyes looked sleepy, and her hair was messy. I pulled a blade of grass from her bangs and let it fall from my fingers onto my chest. She batted her lashes, like it was hard to keep her eyes open. “Yes, definitely.”

“I’m not sleeping in the guest bedroom, tiger,” I said and tugged on her lip with the pad of my thumb.

Her laugh came with a fucking awesome nostril flare. “Definitely not.”

I got up first and then helped her up to standing. I wrapped her in the quilt, put on my boxers, and then made sure the fire was out before taking her hand. It was like I just couldn’t get near enough to her, though, and I put my arm around her as we headed inside.

When we opened the door, we found Cupcake sleeping peacefully on her side in her crate, her little tummy rising and falling with quiet snores. Rosie pressed her finger to her lips to tell me to be quiet, and as noiselessly as I could, I closed the front door, lifting up on the knob to stop the hinges from squeaking like they usually did.

Rosie kept her blanket wrapped tight around her and tiptoed over to Cupcake. Her eyebrows furrowed and she frown-smiled—mashing up her features in the cutest possible way. She’s so cute, Rosie mouthed. Gently, she touched Cupcake’s foot with her fingertip, reaching through the metal door like I had at the vet’s. Cupcake didn’t wake up, but instead, she gave an almighty Wonder Woman stretch, paws out in both directions like she was flying through the air, accompanied by a grumbling groan. She made some adjustments of her little mouth and then snuggled her face back into the blanket and started snoring a little more loudly. I made my way over to the crate too, and as Rosie came back up to standing, she nestled her cheek against my chest. And I pressed my lips to the top of her head.

She’d said I was heaven when I was making her come. But no way. She was.

20

Rosie

Things weren’t awkward anymore. We stood next to one another in the bathroom, brushing our teeth, staring at each other’s reflection in the mirror. I was in my nightie, a little soft pink cotton number I’d had forever, and he was in his lobster boxers. He reached over and gave my tush a pat, and a sudden cheek-pinching came over me, so powerful and so overwhelming that it made me dribble toothpaste foam out onto my chin. I wiped it away as fast as I could, trying to keep some semblance of sexiness intact.

“What?” he asked around his toothbrush.

I managed to close my mouth in time to stop any more foaming. I bit down on the oscillating brush, making the motor grind briefly before I unclenched my jaw and moved to my molars. I shook my head to say nothing.

But he understood. I knew he did. Because he winked.

He never winked. Never. He was a scowler and a brooder, and even sometimes a belly-laugher if I got his funny bone just right, but not once in my life had he ever winked at me. And I loved it. Like a brand-new secret language I never knew we could speak.

In my teeny bathroom, with the Batman flower on the ceiling, everything was in sync. I spat out my toothpaste and rinsed, and then washed my face as he spat out his toothpaste and rinsed his brush in the tap. I watched him with one of my hand towels pressed to my face, so I was looking over the top of the terry cloth fold. “I like this a lot,” I said, my voice muffled by the towel.

He swished his mouthwash and spat into the sink. He rinsed his mouth out with a handful of water. “Fuck. So do I.”

“A lot, a lot,” I said, still into the towel.

He wiped off his mouth with the back of his hand. “Yeah. Times a thousand.”

Together, for the first time ever, we crawled into bed like a couple. Last night we’d been in bed, but this was different. This was a simple ritual that felt as important as any of the rest of the magic. We’d gotten Julia situated in her cat basket on the other side of the room, and she was out cold. I’d conceded on one tiny cube of SPAM, and now she was acting like a junkie who was sleeping off her fix. I slipped my legs under the sheets and felt Max’s weight depress his half of the bed. I tried to memorize everything about him so I could fill my dreams with him before I turned off the lamp—his chest, his thighs, his treasure trail, his face—but just as I was putting my fingertips to the ridged knob on the lamp, he said, “Rosie. C’mon.”

I swallowed hard. My thighs were still wobbly. I didn’t even know if I could do it again. I hadn’t come that hard in years, and certainly not twice in one day. But, glancing down at the covers, I knew I was more than willing to try. “Animal,” I said. “Bring it.”

He made a snap with his tongue, like he was annoyed. “I’m not talking about that—but so help me God, I won’t be able to stop myself in the night, so get ready.”

“’Kay,” I said, through a sort of sultry gasp. I was so used to his voice, but I wasn’t used to the way he was talking to me now. Get ready. “I’m yours for the taking.”

He answered that with a low and vulgar, “Fuuuuuuck,” that made my toes curl. “But that’s not what I’m asking. What I want to know is where’s Peter Rabbit?”

No. I would not do this. I survived last night without him, I could do it again. Having to wear my bite guard was going to be awkward enough. Peter Rabbit was out of the question. “I outgrew him years ago. Same year I finished with the headgear.”

Max glared and pouted in this manly, dreamy way. “Bullshit.”

For a long second, we stared at one another. His breathing was regular and steady. Mine was accompanied by a slight whistle from one of my nostrils.

“Ante up, beautiful. Where is he?”

I figured I could continue on the too sexy for Peter Rabbit path for a while, but truth be told, I wasn’t totally sure I could sleep another night without him. I’d never slept without him. I even stuck him in my carry-on when I traveled so he didn’t get shipped off to some far-away airport, leaving me to a night of tossing and turning while I pretended my pillow was Peter Rabbit, which it most definitely was not.

Or, I could just come clean. I had no intention of this being the last night he stayed with me, and I had no idea how I was going to keep it a secret. I couldn’t exactly sneak the occasional snuggle when I was unconscious. I had visions of waking up with both Peter Rabbit and Julia on my face. Oh, the romance.

But it seemed it wasn’t going to be my decision to make. Max narrowed his eyes and plunged his hand down behind the mattress, between the bed and the wall. I made a halfhearted attempt to stop him but got swept away in the glint of his eyes in this dim light and the girth of his forearms. Max emerged victorious, with Peter Rabbit in hand. Missing an ear. Missing a leg. Threadbare.

I felt an embarrassed hot blush creep up on my cheeks. I mean, what thirty-four-year-old woman sleeps with a stuffed animal, for God’s sake?

“Do you think it’s silly?” I asked, glancing down at Peter.

“I think everything about you is perfect, down to this rabbit,” he said and tucked it in next to me. “There.” He leaned over to kiss me as he reached across me to turn off the light.

Darkness fell over the room, and the warmth of his thigh pressed against mine. “Thank you. For everything. All the time.”

His hand gripped mine hard. It said you’re welcome and thank you and this is all so freaking joyful there are no words. For a minute, maybe more, we just lay there, side by side, hand in hand, until finally Max rolled toward me, said, “You be the little spoon,” and pulled the sheets up over us.

21

Max

I was still the big spoon the next morning. In my arms, Rosie was tucked up in a little ball. My body curved along hers, and my chin was just above her shoulder. I pulled her into me, banking 50/50 that my morning wood would wake her up. Kind of hoped it did, kind of hoped it didn’t. But she was sound asleep, deep in a dream so intense I could see the worry on her face. Peter Rabbit was smashed between her body and her arm, his ear folded down over his face. I watched her for a while, as the sun came up, and as Julia stretched and tugged at the carpet with her claws. I thought about the things I didn’t know about Rosie—what she dreamed about, what she wanted, what she hoped to have in the future. So much shit we’d never really had to discuss. Plans. Big ideas. Fears.

Life. I wanted to know what she wanted out of life.

I knew all about the little stuff that filled up the days. What annoyed her, what made her laugh. But the big stuff, the movie poster version of her future? I thought I knew. But I wasn’t sure.

Project one: Figure all that out. Everything. Every last detail that was Rosie Madden. Everything that made the sweetheart tick.

But also on the docket, I realized as my stomach growled, was project two: Breakfast. The growling was pretty intense, loud enough to make Julia’s ears move. No way was I letting it wake up Rosie. So I got out of bed and pulled on my boxers, adjusting my balls, and making sure the stallion stayed in the barn. She really was making an animal out of me. My usual morning wood was nothing compared to this. But I tucked my cock under my waistband and pulled myself together. As I opened the bedroom door, Julia made a kamikaze dive for freedom, but I picked her up in the nick of time. She hadn’t met Cupcake yet, and I figured that introduction was best made in a more strategic way than her thumping down the stairs and attaching herself to the dog crate like something out of a cartoon. So I gave her a good scratch on her back, lulling her into docile slowness, and slipped from the bedroom. As I headed down the hallway, I heard her thump her nose against the door and let out a low and disappointed grunt.

Even before I saw her, I knew Cupcake was having a drink of water, using the water bottle I’d installed in her crate—the sort of thing that looked designed for the world’s biggest hamster. I heard the gentle rolling of the ball bearing in the tube, and the sound of her lapping up the droplets. But as soon as the last stair squeaked under my foot, she stopped. I came around the sofa, and she started spinning circles in her crate, her claws scratching the plastic as she pushed her blankets aside.

“Heyyyy!” I whispered, getting down on my knees. She launched herself at the crate door, licking the metal, and then tumbled out into my lap when I opened the latch. She scrambled up my knees and climbed as high as she could onto my chest. I bent down for a whole smattering of dog kisses. Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss. Even up the nostrils. OMG, OMG, OMG!

“You need to go out, little lady,” I told her. She rolled onto her back in my lap, and I gave her a tiny raspberry on her stomach, which just made her go into crazier wiggles and squirms. I scooped her up and cradled her with one arm as I stood. “You think you’ll be okay off your leash?” I asked her. I even waited. For an answer.

I really was just so freaking whipped.

She did look like she was thinking about it, like she was listening hard for a word she knew. I set her down on the rug and asked, “Wanna go for a walk?”

And she exploded in a crazy two-legged dance, like one of those poodles on YouTube that dances around in a tutu.

But before I ventured out there with her unleashed, I wanted to be sure. I told her to sit, and she did. I told her to stay and then turned my back on her to start the hot water kettle. She didn’t move a muscle. She made a huffing whine, the way Rosie did when the ice cream shop was out of pistachio. Come onnnnnnnnnn.

Still, though, it was risky. Cupcake had gotten away from her owners somehow, and it seemed like I’d be the worst foster dad in the world if I put her in danger in the Maine woods, too. So rather than chance it, I grabbed her harness. I put her on the arm of the couch, and I suited her up, maneuvering one funny little leg between the straps and then the other. I clipped it tight, hooked on the leash, and took her outside. The sun was brilliant, the day was perfect. Cupcake sniffed a little patch of grass by a bed full of peonies and then squatted to pee.

I looked up at Rosie’s window and saw Julia watching us. I gave her a respectful salute, and she swished her tail.

Back inside, I got Cupcake’s breakfast ready and served it to her in a little soup bowl. I refilled her water and checked my phone to see if the vet had called. I was so fucking relieved that they hadn’t, I felt a sting in my nostrils. I watched her gobble up her breakfast and told myself over and over, Don’t get attached. Do not get fucking attached.

She crunched away on some kibble and looked up at me as she chewed. She stopped mid-crunch, and a piece of kibble fell out of her mouth onto her foot, which startled her. She jumped and skittered, she bounced into the cabinet and smacked her face on the front of the dishwasher.

Too late. Too fucking late.

To divert my thoughts from the agony of having to give her up, I focused on the most immediate task. I found a tray next to the fridge. On that, I put a glass of water and a glass of orange juice. I toasted two slices of bread and put on a thick coating of peanut butter. I even found a little vase in the vitamin cabinet, so I rinsed that out and filled it halfway with water. I actually had no fucking idea how to even really set a table, but I did my best. I lined up the fork and knife and made sure she had a spoon for a coffee.

I grabbed scissors from the drawer with the rubber bands and was just about to step outside when I saw a piece of paper thumbtacked to the little board over the hook where Rosie hung her purse. Something about it, the fact that it was folded in half, maybe, told me it was something she didn’t want me to see. Something important, judging from where she’d stuck it, but something worrisome, too. Right next to it was her car insurance reminder—that kind of an important bummer. I lifted the corner of the folded page and saw that the handwriting was hard, and in all caps. Repair northwest gutter leak. Wet rot on trim, see drawing. The inspection results.

I removed the thumbtack and opened it up. It was bad. Not exactly a surprise, but still a fucking pisser. It was an inspection report that would’ve driven me to a night-long bender, so I didn’t blame Rosie for not telling me—it wasn’t exactly an inspection anybody would want to get ever, especially not if you were trying to sell your place, and quick.

I scanned through the notes. This guy Bremmer hadn’t fucked her over, which was a damned good thing for his sake. But even without talking to her, I knew there was no way she could cover these repairs on her own. The little stuff, even more than the big stuff, would add up quicker than she’d imagine. The repairs I’d made so far had helped, but there was still a shitload to be done. Some of it I couldn’t do myself, like the foundation repair. She was also way too fucking proud to just straight up take my money, even if I did want to play general contractor for her.

Carefully, I repinned the sheet back on the board and went out to snip a rose for her as I thought about what to do. It was in full bloom, a bright pink, absolutely fucking beautiful. Just like her. Almost too pretty to believe. With the rose in hand, I went back into the kitchen and placed it in the vase. I measured out a few scoops of coffee into a French press and added boiling water and then waited for the grounds to brew.

She wouldn’t take my money, but she might agree to something else. A week ago, I’d have gone soft and gentle. But now, I knew her better. And now, I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. So I pushed down the plunger on the French press, picked up the tray, and headed upstairs.

22

Rosie

Breakfast. In. Bed. It was right up there on the list of It’ll never happen to me moments, along with late-night skinny dipping and one-kneed marriage proposals. But this was almost better. Because I was pretty sure I could smell…coffee. Yes. Plus…

Peanut butter!

Max walked softly across my bedroom. I could tell he was being quiet—he was a big guy, he worked with lumber for a living, he didn’t exactly go softly-softly from scene to scene in his life. But he was being quiet for me. Which was just lovely. Cups on saucers rattled. I felt him set down a tray and push it across the sheets. Then I heard his footsteps come around to my side of the bed. I did my very best to keep my face neutral; I focused on my breathing and just hoped this moment would last and last. He moved my bangs aside and softly touched his thumb to my cheek. It was so tender, so unspeakably beautiful, that I swallowed hard. I couldn’t help it. Total reflex. Like being tickled, but instead of laughing I just sort of…melted.

“There she is,” he said quietly. I opened my eyes as he sat down on the bed next to me, still fussing with my hair.

I blinked hard against the sun. “What time is it?”

Max raised his eyebrow and glanced at the tray. “Breakfast time. How’d I do?”

I turned my head and looked at the tray. There was a place mat under the plate so it didn’t slide, a napkin folded carefully in half. A rose in a bud vase. Coffee. Sugar cubes. Be still my beating heart. “You’re a natural.”

“You make it easy.” He handed me a piece of peanut butter toast. “But listen, about the house…”

Well, there went that fantasy. I jammed my toast in my mouth, at the same instant I tried to protest. “Can’t we save this?” I sputtered. “For, you know, never?”

Max scratched the side of his neck. “Nope. Here’s how I figure it. You got that inspection report, and you were just going to let that info drip-drip-drip so I wouldn’t worry, right?”

I shook my head hard and covered my mouth, “No, I was going to figure out a way to pay for it and then start the drip-drip-drip.”

From under the place mat, Max produced the document in question, all crinkly from Bremmer’s sweaty hands and slightly smudged with his hair paint. It looked like a mechanic had manhandled it after trying to fix an engine. Sorta. “This is a lot of repairs,” Max said. He rubbed the brownish smudge and looked at his fingers.

“I’m not sure what that is.” I was trying really hard to sound totally clueless. “Any guesses? Engine oil? Some sort of sauce?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

Fine. Fine. I took the page from him and held it up. Pinprick holes from Bremmer’s ballpoint made the letters look like Braille in the sunshine. It listed so many required repairs that the sheer scale of the inspection report had trickled through my attempts at controlling my dreams—I’d tried so hard to focus on Max, but instead I saw Frank Bremmer, writing things like Insurance Fraud: America’s Pastime Since 1776!, and on the line where he was supposed to write whether or not the house had passed inspection, he’d written, LOLOLOL.

I finally finished my square of toast and busied myself with a slice of apple. “I’ll figure it out. Easy-peasy. Don’t worry about me.”

Max shook his head slowly. “No dice. The minute you let me have you, it became my job to worry about you.”

I bit down, but I was too awestruck to chew. “It did?” I said into the apple.

He nodded. “And I think I can say this now because we’ve crossed all the lines, so I feel pretty confident that you aren’t gonna get all sassy with me if I overstep.”

I chewed slowly as Max moved the tray off the bed, on top of a high dresser—too high for Julia by far.

He turned to me with an aggressive yumminess in his eyes that I had seen a glimpse of in the fire last night, but I saw in a new way in the bright light of morning. The alpha I’d always known was there in full force. “Because you’re mine, I’m going to overstep. And you’re gonna let me, aren’t you?” He pulled the bedclothes off of me so that I was naked. He cupped his cock and balls and then pulled his boxers down with his other hand. He was just so perfect I could not even. Girthy, too. Not only long but very, very girthy. He stroked himself a few times. “Answer the question, kitten.”

Kitten.

I’d never been one for pet names, but that one felt so good, it was like walking into the cold room at the liquor store. My whole body prickled and tensed and relaxed.

Kitten!

Oh, but wait, was there a question? What question? What was the question? I stared at him, blank-brained. Kitteennnnnnn. “What were we talking about?”

He climbed on top of me, taking the apple slice from my fingers and putting it on the dresser. He lowered his weight and took one of my wrists in each of his hands. “I was saying I was going to overstep and that you were going to let me. Right?”

He was right at my opening. I was wet already—pretty sure in spite of my dreams, he’d kept me wet all night—and he moaned as he slid himself along me. I couldn’t even form a sentence. Whatever he asked me to do next, it was almost certain to be a blurted-out Yes! But I still had some semblance of logic left. “Maybe.”

“No maybes,” he said and put some pressure on my opening. He growled a little as the head entered me.

I growled, too. Softer than him. Almost a purr. Kitten, indeed. But I tried to focus. Focus, Rosie. Focus. On the hunk of beautiful man in front of you who is just about to…focus. I flexed my fingers, trying to grab him, and in response, his grip tightened. “I know you won’t take my money.” His eyes got all bedroomy and narrow and aggressive. “But you’re going to take a loan from me, Rosie. No arguments.”

I thought about it, in as much as I could do any actual thinking right then. For the amount that I was going to have to dump into the house, that would be a lot of generic logos. So many smiling toilets. So many owls for library insignias. So. Many.

But suddenly I was back in the Land of Should, where sleeping with your best friend is tied with taking a loan from your best friend for a bad idea. This place wasn’t his responsibility, loan or not. This house had been in my family longer than some hereditary disorders. It was mine to figure out—my problem to solve. Never had a Madden taken charity, never. But as he let me feel his power and his weight, I knew, too, that I was between a rock and a very hard place. So I went for the middle ground and hitched up my hips to draw him further into me. “With interest.”

He answered with a groan, but it took him a moment to find real words. “No interest. You can help me with repairs, but it’s all on my dime.”

“Yes to helping, no to the loan.” I parted my legs a little more and gave him a squeeze.

“Fuck,” he snarled. He let my hands go and took hold of my hips, squeezing so hard that my ass cheeks parted because of it. Still, I stayed strong. “I’ll say yes only if you charge interest.”

The growl came from somewhere in his throat. “I set the terms of the interest.” He punctuated the word with a thrust so intense that I grabbed hold of the sheets in my fists, and I heard the fitted sheet pop off one corner with an elasticky thump. “You can pay me back in quickies and all-night marathons. And cupcakes. And kisses.” He moved his hand to my clit and drew it up between his fingertips. Halfway between a pinch and a roll, and just enough to make me turn my cheek into the pillows and whine.

“Please, Rosie,” he said, his tone softer now. “Let me take care of you. Starting now. Don’t fight me anymore. Let me do what I need to do.”

My heart tumbled and fluttered. I had to give in. I had to. Actual goddesses would have knelt for less. “Okay,” I whispered. He let his eyes slide shut as he drove into me again. But before he pushed me into the pleasure pond, I knew I had the sense to give him one more dig. One more tease. One more jab like I knew he loved. “Compounded daily.”

Now the cheek-pinch smile hit us both at once. I pushed my hips into his, and he came down over me, nipping my lip, as he drove into me all the way, saying, “I’ll show you compounded daily,” as he did.

23

Max

Three hours later, Rosie pulled our cart over in Aisle 11B of Home Depot, ran her fingertips over a sawhorse made of two-by-fours, and said, “This is nice.”

Awwww, fuck. “Listen,” I told her, pretending to be pissed, but not really pretending either. I loved what she did to me, loved how she talked and how she acted. But there were things she didn’t quite get. Like painfully intense hard-ons that made me want to fuck her in public without even getting my pants down all the way. Being a woman, I was pretty sure she couldn’t fucking comprehend the need. “I come here all the time. I can’t be walking around rock hard, you hear me?”

She straightened her shoulders, and her eyes moved over the stuff in the cart. She took a packet of 400 grit sandpaper and propped it in front of the leg holes where a kid would sit, but which was also totally giving away the size and intensity of the bulge in my pants. “There, see?” She turned around, bending down in the most crazy-making way. “You think we could make this…taller?” She pouted and lifted her ass in the air by coming up on her tiptoes, pure old-school pinup. “Because that would be much more convenient for…”

I grabbed a second package of sandpaper and shielded the other leg hole, to keep the goods covered. “You. Paint. Now.”

She play-huffed and ran her tongue along her teeth. “I like making you crazy, Max. I really, really do.” She swaggered on down Aisle 11B as my raging hard-on and I followed.

We didn’t even get one aisle farther, though. Instead, she took a detour to a nearby end cap and plucked a pack of extra-large zip ties off a hook. “Oooh.”

That was my limit. Goddamned Fifty Shades of Grey, for Christ’s sake. I was all for kink, but not at the expense of safety. “I’ll buy you some soft cuffs,” I told her as I snagged them from her fingers and put them back on the shelf. “Zip ties are dangerous. Believe me, I know.” I pushed the cart along, and she trotted to keep up.

“Wait,” she said, giving me a little shove before looping her arm in mine. “How do you

know? Who do you know with?”

I snorted. I couldn’t fucking help it. “Who do you know with? We playing Mad Libs now?”

A red flush crept up her chest to her neck, and she grabbed hold of the cart, her small and polished hands totally the opposite of mine, yin and yang. She elbowed me and tried to bring the cart to a stop. She huffed again. “I get turned on, and my words get jumbled,” she said, smiling hard. “But seriously! How do you know?”

There was no way in hell I was gonna talk about some other woman with her, because not a single one of them held a fucking damp sparkler to the blazing brilliance that was Rosie. “Internet.”

She glared and smacked her lips. “That’s annoyingly vague.” She curled a finger in the air, a come-hither move that made my balls ache. “Details, handsome. I want details.”

“Paint…” I told her, forging ahead, past fixtures and fasteners.

But this time, I was the one who got distracted. On the next end cap were garbage disposals. The inspector hadn’t written that down, but I’d been in the house renovation business long enough to know that it was one of those details that could seal the deal. Might even make someone overlook a damp basement. The noise of a perfectly working garbage disposal was real-estate magic. I picked a solid choice, top of the line, no froufrou bells and whistles, and put it in the cart. Two shelves down, I spotted something that was right up her alley. I picked up a female and male piece of PVC pipe. “Take a look at this.”

That was when I realized she wasn’t with me. I turned around and saw her fussing with something, with her back to me, a few aisles back.

I made a U and damn near knocked over an old lady buying a new toilet seat, but with a few long strides, I was back with Rosie. “You okay?”

Her eyes were wide and nervous. “Ummmm…”

I looked down at her wrists. Somehow, she’d managed to work one zip tie around one wrist and looped the other around it, to bind herself into cuffs.

“Holy shit.” I inspected her wrists to try to see how much room she had. Answer? None. “Christ. I told you. Soft cuffs. Leopard print, whatever you want.”

“I don’t want soft cuffs,” she said, flexing her fingers. “But I think I might be in over my head.”

She most definitely was, and I found it super fucking sexy. Totally goddamned inappropriate, but I couldn’t help my thoughts from rushing toward all sorts of inappropriate things, shit we could only get away with if we stayed in here until after closing. What a fucking time we’d have. I’d take her on every washer-dryer set they sold—high-efficiency, low-profile, everything.

Not now, man. Not fucking now. There’s a time and a place for everything, and this wasn’t it. I wrapped my hands around the zip ties, the bindings digging into my palms. “You’re a piece of work, you know that?”

“My pinkie is going numb,” she said with a little giggle. “But it’s still pretty sexy, right?” She wiggled her fingers and made little fists, then gave the ties a tug by rotating her forearms a half inch. As she did, the ties tightened under my hand, and I had to suppress a groan.

This was a side of her I didn’t know—daring, naughty, the secret sex kitten that had been right under my nose all these fucking years, the girl who’d try out a little bondage at eleven a.m. on a Sunday in Home Goddamned Depot—and I absolutely fucking dug it. But secret sex kitten or not, we had to do something about those zip ties. This was going to go one of two ways: I was either going to have to free her, or fuck her. So I put my arm around her and made her put her cuffed wrists behind the sandpaper barrier in the cart. I guided her back toward the main aisle that linked all the others. A guy with his cart full of petunias that shook as he walked along gave Rosie the old up-and-down. Ass.

“Oh my God, these plumbing parts have genders!” Ties be damned, she snatched up the male pipe and the female elbow and laughed in this sultry way, with her tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth. “How dirrrrrrty!”

“Thought you’d like that,” I told her and took a right into Tools.

* * *

The weirdest thing about Home Depot was that sometimes, there was nobody. I’d been there on days when I couldn’t find a guy to help me in lumber if I sold a kidney on the black market to pay for it. I’d been in there on days when the Patriots could’ve practiced in the aisles and never collided with another living soul. But sometimes, it was like a fucking Fourth of July parade. Like today.

Tools and Fasteners looked like a commercial—all sorts of employees in orange aprons were doing demos for customers. Couples considered things like power drills. A big guy who looked like Santa used a Dremel on a screw poking out of a two-by-four, while an equally big guy, who looked like Johnny Cash, lifted his palms to say what else you got? A lady with big hair and yellow clogs demo’d a vacuum for a family, sucking up packing peanuts from a plastic cylinder the size of a fifty-gallon drum. A few kids were playing right by the pliers, rolling a beach ball back and forth. A little girl dropped her juice box, and her mom grabbed a pack of shop towels to dry it up.

There I was in the middle of the commercial with a woman who’d cuffed herself for me and whose very presence was turning me into an unthinking animal.

Next to me, Rosie whispered, “What’s our escape strategy?”

To take you into the unisex bathroom and fuck you until the supports come off the walls. No. Wait. I looked down at her hands. The grooves were deep and red, and though I didn’t like the idea of her hurting, I did, sorta. A little. “I can’t believe you did that, you vixen.”

She snorted. “Teach me about screws and nuts, boss. The bigger, the better.”

I’ll show you screws. And I’ll show you nuts. Awww, fuck. I shifted my thighs a little because my erection was pushing against my zipper. Keeping my body positioned away from the throngs of people, I glanced side to side and took her cuffed hands in mine. Her smile was so fucking contagious that pretty soon we were standing there having a totally wordless conversation next to the hammers. Because I wanted her. Fuck yes, I wanted her. “I want you cuffed, I want you free, I want you every single goddamned way,” I said near her ear as I chose a small pair of pliers with a blunted end instead of a sharpened one. I wanted to hurt her, but there was only one tool I’d ever use to do it.

Rosie swallowed hard. “What are you going to do about it?”

I studied her and edged her up against the display racks, and she tugged on my belt loops with her fingers. A lock of her hair got caught on the claw end of a hammer, and I pulled it free. “You’ve got no fucking idea how sexy you are.”

She slid her lips together. “Neither do you,” she added as she pressed back into my thighs with her hips.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Knowing I wouldn’t have to wait much longer, I forced myself to step away, pliers in hand. “Come with me,” I told her and headed for the empty back corner of the store.

24

Rosie

He took me down an aisle full of doors and windows, which opened and closed in display frames. The farther we went down the aisle, the fewer and fewer people there were around us, until it was nobody but us, the sound of our footsteps, and the music from the PA system. It was even a little darker back there, because half the fluorescents above were switched off to save energy. It was like a little quiet corner with just us, amid all the hardware store chaos. With my bound hands in his, his massive girthy fingers enormous in comparison to mine, he pulled me to him. Our bodies collided, and I gasped a little, which made him groan. He looked back over his shoulder and then opened a big door—a white one, no windows, brass lock. He yanked me inside the little display foyer, closing it behind him, and then locked the deadbolt.

We were in a little fort almost, a makeshift space between the huge shelves. It was no bigger than a broom closet, and the only light was what came through between the slats. Even the music playing over the speaker system was quieter back here. But I could still hear it. Collective Soul’s “December.”

“Remember when this song came out?” I asked. The lyrics transported me back twenty years, to me in his Blazer, to the summer when we worked together as lifeguards. I remembered stealing glances at his legs as he drove and his red shorts along his tan line. It hit me as it had once and again that I’d been gawking over him for decades, without letting myself feel a thing.

But now I was feeling it. Like Uma Thurman in that wild scene in Pulp Fiction, he had my heart pounding. Every breath near him felt like my first.

“Fuck yes, I do,” he said. “I remember driving you around while you sang at the top of your lungs.”

We listened to the chorus in silence for a second. “So dirty. I didn’t even realize it then.”

He groaned again. “I fucking did.”

He was possessive here, not so polite like he’d tried to be out in public. He drew my hands up above me slightly and worked the pliers between my skin and the zip ties. He was gentle, but it made me hiss—they were that tight. He froze, watching me close. “You okay?”

I winced. “Totally!”

Without taking his eyes off of mine, he snipped one tie, and my hand came free. The blood rushed back into my fingers, and I flexed my hand into a fist a few times.

“Better?”

“Much.” I brought my free hand up to the back of his neck. It was a rather yummy combination of sensations—the pins and needles of my circulation returning and the soft prickles of his short hair under my fingertips. I shifted the chain of his necklace, just an inch back and forth.

“I like it in here.” I glanced up. “Like a secret hideout.”

He nodded and took my other wrist, working the metal between my skin and the plastic. He snipped the second tie free, and both fell to the concrete floor with a soft clatter.

“I kind of want you to tie me up, though,” I whispered.

“I definitely will,” Max said gruffly. His strong hands moved around behind my ass, and he hoisted me up on the shelf behind me. “But not right now. Not yet.” My ass was only half on the shelf, and I turned to make sure I wasn’t going to collide with anything. Where I sat was empty—behind me, it looked like there were refrigerator boxes or ovens. It smelled like lumber and paint and him, the very distinctive smell of Max’s cologne, and his skin. As he parted my legs with his body, I knew that another smell was also getting mixed up in there—the smell of the two of us together inside me. My favorite, favorite, favorite.

“I want to fuck you here—and everywhere.”

“We could,” I whispered back. “Why not?”

He eyed me closely, and his fingers dug into me a little bit more firmly. “You’re a screamer, though. Fucking noisy as hell.”

I shoved him a little. That was ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. “I am not.”

“Fuck yes, you are,” he said, smiling so hard I saw the very rare right dimple. “Max, Max, Max, please, please, please. Turned up to eleven.”

“No way,” I whispered as he brought his lips to mine so they were touching without actually being a kiss. One of his hands moved up my waist and gripped me hard. We locked eyes, challenging each other to take the first step. “Are we going to have sex in Home Depot?” I whispered.

He got this cocky fuck yeah look in his eye and undid his belt. “Got a problem with that?”

“None,” I told him and hung on tight.

The shelf was just high enough to keep me at the perfect height—lower than a kitchen counter, higher than a bed. He shoved my dress aside and gripped my tattoo. “That makes me fucking crazy,” he growled as he pushed into me. “Makes me want to go with you to see you get tatted up somewhere else.”

I pressed my lips to his shirt to force myself to be silent. “Yeah? Like what?”

“Like my fucking palm print on your ass.” To show me what he meant, he gripped my right butt cheek with his huge palm, and he did it hard. Hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to make me see it in my mind’s eye. He gave me a spank on top of it. “You drive me crazy,” he whispered into my ear. His breath was hot, his words were heavy and dirty and rude.

Quiet, Rosie. Quiet. I focused on the feeling, I focused on the noise of the store. On the sting on my tush. More than any of it, I focused on him and his body and the way we fit so perfectly together. “Crazy good or crazy bad?”

He didn’t answer that either, but he drove into me so hard he took me right off the shelf. Max scooped me up into his arms, and then, like we were in a movie, like gravity didn’t matter at all, he took me standing, my back against the hard metal posts of the huge solid shelves.

“Crazy good. Like every motherfucking thing about you.”

* * *

Home Depot was lovely in the afterglow. At the paint counter, we stood side by side, hip to waist, the warmth of his body seeping through his jeans and my thin dress to mine. He’d come inside me once more, and I felt a warmth in my panties, a hot trickle as he spilled from me.

Goodness.

I tried to ground myself on what was real, tangible, and familiar. Underneath the little see-through pad for signing credit card receipts was an advertisement featuring a dad painting a nursery. In my dreamy not-there state, I replaced him with Max on a ladder, with Cupcake watching from below, as he dipped a brush into a big bucket of light pink paint, tenderly painting every wall, making everything perfect for…

Kablewy!

I cleared my throat. I didn’t even feel like I was on the same planet as everybody else. I felt like I was one of my little snail girls, sailing away on her hot air balloon. Still, though, real life. I focused on it as best as I could, on the fact that my toes were a little cold from the air conditioning. On the fact that my whole body was pleasantly sore. On the way Max now stood closer to me than he ever had before, when we were just friends. I looked up at him, and a little bit of dog fur on his shoulder caught my eye. I reached up and brushed it off. “Any word from the vet?”

Max shook his head. “Nope. But want to know a secret?”

We didn’t really have secrets. We finished each other’s sentences, and we were each other’s emergency contacts. I knew what he was going to say before he said it. It was written all over his face and his cell phone wallpaper, which was Cupcake in my arms. “You want to keep her?”

He blinked solemnly. “So fucking badly.”

I dragged my eyes from yet another nursery photo, this one with blue paint and a toddler in a walking thingy, also with a big, beefy dad on a ladder, smiling—how did anybody get anything done in this place? “We should probably try to get Cupcake and Julia acquainted. If you’re planning on staying, that is,” I added, coming up on my tiptoes and tracing the edge of the signing mat with my finger.

“Oh, yeah,” Max said, his eyes right on mine. “I’m staying.”

Butterflies had nothing on that feeling in my stomach. It was a school of a hundred thousand fish, swimming in different directions, or maybe those tiny starlings that fly in a solid mass. “For good?”

Max held my stare. He opened his mouth, about to speak…

Which was when the paint man thumped the counter and boomed, “What can I do you for?”

25

Max

As we left the parking lot, I did something I’d never done before. I reached across the seat and put my hand on her inner thigh, like dudes in trucks had been doing with their girls since the first time a dude owned a truck. For a second, she just stared at my hand, with her lips slightly parted. I gripped her tighter, her bare leg under my palm, so fucking soft and silky. Mine, all fucking mine, I told her with my hand. I pulled on her thigh a little to show her what I wanted, that even though I was touching her, she was still way too far away. She got the message and unbuckled her belt, scooting over to the middle, where she buckled in again. I was living in a country song, and it was the most awesome thing ever.

We drove home like that, and I took the old King’s Highway—the long scenic route. It wound through the forest; I took the curves slow and held her close. I kept one hand on the wheel and one hand on her the whole fucking way. I’d driven that road a million times in my life, but it had never looked so clear or so right. I’d never been aware of how fucking beautiful it was. How beautiful life could be.

It was because of her. Because for the first time, things were starting to make sense. My place in everything made sense. She made sense of the world for me. She gave me somewhere to belong, something to protect. The meaning of life? I’d found it.

A chirp from her phone yanked me out of my haze. “Is it okay if I check it?” she asked, putting one of her hands to her purse but not reaching in.

“God, yeah, of course it is.”

“Okay, but don’t move,” she said, smiling. “Keep your hand there.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I told her and turned my eyes to the road, taking a gentle left deeper into the forest, so that she slid even closer on the bench seat.

But within a moment, she groaned, dropped her phone in her lap, and put her fingers to her eyebrows like she was getting a headache.

“Bad news?”

She dug her fingertips into her eyebrows hard. “This author, the one with the snails and the balloons? There’s a plot change. I need to do some work.”

She really was the fucking cutest. If there was one thing Rosie Madden hated, it was a change in plans. “And that’s a bad thing?”

“Obviously!” She was wide-eyed and incredulous. “I promised I’d be your foreman or right-hand woman or whatever. I promised I’d help. We never agreed for you to fix my falling-down house while I drew snails flying to the moon.”

I gave her leg an even more possessive squeeze. “All I want to do is take care of you. Starting right now.”

* * *

When we arrived back at her house and I parked my truck, I didn’t just offer my hand to help her out. As she dangled her feet out the driver’s side, I decided to go the whole nine yards and did yet another thing I’d never done: I put both my hands to her waist, pulled her close, and lifted her out of the cab.

“Oooh! I could get used to this,” she said as she blinked hard in the sun, looking up at me and shading her eyes with one hand.

“You better,” I said, with a pat on her ass.

A thumping from the dormer above the driveway distracted us both. It was Julia, whacking the glass with her tail. Rosie sighed and scrunched up her nose. “I feel bad. She used to roam around, and now all she has to do is stare at my books and try to pull apart my pillows. Hardly seems fair for a lady like her.”

“On the plus side, SPAM consumption is down by like eighty percent, right?”

Rosie lifted her shoulders. “Yeah, but it’s like those cat food ads say, Inside every cat is a hunter. I don’t feel like I’m being a good cat person. Lady. Whatever.”

I grabbed a bag of stuff from the truck bed and tucked the garbage disposal box under my arm. “Want to try to introduce them?”

Rosie sucked in a breath from between gritted teeth. “But we’ve had such a nice day.”

“Have to do it sometime.”

She grabbed my hand. “Do you think it’ll be awful?”

A small cluster of birds took off together as Julia swatted the glass, this time with her paw. My first thought was, Yeah, it’s gonna be terrible, but I didn’t want to rain on her parade. “Maybe, maybe not.” I unbolted the door and put down the stuff from the Depot on the counter. Rosie knelt down to open Cupcake’s crate and greet her. She wedged her tiny head between Rosie’s knees and wiggled her back end like crazy. Wiggled so hard that she flipped herself over, and she bit the air with a big smile.

“So good to seeeee youuuuu!” Rosie cooed softly. “Who’s a good girl? You’re a good girl!” Rosie lay down on the rug and let Cupcake launch the full-scale love attack. I pulled my phone from my pocket and grabbed a whole bunch of awesomely blurry shots.

As Rosie squealed and Cupcake tried to kiss the inside of her ears, I heard the thump of Julia jumping off her window perch one floor up. I considered how to do this—this interspecies territory negotiation or whatever. I actually wasn’t sure at all, so I opened up my phone and asked what Rosie called The Source of All Knowledge. “Okay, Google. How do you introduce a cat and a dog?”

A whole bunch of different ideas came back, but the one on top, the one bolded and in bigger font, seemed the most reasonable, “Instead of having them meet face-to-face, consider introducing an object or toy to each other. If your cat has a favorite toy, let the dog sniff that, and vice versa. It’s a good first step.”

While Rosie made Cupcake’s arms dance around like a puppet’s, I dug through Julia’s toy box. “Which one of these does she play with the most?” I asked. In my hands were a whole array of mangled stuffed mice. It was like a recast horror-film version of Watership Down.

Rosie rolled up to sitting, still with Cupcake in her lap. “The one that’s missing its face.” I held up a possible contender. “No, the other one.” I held up the double-amputee, faceless, skinless shell of a stuffed mouse. Rosie snapped. “That’s the fellow.”

I held it out for Cupcake to have a sniff. “What do you think of that?” I asked.

“It’s okay, right? That’s Julia. Juuuuulia,” Rosie explained, like Cupcake might pick up on English any moment.

Cupcake took a tentative sniff, her shiny black nose wiggling but the rest of her holding stock-still.

Until she let loose with a small, wet, and very violent sneeze.

Rosie dissolved into giggles, scooping her up in her arms and nuzzling the top of her head. “My thoughts exactly,” she whispered, with a kiss to Cupcake’s blondish fur.

I left the disfigured mouse there and grabbed a long-armed monkey in striped socks, no bigger than a stalk of celery, to take up to Julia. Even in the few days we’d had her, Cupcake had already unstuffed one arm and was working on its tail. Definitely one of her favorites.

Rosie raised Cupcake’s paw. “Ever in your favor, so on and so forth.”

Up the steps I went, two at a time. In front of Rosie’s bedroom door, I put my hand on the doorknob and braced for some quick defensive moves. “Hang on to Cupcake. Just in case,” I hollered down the steps.

“On it!” Rosie called back.

I cracked my neck side to side, braced for disaster, and made my entrance. As I opened the door, Julia tried to make another mad-dash carpet-fiber-wrecking escape. I was too quick for her, though, and she ground to a stop inches from the door with her claws extended into the carpet. She let out low rawwwwwwwwwr of protest and then turned her back on me. She sashayed off toward a basket of clean laundry and ran her shoulder along it, making her fur ripple through the holes in the plastic.

“Listen,” I said as calmly as I could, “I’m going to show you something.” I palmed the little monkey behind my back. I sat down on the edge of the bed, to let Julia come to me. She slowly stalked the perimeter of the room, eventually circling around to the bed as if by accident. She walked back and forth along the bed skirt, and I placed the monkey at my feet.

“That belongs to a dog. I don’t think you’ve ever met a dog.”

She looked at it, leaned in slightly, and jerked her head back, and then made another pass at the bed skirt.

Her reaction reminded me a little of Rosie’s reaction to expired dairy—“Oh my God, how can it be whatever date already!”—but unlike Rosie encountering spoiled milk, Julia was on the defensive. One step at time, I figured, and reached out for the monkey.

However.

At that moment, I heard the staccato patters of a very small creature moving very quickly up the steps, followed immediately by Rosie running up the steps, too, and whisper-yelling, “Cupcake! Cupcake!”

I didn’t panic at first because I was sure I’d closed the door, but then it became very clear—as Cupcake burst in like someone walking into a surprise party—that I hadn’t. The shit was officially about to hit the fan. Cupcake galloped toward Julia in pure canine joy. Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!

Julia raised the hair on her spine, arched into a half circle, and hissed. How dare you defile my personal bubble, you savage.

Uh-oh.

“It’s all good,” I told Julia. “Seriously. Everything is fine.”

It wasn’t. Like a very small-scale version of a lion stalking a tiny deer, Julia backed Cupcake up against the laundry basket and puffed up her fur so she looked twice as big.

Cupcake flattened her ears and slinked back, Julia began hissing, even louder now, arching her back up like a Halloween decoration. Rosie made a lunge to break them up, but instinctively, I put myself between them. There was no fucking way I was letting Julia sink her claws into my dog or my girlfriend. I scooped Cupcake out of harm’s way, and Rosie grabbed her from me.

And then Julia became airborne.

She hung in suspended animation somehow, legs out like a starfish, furious in the eyes, wild and insane.

The door slammed shut, and Julia made contact. Her claws went straight in, like ten fishing hooks, spread out along my arm. It was like I’d been shot or something—I didn’t feel any pain, only total astonishment. I stared at her claws, sunk deep into my arm, and thought, Holy fucking shit. There is a cat dangling from my body.

“You okay?” Rosie squeaked from outside.

Now, I felt the pain. “Totally!” I said, trying so hard not to let my voice crack with the agony. “You go downstairs. She can probably smell your fear.”

Which Rosie answered with a frustrated, “Grrrrrrr!”

When I was sure Rosie was gone, and gritting my teeth through the pain, I disengaged one claw after another. For a brief and horrible second, Julia swung from me, attached by a single toenail, and I thought I might pass out. I finally understood how those guys felt who got nabbed by a stray hook when they were out fly fishing. Shock. Total fucking shock. But at last, she dropped down onto the bed, eyeing me…and licking small droplets of my blood from her claws.

Yet at that moment, it wasn’t the flesh wounds that shocked me. Or the fact that I finally understood why Rosie’s grandma had named her cat after a tyrant. Or that possibly I’d just given her the taste for human blood, and we were all fucked. Nope. Only one thing mattered then.

I’d thought of Rosie as my girlfriend.

Holy, holy fuck.

26

Rosie

“Oh my God,” I squealed, setting down Cupcake and rushing to help Max. On his arm were ten growing droplets of blood, but he was smiling so hard that it stopped me in my tracks.

“What?” I asked, looking down to see if maybe my dress had gotten caught on my panties and I was giving him an accidental show. Or if, I don’t know, my breasts had somehow fallen out of my bra. He really was smiling that hard. But no, again, everything was in place. It reminded me of the smile he’d had when he saw me naked, I remembered. Only this one was much bigger. “Why are you smiling like that? You’re bleeding! A lot!”

He raked the hand on his non-injured side through his hair and kept smiling as he looked down at the floor. “Nothing. Seriously.” He tried to swallow his smile, but it was totally stuck on his face. He smiled with me a lot, but never like this. “Flesh wounds. I’m good.”

I guided him over to the sink and ran some warm water from the sprayer hose on his massive forearm. Small trickles of blood turned the bottom of the sink briefly pink, before they swirled down the drain. I grabbed a wad of paper towel and blotted at the distinctly claw-shaped marks. “Well done, Google. Nailed it.”

He cleared his throat. He looked me up and down. He was smiling so hard, there were shimmers in his eyes. Like happiness tears. “Could’ve been worse.”

“Are you okay? Are you concussed? Did you fall down? I heard some thumping. You’re sure you’re all right?”

“Oh, yeah.” He dabbed at his puncture wounds with the paper towel. “Never better in my life.”

I had to admit, that smile looked beautiful on him. It was like for the first time, I was seeing the very center of him—unfiltered, no tough-guy exterior. Just pure, shimmering happiness.

It almost didn’t matter to me that I had no idea why. Because seeing him happy made my heart soar.

“You go do your thing, kitten,” Max said. “I’ll work on the disposal.”

27

Max

The plumbing was circa who-the-fuck-knows, from back when indoor plumbing was still just an experiment. I put the back end of a penlight in my mouth and wedged my head between a spray bottle of something green and an aerosol can of oven cleaner. The pipe work was a fucking free-for-all, like a Tetris of pipes. I maneuvered my hand between them to get to the shut-off valve at the back of the cabinet. The knobs were stuck, like they had thread lock all over them.

I pulled my wrench from my pocket and tried to get a grip on the connection, driving the heel of my hand into the handle, but no dice.

“Need help?” Rosie asked. At the sound of her voice, I instinctively lifted my head—like some bird hearing his mate call out for him. Unfortunately, I was also one inch away from a cast-iron pipe that a guy like Al Capone would’ve had as his weapon of choice, and I clocked myself on the forehead. “Fuck,” I said around the flashlight.

Rosie crouched down with her legs pressed together, giving me a perfect view of the V where her thighs met her panties. Yellow polka dots today. Pink bow, white trim. She’d let me pick them out. Christ. “You okay?” She looked legit worried—eyebrows furrowed, blinking hard.

“Never better.”

“Arm’s okay?”

I glanced at the patchwork of gauze and tape she’d stuck on me. “Perfect.”

She touched her hand to my knee and looked to be biting back a smile. “Got a little something there on your forehead, champ.”

I rubbed the spot where I clocked myself and saw a big smudge of something greasy and dark. Wet rust, probably. Hopefully. “All in a day’s work, ma’am.”

She rolled her eyes, but I could tell she fucking loved it. “Here, lemme just…” She reached in and grabbed some of the cleaning supplies. “You’re such a dude, Max. Just get right in there and fix it without cleaning it out first. So focused on the job, you don’t even try to make it easy for yourself.”

“I’ll show you focused on the job.” I shined the light at her cleavage.

She smacked my leg and laughed, and then grabbed a stack of dish towels from beside me. She reached up to put them on the counter, giving me yet another perfect view of the soft curve of the side of her breast, milk-white, untouched by the sun or some tattoo artist with the hots for her. That spot, and all the rest, mine, all mine.

I took hold of the shut-off valve knob, digging my fingers into the cracking red vinyl cover. Finally, it let me have a quarter turn. Then a half to the right. I tightened it closed and did the same to the cold-water line. I took the flashlight out of my mouth and placed it on my chest. “All right, beautiful. Give that faucet a try and see if it’s off.”

She stepped closer so her smooth, bare calf was brushing against my jeans. I couldn’t fucking resist and ran my fingertips up those soft, perfect thighs. Her knees buckled a little, and I felt my cock twitch, a physical and instantaneous response. She came up onto her tiptoes slightly to reach the faucet, because my legs were in the way. Above me, I heard the faucet handle move, and the water that had been in the pipes trickled out. “I think we’re good!” Rosie said.

I wasn’t so sure, though. From below me in the basement, I heard a rumbling, followed by a strange and ominous thumping. I still had one hand to the cold-water valve, and I felt it tremble.

“Max?” Rosie asked. “What is that noise…”

Noise wasn’t the word anymore. Imminent disaster was more the idea. There was a rumble and a bang and a weird burping sound. The vibrations in the pipe got more pronounced, and then with a hiss, the connections below the valves split open and sprayed me like I was Fletcher’s dog trying to grab the sprinkler.

I shut my eyes tight. Fucking plumbing. The worst.

I tried to sit up, but as I did, I whacked my head again—hard this time, hard enough to feel it rattle my molars.

Cupcake came racing in—I heard her collar jingle before I saw her. She leaped into my lap, giving me an accidental glancing blow to my balls. I made a sound like I’d just been, you know, kneed in the balls, and instinctively tried to curl into the fetal position. Cupcake took my agony as a hidden sign for playtime and put a paw directly in the center of my scrotum. Motherfuck it. Rosie, unconscious of the fact that I was in the midst of the most mind-numbing, logic-busting pain, just squealed and giggled, barely able to talk, “Max! Do something!”

I forced myself to ignore the pain in my balls and gave the shut-off valve my all. The motherfucking thing came right off in my hand and spewed a jet of water in my eye. The burping shifted to a rattling. It was like a volcano was about to blow. Though I couldn’t see it, I could hear it—the clatter, the sound of a geyser, and Rosie giggling hysterically, as the water shot through the pipes and sheared off the faucet.

* * *

By the time I got the water turned off in the basement, Rosie looked like she’d been in a wet T-shirt contest or in my personal dream version of Girls Gone Wild. Her makeup was smudged, and I could see the pink fabric of her bra straight through the white cotton of her top. I pulled off my T-shirt and stepped outside to wring it out in the sun. I hung it over a hedge to dry, and Rosie emerged, pressing a dish towel to her soaking wet curls.

“Well, that was fun!” she giggled. Cupcake trotted out, her coat shiny and spiky with the water. “What in the world happened?”

“I don’t know,” I said, wiping my eyes and laughing. “I disturbed the memory of Grandma Maryann or something.” I peeled the soaking wet gauze off my arm and wadded it up into a ball.

Rosie snorted and then did this thing where she mussed up her hair in a sexy-as-sin way. Half innocent, half vixen, pure Rosie. “She always said never to touch the plumbing. I think that was the tenth PS in the will, right after PS: The ants come every three years. Just deal with it.”

As I undid my soaking wet boots, I wondered exactly how many dudes in the history of guys trying to impress their girls had blown up pipes or set fire to stuff with shoddy wiring. Lots, I imagined. Millions. I sat on the front step and looked up at her as I took off my socks. “At least tell me you got your snail done.”

“Mostly!” she said, beaming. She turned and headed back inside. The fabric of her dress hugged her hips, and the lace of her panties made a ripple above her ass. She was totally fucking oblivious to what she was doing to me. “More or less!” Rosie added over her shoulder, still drying her curls. “I’ll send it back to the author to make sure she doesn’t want me to draw in some snacks or something.”

I followed her in, and we stood together in the soaking wet kitchen. The ceiling was dripping, and there were big puddles on the floorboards. It looked like the fire department had been here, except without the fire damage. Thank Jesus.

I went to the linen closet and got a whole stack of beach towels that I’d seen Rosie folding a few days earlier. They were old ones, bleached and faded. I handed her a stack and arranged a few on the floor to help soak up the flood. “So,” I told her as we wiped down the cabinets, “I think we should make the best of my total inability to install a garbage disposal.”

Her eyes twinkled. “Chicken salad out of chicken shit?”

“How about I take you out to dinner?”

“Oh, yes, please.” She smiled and reached up to run her fingers through my damp hair. “I could really go for a beer, a cheeseburger prepared completely at random, and a round of pool.”

But we were way past burgers at the Anchor Nurse now, and for one fleeting second, I imagined her grandma laughing, as if it had all been some grand plan to change things up. Matchmaker, matchmaker, blow up the plumbing and see what happens… “I mean out to dinner, for real.”

She inhaled sharply. “Like…a date?”

“Yeah,” I told her, letting myself feel her wet panties on my wet jeans. Christ all fucking mighty. “A date-date. Somewhere really nice. Let me wine and dine you. Let me do it up right.”

She broke the stare, and her eyes moved down to my hand, gripping her waist. “How nice?”

“Heels. A dress. I’ll treat you to something new to wear.” I snapped the edge of her thong. “What do you say?”

“Pfffft,” she said, grinning. “I’ve got something.”

“Just to be clear, I like you naked best.”

“Noted.” She pursed her lips. “Duly noted.”

I gave her a wink and then glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall, each hour a different species of bird. It was already three in the afternoon, and I figured she still some work to finish. “How about I take Cupcake, and I’ll go get cleaned up? We’ll pretend we haven’t been all over each other constantly. We’ll be upstanding and pretend we’re just starting.”

Rosie looked nervous, and I fucking loved it. “A date. We’re going on a date.” She gulped. “A date.”

“Our first date,” I said, and I gave her ass a possessive squeeze. “Pick you up at seven thirty.” I lifted her chin, my thumb to her jaw. “You’re sure you don’t want me to take you shopping? Give you some cash? I’d love to do it.”

But she shook her head, and her wet curls slid along her tanned shoulders. “Nope. I know just the thing.”

28

Rosie

Actually, I didn’t know just the thing. I’d looked him right in the eye and lied to his face because I didn’t have one single thing to wear. After he and Cupcake headed down my driveway, with her in her little hanging box, looking out the window with her ears perked up and him giving her head a little pat—shhh, shhh, shhh, ovaries—I put the wet towels out on the line to dry, so heavy that they made the trees on either side lean in. I pulled off my soaked sundress, hung it over the newel post, and ran upstairs. I opened my bedroom door and found Julia Caesar, wagging her tail a little differently than her normal question marks and S-shapes.

Was she happy? Did cats ever look happy? Had Henry Kissinger ever looked happy? I felt like I had feline face-blindness. I didn’t know happy from furious. This time her tail was flat on the floor, going side to side, and she was staring straight at me. I was no cat whisperer, but I slowly became certain that, for some reason, this was a really bad sign.

“Hello!” I chirped, like one of her petrified swallows on the gutter. “All yours.” I opened the door and stepped aside like I was a butler or something.

She moved her whiskers and dead-eyed me.

“Seriously!” I made a magician’s assistant ta-da! move with my hand. “Go forth and investigate!”

Tentatively, she stood up and placed one paw forward, letting it hover out in the air. She didn’t look at me but just waited. And waited.

“I’m not going to close it. Promise!” I did a two-armed ta-da. I was pretty sure I was overselling, but Julia wasn’t buying.

Then she made a sudden and lightning-fast yard-long dart. Once out of my room, she stopped on a dime in the hallway, raised her nose, made the question mark of her tail again, and thumped off down the stairs.

I plumbed the depths of my closet. Lots of sundresses, lots of leggings, lots of sweaters and boots for winter. But nothing that was even close to being special enough for my first date with Max. Nothing that would be good enough for fancy things like linen tablecloths and fancy drinks in equally fancy glasses—nothing that was new, free of memories, and that would just be his and his alone to take off me.

I slumped down on my bed, part of my leg warmed by the square of light coming in from the skylight above. As I thought about what to do, I heard a creak on the stairs. A very manly-sounding creak.

My heart leapt into my throat. “Is that you? Max?”

But it wasn’t. It was Julia, with footsteps like a grown man. She leapt up on the bed beside me, depressing the mattress slightly under her weight. Much to my surprise, she actually nuzzled the underside of my arm, and I petted her downy soft fur.

“What do you think?” I asked her.

She cleaned her face with her paws. It reminded me a whole lot of my gram putting cold cream on her cheeks.

Actually, I realized, Julia had a lot of Grandma-like qualities. I’d never thought about it before, but neither one of them tolerated bullshit, and they were both passionate about SPAM. Julia was much scarier than Gram, but still. There were hints. Julia glanced at me, and even her eyes had a touch of my grandma. So much so, in fact, that I heard Gram’s voice in my head. Some of her age-old, practical wisdom, tried-and-true. Time for a trip to Marshalls, honey. They won’t let you down.

29

Max

The Rose Marie was in dry dock, and she looked like a beached whale. Her normally wet and shiny sides were now dry, and the crackles in the paint looked like alligator skin parched by the sun. I put Cupcake on her leash, lifted her out of her travel box, and led her down to the jetty. But within a couple of steps, I felt the leash tighten, and I turned to see her digging her claws into the dock boards in a desperate attempt to pull me backward.

“Oh, shit.” I took a few long strides back to her and scooped her up. It hadn’t even occurred to me, but out here, she was surrounded on every side by the dreaded water that had almost swallowed her up whole. I kept her close and felt her trembling against my chest. I put a kiss to her bony head and scratched her ears as I carried her back to the parking lot.

The docks were empty, and anyway, I wasn’t about to leave Cupcake in the care of whomever. I considered some possible strategies—leaving her in the car while I showered and changed? Fuck no. Tying her to the fence? Fuck no, again. Her trembling had lessened, and she placed her tiny chin on my shoulder. I gave her a little kiss on the cheek which she answered with a big lick up my stubble and a full body wag that started in her tail and moved up her like a shiver.

I sat on the front fender of my truck and looked out at the houseboats, the Sunfish, the skiffs, and all the rest. There was a time when this place was it for me—the water, the shore, the freedom to up sticks and head out for different waters if I ever wanted to go. Now though, it was different. Now, it didn’t even really bother me that my whole house was in dry dock or that my life was basically upside down. It didn’t even annoy me that this little bitty dog I was holding might have an incurable fear of water. All my priorities had gotten reshuffled like a deck after a game of 52 Pickup. What used to matter didn’t anymore. What mattered now was something completely different than I’d ever allowed myself to hope for. Everything was new, because of her. She’d exploded a depth charge inside me, and I’d never be the same again. I adjusted the broken heart on my neck, tucking it under my shirt for safekeeping.

Since I couldn’t get to my stuff, I realized I was going to have to do some shopping myself. The thing was, though, usually I’d have asked Rosie for help on this. But that wasn’t an option.

Fletcher, on the other hand, was.

Even though he was all tatted up and spent most of his time in old T-shirts and jeans with holes now, I remembered him way back before the tats. The guy had style, always had. “Maybe we should go see Fletcher. Remember Fletcher?”

She looked at me, no recognition. She cocked her head, though, like she was thinking, Mmmmm. Maybe? Don’t know. Say more words.

“Remember…Captain?”

Cue the whole-body shimmy-and-shake.

* * *

Fletcher lived off the beach, in an old Cape-style shingle board house with a sun-bleached kayak leaning against one wall of the garage. When we pulled up, he was sitting out on his front porch with a beer, watching Captain attack an oscillating sprinkler in the middle of his yard. I could hardly hold Cupcake in my arms she was wriggling with so much excitement. Captain raised his dripping jowls from the sprinkler and perked up his ears. We were pretty far away, though, and clearly Captain didn’t know if we were good, bad, or the UPS man. The sprinkler kish-kish-kished back toward his face and sprayed him in the chest, but he didn’t budge. Cupcake made little marfs and meeps, huffing and puffing and trying to get out of my arms. I opened the front gate, closed it with my foot, and then let her go. The two of them charged toward each other like that beach reunion scene with Dudley Moore and What’s Her Name from Ten.

“Hey, man,” Fletcher said, raising his chin. “I was just thinking about you.”

He stood up, and we did the old familiar bro-hug we’d done a million times, all chest and shoulder pats. He took a second beer out of the six-pack by his chair and handed it to me. I popped off the top with my key and toasted his bottle. As I put my bottle to my mouth, he said, “Asked her to marry you yet?”

I almost shot beer straight out of my nose. But I knew what he was expecting me to say, because up until very, very recently it was what I would’ve said. I’m never getting married. Never fucking ever.

The silence, it said it all. As I lowered my beer, the mouth of the bottle hissed against my lips. Still, I didn’t say anything.

“Holy shit fire.” He watched me closely, eyebrows up. “It’s real.”

“It’s real,” I told him. “Tonight, I’m taking her on a date-date.”

Fletcher let out a whistle. He flipped my beer cap with one thumb, and it landed upside down in his hand, where he tightened his fist around it. “You sound like her, dude. Talking in doubles.” He flipped the lid again, smiling. “Starts with like-like, moves to date-date. Pretty soon you’ll be talking about love-love.”

He never minced words, never, and I might have dead-armed him a time or two over the years because of it. Except now, it was different. Because now he was exactly fucking right. So I just toasted him again, to say, Yeah. Hell yeah.

Fletcher ran his hand down his jaw. “Where you taking her?”

“Portland, for sure.” Out in the yard, Captain rolled onto his back while Cupcake stuck her butt up in the air and barked. “There’s a place on Fore Street. Fancy as hell.”

Fletcher’s eyebrows shot up as he swallowed hard. “You? Voluntarily going to a city where there are actual crowds of people?” He clicked his tongue. “Bringing out the big guns.”

“You know it. But I’ve got fuck-all to wear.”

He looked at my clothes, like, You’re goddamned right about that. “I can help you out. We’ll leave the dogs inside—turn on some Animal Planet.” He drained his beer. “But seriously, I call dibs on best man. Deal?” He raised his almost-empty bottle to me.

Best man. Me and Rosie, walking down an aisle. Holy fuck alive.

Real as a goddamned heart attack.

“Deal,” I said and toasted him again.

* * *

With Fletcher’s help, I decided on a pair of dark gray pants, a blue shirt, and a dark blue tie, which had this shimmery thing happening I thought Rosie would probably dig. Also, a new belt. The only thing they didn’t have was shoes.

“I’m good,” I told Fletcher as we headed for the car, and I stuck the receipt in my pocket.

“Dude. No. What are you going to wear, your fucking boots?” He lifted his hands like I’d just suggested, Christ, something unforgivable. Like putting vinyl siding on a historic house. Totally inappropriate.

He had a point. I was pretty much either shit-kickers for work or flip-flops for the beach, and nothing in between. “What size are you?” I asked him.

“Twelve and a half,” he answered as he unlocked his truck.

“Fucker. I’m a thirteen.”

From his pocket, his phone began to ring, and he checked the screen. “Oh, shit. I gotta take this. Go take a look at Marshalls. Brown, not black. Got it?” he said and put his phone to his ear.

That, at least, I could be trusted to do. Pretty much the only fashion rule I knew—make sure your pants match your belt. So I headed down the sidewalk, past an ice cream shop where a little girl was drawing on the windows with sticky fingers, and past a nail salon where an exhausted-looking pregnant woman was getting her toenails painted. It made the future spread out in front of me like a slide show. Our little girl, with ice cream. Making sure Rosie pampered herself when she was pregnant.

Christ. It was scary. It was a lot. And it was exactly what I never knew I’d been hoping for.

Just as I rounded the corner of the strip mall, I saw it, out of the corner of my eye. Orange-crush orange, convertible.

Rosie’s Bug. Parked right in front of Marshalls.

That little devil. I knew it. She’d lied to me. She didn’t have anything to wear, and now here she was buying something she couldn’t afford for a date she’d had no plans to go on.

I burst through the rolling doors, nearly colliding with a woman putting price tags on a huge stack of towels. I scanned the shoes for Rosie, but nothing. Scanned the women’s wear. Nothing there either. I was just heading back to pet supplies when I heard her laugh as she came out of the dressing room. We faced off across a rack of off-brand Crocs.

“Rosie.”

“Max!” She staggered back, knocking a very uncomfortable-looking display heel off of a stack of shoe boxes. “What are you doing here? Since when do you come to Marshalls?”

Draped over her arm was something red—and fancy. As soon as she saw me looking, she gathered it close to her body to try to hide it. I narrowed my eyes at her and tried to outmaneuver her around the shoes. “That for tonight?”

She blinked hard. “Nope.”

“Liar.” I circled a display of little boy’s tennis shoes. Fuck. I held out my finger, pointing at her, threatening almost. “My treat. Don’t argue.”

She burst into a big smile. “Don’t you dare,” she whispered. She circled clockwise, same as me, and hid whatever she was holding behind the shoe boxes. She was smiling so hard that I couldn’t help but smile, too. “I can buy my own clothes, Max. Especially for our first date.”

The words hit me like a bucket of warm water, but I would not let her saying things like our and date derail me. I refocused on her and went left and then juked right to try to fake her out. But she was too damned quick, and anyway, she knew all my moves, probably way before I’d even decided to make them.

Yeah, of course she could buy her own clothes. On a credit card, which was surely close to being maxed out. “That’s not how this is going to go,” I told her and tried to intercept her by the purses. She flip-flopped her way through them, and I picked up the pace to catch up to her. Her footsteps stopped suddenly, and I listened for her breathing. A lady holding a shiny silver purse grinned at me through the racks. I hadn’t noticed her before, but it seemed that she’d definitely noticed us.

“Please,” I mouthed to her.

She winked and mouthed back, “Behind the suitcases.” She drew a U in the air to show me which way to take.

“Thank you!” I mouthed and made an end run around them.

There I found her, crouched down behind a huge pink suitcase on wheels. She was on her tiptoes in the crouch, facing away from me, clueless that I’d gotten the jump on her. Thank God for strangers who still believe in romance. Because I had the advantage, I took it and gave myself a few seconds just to take her in. Her shorts had come down slightly so I could see the small of her back. Her bra strap had come down past her T-shirt, and her hair was swept off to one side so the curly sweet tendrils around her ear made delicate ringlets. I loved her in that moment, peeking over a half-priced Samsonite, more than ever before.

I took one silent step toward her and whispered, “Gotcha.” As she shot up to try to get away, I used both arms to pull her to me, her back to my stomach, my chin nestled against her ear. She giggled, a deep, sultry, tongue-biting giggle that made me pull her even closer. I felt her go slack against me, not so much fight in the little vixen anymore. She tipped her head slightly, and I kissed the spot just below her ear.

“No peeking,” she said as she turned around in my arms, hiding whatever she was holding behind my back. I could feel the edge of the hanger digging into me, and I wanted so fucking badly to turn my head to see what she had up her sleeve. But I also wanted her to listen to me, so I decided to give her what she wanted. For now.

“I’m not letting you leave this store without my paying for your stuff.” I kept her so close that I could feel the movement of her breasts with each breath.

“I can afford it. I mean that,” she said, stubborn as ever, proud as always.

“I know. But I’m no more going to let you pay than I’d let you take me out on our date. You get it? This is me, taking care of you. I told you, get used to it.”

Her expression softened in a way that fucking melted me. She arched her back and pressed herself against my body, and I let one hand move down to the very top of her ass. Still okay for public, but only just barely. “Okay, but no peeking,” she whispered.

So I nodded and closed my eyes. Reluctantly, I opened my arms to let her go. I could still feel the heat of her body against mine, so I was confident she was going to listen to me and she wasn’t going to make a break for it. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my wallet, feeling for the bill fold and opened it wide. “Take all the cash in there.”

“Max,” she growled.

“Don’t argue with me, Rose Marie Madden.” I took the cash out myself. I knew there was three hundred in there easy. “Everything I have is yours. So just take it. If that’s not enough, I’ll leave my card at the register. No peeking, but let me do this. Okay?”

It was a long time before she answered. I could feel her hesitating and thinking. Over the loudspeakers came The Cure’s “Love Song.” Like I was in a fucking catapult, I was flung back in time to the one time I’d ever danced with her. Senior prom. Her date was too drunk to stand. Mine was making out with some other guy. One of the best nights of my whole fucking life, and all because of that dance.

I wanted to tell her that and so much more. But standing in the middle of Marshalls, it wasn’t the right time. “Do you remember when we danced to this?” I asked.

“Yes.” She sounded almost choked up, same as I felt. “I loved that dance. So much.”

My heart busted right open. She remembered. Maybe she’d even known what I hadn’t had the balls to say. But now she knew, and she was right here on the roller coaster with me. She was everything I’d ever wanted and more. She was The Cure, and she was summer nights. She was all the good things rolled up into one.

I folded the bills in half and guessed at where her hand might be in the darkness. After a few seconds, her hand clasped around mine.

“Everything I have is yours, too,” she whispered and put a kiss on my cheek. Her sandals slapped softly on the linoleum as she walked away. I opened one eye, just a slit, and she was looking back over her shoulder as she went. Like she knew I’d peek and didn’t want to miss it.

“See you at seven thirty,” I said.

“Can’t wait.”

30

Rosie

I pampered myself like I hadn’t in ages. Manicure, pedicure, and even a sugar scrub in the shower. I dried my hair with a flat brush, taking special care with my big drum curling iron to get each curl perfect. By 6:30, I was totally ready and as nervous as I had ever been for any date in my whole entire life. I practiced walking up and down the steps in my heels and tottered around the still slightly damp kitchen. I checked my makeup six bazillion times and hemmed and hawed over my three bottles of perfume, contemplating if he was more a citrus or floral fan. But then I remembered there was something Max liked even better than any of my current perfumes and lotion. I kicked off my heels and knelt in front of my closet. In the mirror on the back of the door, I watched Julia Caesar watching me. When I turned my head to face her, she pretended she’d been watching the pillows.

Through the bottles, I dug. I wasn’t even sure that I still had what I was looking for, but maybe, I thought. Just maybe. I tossed aside half-empty, slightly sticky bottles of curl cream. I rummaged through slippery containers of anti-frizz serum. I sorted through old bottles of lotion that I hadn’t liked enough to finish but hadn’t disliked enough to throw away either. Then there, at the bottom, I found it.

Bath & Body Works. Freesia body spray.

It was so old that the label had faded, so vintage that the bottle shape itself seemed somehow out of date. Simple and un-chic. I unscrewed the top and prepared myself for a smell that was all wrong, changed over time. But lo and behold, it hadn’t changed at all. With one whiff, I was bowled over by nostalgia. Max driving me to high school, us driving around on summer nights. Me cheering him on at football games. Studying for chemistry tests together at the library. Max, always Max. The only one who had ever mattered. I spritzed my wrists and my neck with it and inhaled long and slowly, same way as Max used to when I’d wear it.

Perfect.

After I bundled everything back into the box, minus the body spray, I checked my phone and saw that only ten minutes had passed. So, I pulled another box from the closet and began to go through all my old jewelry. What I had wasn’t very expensive, except for a few nice things that I was always too worried about losing to wear. I dug out my oldest jewelry box and removed the top partition where I kept my rings and my bracelets. Underneath was a crazy mess of old necklaces, so tangled and so knotted that it would’ve taken me a week to undo them. I held them in my hand, a heavy mass of fine chains and searched…for my half of the broken heart.

I tried to place the last time I’d seen it. Years and years ago. I had searched for it, I remembered that, but I’d never been able to find it.

I couldn’t find it now either. It wasn’t anywhere in the tangle, and it wasn’t in any of my other little boxes of cheap things either. So I settled on a single pearl on a necklace that Gram had left me and matching earrings. Then I waited and waited, for what felt like an eternity, until I heard the rumble of Max’s truck coming down the drive. I stood and put on my heels and gave myself one more spritz of Freesia, this one between my breasts. I gave Julia Caesar a few fish-shaped treats and closed my bedroom door. I gripped the banister tight as I headed down the stairs, not because I was unsteady on my heels, but because I felt like it was the first moment of the rest of my life. With Max.

31

Max

I’d never been the type of guy who looked up at the sky and said Thank you, Jesus, but when Rosie opened the front door and I saw her all dressed up, I couldn’t fucking help it. Because Christ almighty, was she gorgeous—the dress was red and right above her knees. It fit her like it had been made for her. Sleeveless and with a low scooped neck that just showed off a hint of cleavage.

I put the truck in park. In one arm, I held Cupcake, and in the other, a bouquet of lilies, which were Rosie’s favorite. The ten steps from my truck to her felt like they took a goddamned eternity—the light was low, every millisecond a still frame I knew I’d never forget. There was wind in the trees, and it smelled like rain. She was standing in the doorway, with her hands clasped behind her back, so beautiful that I lost every single smooth line I had. “Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she answered.

“You look so beautiful,” I told her and gave her a kiss on her silk-soft cheek.

That’s when it hit me. The scent.

Ka-fucking-pow.

In one millisecond, I was sixteen years old again. I was standing at my locker talking to her. It was between biology and English. She was talking about a potluck her grandma was having. She was wearing a pink tank top with stars on it. I was there. It was happening all over again. Except, it was twenty years later, and it made no sense. It made me feel like I’d just taken a hit of weed and inhaled too long. “Holy shit, what is that?”

She blinked a few times like she was embarrassed. “Bath & Body Works. Freesia.”

“You used to wear that all the time.” Now I remembered getting snow cones on the beach with her and how the cherry syrup made her lips extra pretty.

“You always liked this one,” she said. I set Cupcake down inside, and she trotted over to the cereal bowl I’d filled with water.

I edged Rosie against the doorframe and inhaled again. “And I love it even more now.”

Her eyes glistened, and she smiled, almost shy. Speechless, maybe. “I’m so nervous, Max. I don’t know why I’m so nervous.” She held up her fingers, left hand, palm out, the way she might if she was looking at a ring—fuck me. Her hand trembled, every finger shaking, before she closed up her hand into a fist.

“So am I,” I told her. “But it’s a good kind of nervous, right?”

Rosie beamed and looked down at her shoes, red heels that were one part cute, nine parts bombshell. “Yeah. The best kind.” Between the smell of her perfume, the way she was looking at me, and just her, everything about her, I felt my desire welling up inside me, a solid thing, a real thing, right down in my soul.

I was the man for her. I fucking knew it; I believed it in the depths of my heart. I handed the lilies to her and closed the door behind me. “How about I put those in water, and we can get going?”

“I’ll find a vase.” She turned toward the kitchen. With every step, the edge of her skirt rippled, like petals or waves. Her hips swayed, the long, smooth curls of her hair bounced. She got a vase from the cabinet and put it in the sink, and she turned to me to smile as she turned on the faucet.

Of course, nothing happened at all. I’d turned the water off to the kitchen earlier. She braced herself against the edge of the sink and snickered. I watched her shoulders relax with the laughter, and I somehow knew she wasn’t nervous anymore. And neither was I.

“I’ll use the hose,” I told her, taking the vase from her hands and letting my fingers brush against hers. New nail polish. Red to match the dress. She couldn’t have been more gorgeous if she tried.

“Perfect,” she said, smiling so hard that her nostrils flared, and her eyes twinkled.

* * *

We pulled onto Boston Post Road, and I headed toward Portland. Fletcher was right—I hadn’t voluntarily gone to Portland in years. All those goddamned people, I couldn’t take it. But this was different. This was special. “Can I ask where we’re going?” Rosie asked. It was pretty hard to focus on the road, though, because she’d pushed her thighs together and had the fingers of one hand tucked in between, which made a shadow under her skirt, and that was just so fucking…

I refocused on driving. “You can ask, but I’m not going to tell you.”

“Mmm.” She played with the single pearl around her neck, pinching it between thumb and forefinger and running it back and forth along the delicate gold chain. “Okay. I’ll allow it.”

“Good girl.” I gave her thigh a squeeze—not quite a horse bite, but damned close, which made her gasp. I worked my fingers farther into that tight space between her legs, feeling the barest sheen of sweat. God bless summer. God fucking bless it. “I’ve got a surprise for you, though.”

“Oooh,” she said, squeezing her thighs tighter in anticipation and coming up on her tiptoes in her heels so that I got my hand even closer to where I needed so fucking badly for it to go. “I love surprises.”

Part of me wanted to pull the damned truck over right that second, skid to a stop on the gravel on the shoulder, and fucking ravage her right there. But she was too pretty to ruin…yet.

“Open the glove box,” I told her. She leaned forward, making a curtain of her hair between us. The ends tickled my forearm and passed over the top of her thigh, too. She knew the trick to the glove box without my telling her and turned the knob, jiggled it, whacked the door, and it popped open.

Inside, there they were. All the mixtapes I had.

“Oh. My. God,” she gasped as she pulled them out, one after the other, lining them up on her legs. “You kept them?” She picked up one that I’d made and traced her finger down over the plastic case, moving over the lines of my writing.

“We can play them on my state-of-the-art stereo.” I tapped the old tape deck in the dash.

She squealed. “I don’t even know where to… Oh, yes,” she said, picking up one that I’d made for her sixteenth birthday. “This one. I remember this one.”

Rosie took the old cassette out of its case and put it into the player, pushing it inside with her perfectly manicured cherry-red thumb. She hit the rewind button, and it made that noise, that high-pitched squeal I hadn’t heard for twenty years. She turned up the volume and grabbed my hand. Like that we blazed down the old Post Road, with its juts of granite and deep, dark parallel trees, while Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life” played so loud that the doors thumped. And nothing about that moment, not one fucking thing, felt semi-charmed at all.

32

Max

She looked up from the menu, one of those fancy-as-hell things on heavy cream-colored paper, typeface like something out of an ancient book, and a leather-backed holder. “Max, this is way too expensive.”

I put my napkin in my lap. “Tough.”

She leaned forward, showing off more cleavage, just enough to make me lose every thought I’d ever had. With one pretty finger, she pointed to the page. “The catch of the day doesn’t even have a price!” she whisper-hissed. “Could be highway robbery! Could be charging nineteen-a-pound for a lobster we could’ve caught ourselves with two milk crates and a sardine!”

The fact that she was uncomfortable at being spoiled just made me want to spoil her more, to get her to push those thighs together, to get her to blush all night. It all made me feel way cockier than usual, and I fucking loved it. “Tough.”

“Twelve dollars for a glass of wine!” she croaked, now like she’d discovered some treasonous national secret.

“Why not a bottle?”

She peered at the menu, flipping through the leather-bound pages. “Or I could go buy three boxes!”

“Listen,” I told her. “No more boxed wine for you, only the best.”

“It’s very economical! A very good glass-to-dollar ratio!”

I glared at her and made a zipper across my mouth.

Before she could protest about anything else—eleven dollars for a Dark and Stormy!—the waitress came by and took our drinks order. While Rosie was ordering a glass of “house white, whatever’s cheapest, no, seriously, I mean that.” I took her menu off her plate, stacking it on top of mine.

“Your job tonight is to spoil her,” I told the waitress as I handed over our menus. “She’ll try to convince you otherwise. Don’t listen.”

“Max!” Rosie huffed, with such exasperation that it made the flame on the candle flicker along the wax. I shook my head at her nice and slow to say, No, kitten. No more. I’m running this fucking show, and you’re gonna have to deal with it.

Her big, brown eyes got wide with fury. But I didn’t budge. No way. I had her, and I was gonna keep her. Spoil her rotten—it was my only job.

“All right, sir,” said the waitress, beaming as she hid the menus behind her back. “I will. And for you?”

“Scotch, neat. And you just bring us whatever the chef would send out if he were on the most important date of his life.”

Rosie let out an adorable squeak, and I felt her leg press against mine underneath the crisp white tablecloth. It was the first sign of surrender, and I reached under the table to put my hand to her thigh.

When the waitress had walked away, Rosie pressed her eyebrows together and looked at me like I was a stranger, the same way she’d looked at the substitute postman. Her hand slipped under the tablecloth to join mine. “I didn’t know you liked scotch.”

“There’s a lot of stuff you don’t know about me,” I told her.

She tsk’d. “Baloney.”

But I held her gaze. “I’m not kidding you, beautiful. Especially one big thing that nobody else on the planet knows.”

“Whaaaaat?” She shook her head, like I had to be making stuff up. “Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure you’ve told me,” she said. “I know you’ve got an irrational phobia of jellyfish. I know how you feel about grapefruit. If it’s got to do with Max Doyle, I know it.”

I shifted my hand away from her inner thigh to knit her fingers in mine on top of her leg. “You don’t know this.”

33

Rosie

My jaw dropped open. It was like I was stuck, one of those people in a viral video mannequin challenge—frozen absolutely solid, with a little crab-stuffed pastry halfway to my mouth. What he’d said made no sense to me at all. It was like word salad. Though I had heard the words, “I have an inheritance from my uncle,” it made about as much sense as if he had said Radiator peanut butter frosting jack-o-lantern purée. “Wait. What?”

“A million, give or take,” he said.

Dishwasher manila folder chocolate macaroon. The what? The what?

A flake of pastry landed on my plate. Still, I just gaped at him. I think I’d forgotten to blink for a while because my eyes suddenly felt dry and huge. How could that be? How could Max have a secret inheritance? Impossible! I’d watched him haggle with a guy at the lumberyard over the price of pressure-treated posts like he was a Bahamian fishmonger trying to get the wholesale rate on monkfish. Ridiculous. Max might’ve not been as broke as I was, but he didn’t have money-money. By any stretch of the imagination, we were no longer talking about three hundred bucks in his wallet at all times. We were definitely talking money-money. “Your uncle was totally bananas.” I tucked the pastry into my mouth before I said something I might regret. Because his uncle really was absolutely flipping bananas. Eight eggs short of a dozen, minimum. No hope of a soufflé. None.

Max nodded. “Totally, but he’d only ever made two investments in his life. Costco and Apple.”

My mouth dropped open again. “Is this real? Am I dreaming?”

He smoothed his napkin, but he absolutely was not laughing. He was smiling though, really smiling. And it was that smile, that sincere happiness, that made me finally understand this wasn’t some huge joke. I’d gotten to know him better and better over the past two weeks. That happiness was him. He was being honest.

It was true.

“I can’t believe you never told me!” I gripped the side of the table. “You little stinker! And why in God’s name have you been living on that houseboat all these years when you could’ve—I don’t know—bought a mansion and been driving a Range Rover while you collected huge chrome-faced watches and wintered in Turks and Caicos?”

“Because I’m not that guy. Why would I want anything more than what I have right here, right now?”

“Can’t imagine!” I chewed furiously. “Because Turks and Caicos sounds awesome! You’d look so sexy in a Range Rover!” I could see it now. Totally some sort of cologne ad.

“I’m serious, Rosie. Until last week, I thought I had everything I needed. Now I know it for sure.”

“Stop,” I said as a blush crept up from my chest, to my throat, to my cheeks.

“Never.” Max winked and took a sip of his scotch. “I’m not kidding. I mean that. It’s you, or it’s nobody.”

I tried to find the words, but they were just…gone. I had nothing, absolutely zippo. I mindlessly put another crab puff into my mouth and let myself get lost in those eyes and the way he held his hand in mine. That secret proved that Max was just as I’d imagined him. Never over the top, never bragging. Just Max. Million in the bank or no, he was the man he was. He was the man, I knew then, that I was falling for. Fast.

His fingers pressed into the back of my calf as his thumb ran over the very top of my shin. A light touch that just about made me dissolve in quivers. “Your turn for a secret.”

He began to spread a slightly too-cold curl of butter onto his piece of focaccia.

“I don’t think I have any secrets from you.” I watched the muscles of his forearm flex while he spread the butter. Goodness.

He pressed the knife into his bread and met my stare with his dreamy eyes. “None?”

I tried to think about it as I took a sip of my wine. He knew about Peter Rabbit. He knew I was utterly broke. He now probably also knew I snored a little. “I don’t think so.”

“Then tell me something I don’t know. Like…” He handed the buttered bread over to me. “Kids. What about kids?”

I shoved my own piece of focaccia in my mouth as fast as I could, far more out of surprise than anything else. Had he really just asked that? I could not possibly be sitting across from my Max, at a fancy-schmancy place in Portland, talking about kids.

“Too much?” He looked like he realized he might’ve unknowingly pushed a button.

I understood why he might have thought that—I flashed back to Loafers looking at my general reproductive organs area, the bastard—but this? This was completely different. Yes, it was from left field, it was a curveball, it was the pop fly into the stands. But it was also one of those very important things that we’d never talked about.

And that now we could.

Because we were there, we were at that point. We were staring into each other’s eyes on the edge of a huge, terrifying, wonderful abyss. There was nobody on the planet I’d rather have looked into the depths with than Max Doyle.

I swallowed my bread. I wiped my mouth with my napkin. “I want them more than anything in the world.”

It hung out there between us, the thing I never knew I wanted to know, but now wanted to know so, so much. There was a question unasked, and I knew I didn’t need to ask it. He felt it, without my saying a word. What about you?

“Yeah,” he said, moving his eyes up and down my body and squeezing my calf a little tighter. “Me too.”

* * *

Dinner was amazing. We talked and talked and laughed so hard my cheeks hurt. We remembered a million old moments. We talked first kisses and first times. And I talked about old crushes…

But Max didn’t. He leaned back in his chair as the waitress brought out another few tiny plates, one of them a very small cast-iron pan of baby shrimp and clams in a miniature paella that smelled so good I started to salivate as soon as she set it down.

“You know, I never really had crushes.” He straightened out his dessert spoon and lifted his eyes to meet mine. “Because I think it was always you.”

The paella platter sizzled between us. My heart felt like it was melting, like it was drizzling right down through me like raspberry sauce on a chocolate cake. “Really?”

He nodded. “I thought I was always just picky, but honestly, I think the one I wanted was right in front of me all those years. I had no idea at all.”

Max turned his attention away from me to the mini paella, putting some delicate scallops on my plate, next to some equally petite shrimp.

“Crazy, right?” he asked, mostly talking to the itty-bitty mussels and saffron rice.

“Not to me,” I said, taking my plate from him. “Not to me at all.”

For a long while, we stayed just like that, him gracefully eating his mussels with a tiny fork, while I chased a clam no bigger than a quarter around my plate. When I did manage to get the meat from the shell, it was worth it. Worth waiting for, worth working for, like all the surprising treats in life, maybe. I watched Max pick up a small cube of beef from a bright green and yummy-looking sauce.

“You’re still going to be hungry after this, aren’t you?” I asked, taking a piece of the beef, too.

He looked like he was going to play it cool, but then I gave him an eyebrow. A big arch of my left eyebrow to tell him, Things might’ve changed, but don’t you go changing, too.

“Fucking starving,” he grumbled softly. “I could eat a whole ham, right here. Like Julia.”

I couldn’t keep the snort down, so I didn’t even try. It was so loud that a prim-looking lady with chic white hair and a big turquoise necklace glanced at me, shocked. Her astonishment just made it so much funnier, but I pulled myself together, forced myself not to giggle and answered, “I’ve got an idea for after. Okay?”

Max nodded and looked me right in the eye. “I’ll never say no to you. Never.”

34

Max

She was driving my truck in that sexy-ass dress, and every single time she pressed the accelerator, her skirt rode up more. Fuck. Fuck.

“We better be going somewhere close because I’m like six seconds from turning on the hazard lights, yanking the emergency brake, and taking you outside to bend you over the fender.”

“Oooh! Sex in public! There’s another secret. I had no idea that was your jam.”

“Anything you want can be my jam,” I said, and I ran my finger up the edge of her panties, right on the soft edge of her pussy lips.

But she swatted my hand away. “Max! Be good. For two seconds. You can have your way with me however you want, but first…” She took a crazy sharp left, making the tires peal on the asphalt, and then a quick right. Then she skidded to a stop and threw the Chevy into park. She looked like heaven and always drove like she was driving getaway after a bank robbery. Goddamn it, how I love her.

Rosie held out her hands. “So?” I looked around. On the right side was a burger joint, on the left a liquor store. “I’ll get the burgers,” she said, taking the keys from the ignition. “You get the beer.”

This woman. Seriously. But it got even more ballbusting, more crazy-making, more dream-come-true. As she slid out of my truck, she showed me so much thigh that I felt myself starting to get hard. She gave me a coy look over the shoulder and pointed at the liquor store. “Don’t dawdle!”

“Just dealing with the aftermath of that dress,” I told her.

Which she answered with a shake of her hair, a pouting blown kiss, and a huge smile, before disappearing into the burger joint.

And after a few minutes, I was able to get out of the truck and hold up my end of the bargain, too.

* * *

Half an hour later, we were sitting on the hood of my truck, under the stars, drinking IPA, and finishing our cheeseburgers. She’d kicked off her heels, and they lay together on the sand below. Out in front of us was Smuggler’s Cove, a small, clear lagoon cut off from the world.

“This is heaven.” She lay back on the hood of the cab and ate some fries. She was even cute when she did that—not graceful, just adorable. Jammed them in there like it was going to be her very last meal.

I put the bag of fries and our beers between us. Better than heaven, really. Heaven on earth. I sat up and swallowed half my beer. I looked her up and down, and as my eyes slid up her thighs, I let my finger draw her skirt up, up, up until I could see the tattoo, which tonight had a lace strip from a bright pink thong over it. I hooked my finger over the lace and snapped it. And then started to unbutton my shirt.

She froze with her hand halfway to the fries. “Are you going to take me on the hood of your truck? Because that sounds amazing.”

“Not yet,” I said. My voice was deeper than usual, all that fucking desire making me sound like I’d just woken up. I tipped my head toward the still, quiet, pristine cove.

Rosie’s lips parted. “Please tell me you’re thinking what I’m thinking.” She pushed herself up onto her elbows. “Pleeeeeeease.”

I unbuttoned another button, and then another. She took hold of the tiny zipper on the side of her dress and revealed the fucking perfect curve of her hips and the side of her bra underneath.

“Starts with skinny and ends with dip?” she asked.

“Bingo.”

But before I could get one more button undone, before I could pin her down on the hood and kiss her like I wanted to, she’d slid off my truck. She shimmied out of that dress and sprinted for the lagoon in her lingerie, with sand spraying behind her.

I took off after her. I pulled my half-unbuttoned shirt over my head and stripped off everything else. She cannonballed off the edge of the lagoon, and I did the same right beside her. The bubbles off her skin shimmered in the moonlight. I had my eyes wide open, and the salt water stung, but I never took my eyes off of her, not once.

* * *

She played hard to get for a while, because she was a more graceful and faster swimmer than I’d ever be, but I caught her eventually. I laid her back in the water, supporting her ass with my hand so she was floating, like she was about to do the backstroke. Her left arm, she let drift out to her side. Her right, she used to hold on to my shoulders. I went for her left nipple first. The fucking salt water kicked the whole thing into overdrive—the sweetness of Rosie, the salt of the ocean. Totally one of those salted caramels she loved so much. Her fingers moved through my wet hair, and I watched her extend her toes in pleasure, right below the waterline.

“Please get inside me,” she said. “Please.”

I was deep into the nipple play, but I’d seen it coming. I shook my head into her left breast and pinched the right nipple between thumb and forefinger.

She gasped like she was outraged. “Max. Please.”

“Fuck, I love to hear you beg.” I put my hand gently to her sternum and pushed her down so the water lapped at the edges of her nipples. I watched the waterline creep up her cheeks, past her ears, and I knew the feeling of that—that sensory deprivation. When suddenly everything goes quiet and everything starts to make sense.

“Why not?” she said. She turned her head slightly so she could hear me.

“Because there is no way in hell I am going to do anything to hurt that pussy of yours, beautiful,” I told her. I held my breath and slipped underneath her, emerging on the other side, careful to be silent, not to make a single sound or splash. She was still facing away from me when I reemerged, and for a second, I got to take her in without her knowing I could see her. It was like what I’d done in Marshalls—and that fateful day on the roof.

I gave her a flat-handed splash, and she turned to face me, splashing me back. I scooped her up into my arms, newlywed-style at first, but then her legs wrapped around me automatically.

“But it would be so easy.” She slid her tongue up the curve of my ear, and she was damned dirty about it. “Just one little move of my hips.”

Tempting. So fucking tempting. But what I said, I meant. “I’m all for nature, but that pussy is sacred.” I gave her a thrust, but I didn’t enter her. “Got it?”

She snagged her top lip with her bottom teeth. “I love when you talk like that. All possessive.” She slipped her arms off of me and lay back into the water without unwrapping her legs from my hips. When she came back up, her hair was away from her face, and she had her bra in her hand.

In that moment, every fucking thing on earth was perfect. It was her, and it was me, and nothing else mattered. Nothing else would ever matter. So I took my chance, and I bit the bullet, and I said the words I never thought I’d say to anybody. It was heavy, and it was what I needed her to know. “I think you know this already, but I love you. So fucking much.”

She ran the backs of her fingertips down my cheek and brought her forehead to mine. She didn’t giggle, she didn’t smile. She didn’t tease. She kissed me, slow and sweet, and then whispered, “I love you, too.”

If my words had weight, hers had the power to fill a hole inside me that I never fucking knew was there.

I wasn’t sure how long we stayed tangled together like that. Whatever it was, it wasn’t long enough. But I needed her. I needed to be inside her, I needed her to feel just how much I meant what I’d said, and so slowly, I brought her back to the shore and carried her like a brand-new bride up the sand.

“You wanna go home?” I asked her.

She shook her head and smiled. She looked as sweet and innocent as I’d ever seen her. But innocent she most definitely was not. “I think we should stay here a little while longer.”

35

Rosie

The bed of Max’s truck was corrugated plastic, ridged like a tin roof, and still warm from the heat of the day. He laid me down and pulled my panties off me, yanking my legs past the end of the truck bed, bending my knees and drawing my body off the bed liner. He placed a line of kisses up my inner thigh and touched my clit with his fingertips. It made me arch my back, and I pressed my hands down to raise my hips up to him even closer.

“How do you want it?”

“You tell me.” I ran my hands up his arms, up those perfect muscles and back down again.

He shook his head. “I asked first. You want it sweet, or you want it dirty?”

We’d done sweet. We’d do sweet again. But right then, naked in the moonlight, there was only one thing I wanted. Max, unfiltered. Max, unstoppable. Max, the alpha. So I brought my lips to his ear, nipped the lobe, and whispered, “Dirty.”

He answered with a primal growl. “You better be damned sure.”

“Don’t be gentle.”

“Tell me you’re sure.”

One more nip. “I am.”

He dug his hands into the muscles of my ass, gave the right cheek a slap. “Then get on your knees.”

Hello. “Don’t treat me like your best friend. Not tonight.”

“Fuck no. But listen to what I told you. If it gets to be too much, you just stop me. I’ll listen. Probably.”

His eyes shimmered in the moonlight, and the droplets of salt water ran down over his abs—I had flashes of actual washboards in actual rivers.

When I didn’t answer and didn’t roll onto my side, he got wilder in the eyes. When I didn’t do as he’d asked after one second, two, three, he glared at me. Melted me from the inside out. “Get on your knees, beautiful. Show me that ass.” He twisted the edge of my panties around his finger, making the lace pull tight. He put the other hand to my hip and positioned me where he wanted me to be, getting me on all fours like a cat. I looked back over my shoulder at him as he put his foot on the fender and got into the bed, too. He stood above me like that, towering over me, and stroked his cock a few times. “You sure this is how you want it?”

“Yes,” I said, but the word was long and desperate, like a purr. Yessssss. He came down into a crouch and parted my ass cheeks, his thumb just brushing along my opening, enough to give me goose bumps all over. He rolled my panties halfway down my thighs and put his tongue inside me. I could feel his breath hot, warm, and sultry against the opening of my ass.

He watched me like that, and I watched him, too. His tongue felt so good that I started to crumple down into a ball, but he yanked me back up and shook his head; his stubble grazed the inside of my thighs. God, oh God, oh God. He entered me slowly with two fingers, taking his mouth away from my pussy. He found my G-spot immediately, and I felt it echo back through my clit, waves of pleasure pulsing on each side of me. Inside and outside and back again.

Still with his fingers inside me, he moved his tongue up my opening, and then…kept on going. I hissed as he licked me there, the place nobody ever had—the place I’d never even let myself imagine being tasted. It made me feel vulnerable and dirty and utterly…amazing.

“Max,” I gasped.

And he just went for me more greedily than ever.

“I want every goddamned inch of you to be mine,” he said. “Not just this body either.” He dug his fingers into my left ass cheek, and I heard him hiss, drawing a breath through his teeth.

“What else?” I said. I was actually panting for him, my own breathing jagged and exaggerated.

“Every moan, every writhe, every feeling you have, Rosie Madden. I want to put my name all over this body. I’m never, ever letting you go.” With one more lick of the valley between my ass cheeks, one more full-body shudder, he got up on his knees, pressed into me, and took me until I’d slid right up against his toolbox behind the cab. I grabbed the nearest thing at hand to hold on to—the handle of his toolbox.

Max’s thrusts slowed slightly, and he hooked his forearm around my hips to keep me as close as I could get. “I’m never gonna be able to touch that box again without thinking of this moment, you know that?”

I turned to watch him. So determined, so aggressive. So beautiful. “I don’t want you to think of anything but me, doesn’t matter when or where,” I managed to tell him between pants and moans and whines.

“Fuuuuuck.”

He was so deep it made my eyes roll back in my head, and I gripped the hand that was over my rose tattoo as hard as I could. Finger bones to knuckles and nothing sweet about it. Every drive got me closer, and he must’ve been able to feel that too because within just a few more pounds, he’d put his fingers to my clit again.

“Come for me,” he told, “Right now. Give me everything you’ve got.”

The command made me powerless against him. I was coming, and I was coming hard. My whole body was shaking, and I was going back down into a ball again. I couldn’t help it—it felt so good, so, so good. “Coming,” I panted.

“Good girl,” he said. “Such a good fucking girl.”

That. Oh my God, that. “Say it again.”

He laughed, or I think he did. I don’t know—I was falling headlong into the darkness in my mind, where everything was warm and soft and shimmering.

With the next thrust, he said, “Good…” Another. “Fucking…” And the third. “Girl…” Which was so hard and so powerful that my body gave in to him completely.

36

Max

I stayed buried inside her until I was sure she was back with me. She came like that, like she was out of her fucking mind, and it drove me absolutely wild. I held her close, the tip of my cock firm against her cervix, and one wave of contractions after another passed through her pussy and into my shaft. I made my mind drift away. I forced myself to stave off the orgasm. But I didn’t think about boats or pool or fucking clapboard shakes or any of that shit because there was no need. Just the memories of her were enough to suspend my thoughts and my urge, to put me in fucking stop-motion. Jackie Chan had nothing on that. One memory in particular made me think of the way she was when she came. The most scared and beautiful I’d ever seen her.

She and I had gone cliff jumping in Katahdin—dangerous as fuck but so much fun. It had been my birthday present, that jump, the thing she knew I’d always wanted to do but never got around to doing. Or maybe never had the balls to do without her beside me.

But she was gutsier than me, by far, at least until we got to the platform. We’d stood together on the board, all belted up. She wore black leggings, and I remembered pulling my eyes off her ass, forcing myself to look away from the way the harness and cords hugged her. I wasn’t allowed to look at her like I’d wanted to, so I hadn’t. But it was burned into my memory, the way she looked. I remembered a strip of her stomach being visible, because her tank top had gotten tangled up in the harness. We’d stood on the platform together, her with her back to the thousand-foot fall, facing me. I remembered her hands trembled, just like they did when she came. I remembered the afternoon light on her cheeks and how she was flushed—and petrified.

“You don’t have to do this,” I told her.

She gripped my hands harder. Her hair was messy because of her helmet, and I remembered she smelled sweet, like sunscreen.

“I want to. I told you I would,” she said, barely a whisper. She looked down at her toes and lifted them up just slightly. “But I just can’t. I can’t jump.”

It was, admittedly, scary as shit up there with nothing between us and a catastrophe on the rocks below but elastic bands and pure faith.

But if she didn’t want to do it, I wasn’t going to push her. I’d been about to pull her back from the edge when she took half a step backward. The heels of her shoes were off the platform. She hung on tight to my forearms. “I can do it if you let me go,” she’d whispered. “I can do it if you decide.”

It was as if the whole fucking universe stopped then. Just her and me and the clouds. “You sure?”

She’d swallowed and given me those wide, honest eyes. “Yes.” She edged back another quarter of an inch, and half her Converse were off the platform. She inched her hands down my forearms and linked her hands with mine, fingers hooked over fingers. It was the first time she’d ever held my hands. She let her body tip back, anchored against my weight.

“You ready?”

She answered with a few quick nods. In the sunshine, I remember seeing her pulse in her throat, that steady heartbeat that had slowly but surely become more important than my own.

There we were, hands clasped together, in the mother of all the trust-falls. “Count of three,” she whispered.

“Three,” I told her, gripping her tighter. The tighter I squeezed, the more natural it felt. It was like her fingers were meant to be between mine—a perfect fit.

“Two,” she said, shutting her eyes and taking a deep breath.

“You sure about this?” I said.

She’d flashed her eyes at me. “Max!” she’d gasped, laughing. “Q&A is over.”

“Like, sure-sure?” I’d asked, teasing her now, loving the feeling of how she trusted me—with her fucking life, right over the edge into the nothingness.

“Yes,” she said, with one more squeeze. “See you on the other side.”

“One and a half…”

One sure nod. One wrinkled-up nose and a giggle.

“One and a quarter…”

That’s when I let her go. For a suspended, strange, endless second, I held her eyes as she fell backward. It was the fucking title sequence of Mad Men, except it wasn’t Don Draper swiping at the sky—it was Rosie, my Rosie, falling from Mount Katahdin, leaving my arms. As she fell, her hands stayed open, like they were still reaching out for mine.

And I’d known it then, as strongly as I knew it now. I’d always loved her. I always would.

Just as she’d come back to me after that jump, she came back to me in the back of my truck. Her whimpers and moans changed to more regular breathing. Her grip on the toolbox loosened, and she relaxed into me.

I enveloped her body with mine and shifted her hair aside, kissing the nape of her neck, smelling her shampoo, that old-school perfume, the creamy softness of her skin.

“You good?” I asked her.

She nodded against my cheek and inhaled hard. “That was amazing. That’s the sort of orgasm that makes people believe in God, I think.”

Fuck. Every word she said made me fall for her more. I crisscrossed my arms in front of her and pulled my cock out of her pussy. “Noooooo,” she moaned. “Don’t do that.”

“I’d stay inside you always if I could,” I told her, “But first…” I helped her onto her back in the middle of the bed and made a pillow for her from my pants and shirt. Straddling her, I took my cock in my hand and adjusted my balls so they were just between her wet thighs—wetter than the ocean could have ever made her. Wet from inside. The best kind of wet there was.

I placed the head of my cock right on her tattoo, the tip pressing on the ink. In the moonlight, it was as clear as could be what I was telling her I wanted. To mark her, to claim her, to do all the primal shit there was. “Oh my gosh,” she gasped. “Yes.”

“Yeah?” I stroked more roughly, pinching the head on the outstroke and gripping the base as I returned. With one hand, she cupped my balls, and with the other, she dipped her fingers inside her and rubbed her wetness on my shaft.

“You look so sweet,” I told her as I pressed my head into one of the petals. “But you’re not.”

She bit her lip and shook her head. “Not with you.”

As we locked eyes, she took over for me. The change in pressure was fucking crazy-making. My roughness with my cock almost dulled my senses, but her soft, delicate, almost worshipful way of holding it made my balls tighten instantly, and I felt that telltale shiver going right up my spine.

She worked me slowly, patiently, and she didn’t rush. Her eyes stayed on my cock the whole time. I balanced the edge of her jaw on one of my fingers and made her look up at me. When our eyes met, it started to happen, and a drop of precum spilled from me onto her ink.

“That guy might have inked you, but I’m going to be the one to mark you.”

Rosie didn’t say a word. Every word that needed saying was in the way she was stroking me. Yes. And yours. And always.

After a few more strokes, she had me coming on her, a powerful few spurts that rushed out of me all over her perfect skin. My cum covered the green of the stem and leaves. But before the second wave came, I couldn’t handle it anymore. I took myself in my fist, put my head to her opening, and drove into her pussy. I felt my cum between our thighs as I spilled myself into her as deep as I could get.

When she had me like that, fucking spent, half hard inside her and still growling, she slid her palm between us, wetted her finger with the cum I’d left on the leaves and petals. She licked it as she watched me watching her.

What a fucking goddess. Athena and all the rest? They had nothing on her. Not one goddamned thing.

* * *

On the drive home, she fell asleep on my shoulder, with her arm looped through mine. I pulled into her driveway, where I always parked, and cut the lights. I ran my fingers lightly through her still-damp hair to try to wake her up, but she nestled against me tighter, her cheek against my shoulder. I turned off the engine and watched her for a while, caressing her forearm, trying to wake her up. “Rosie,” I whispered. “We’re home.”

Home. It wasn’t a word I thought of often. My boat wasn’t really home, never had been. It was a place to crash, but it wasn’t home. But her and this place and this world that meant so much…

I trailed my fingers along the inside of her forearm. Home. Absolutely. Home.

But still, she didn’t wake up. As quietly as I could, I opened my door and lifted her in my arms. “I’ve got you,” I told her as I pressed my door closed with my hip. This time, I wasn’t pissed with her for leaving the front door unlocked, because it made it easy to get inside. Cupcake’s head popped up from her crate, sleepy in the eyes and confused. I gave her a wink, and she gave me a wiggle, and then tucked herself back into her little nest.

Up the stairs, I carried Rosie, careful not to let her bare feet touch the banister, careful not to bump her shoulder against the wall. Julia was too sleepy to make a break for it and stayed where she was on the windowsill. I laid Rosie down on the bed, gently rolling her onto her side. She hadn’t zipped her dress up all the way, and it was easy to slip off of her. Speckles of sand clung to her thighs, and I brushed some off of her ankles, too. Her skin was a bit gritty with salt water, same as mine, and I wanted to go all out—draw her a bath, clean every inch of her until she was warm and pink and soft. But I didn’t, because she was perfect exactly as she was. I tucked her in and put Peter Rabbit under her left forearm.

As I did that, though, her eyes did flutter open.

“Go to sleep,” I told her. “Everything’s good.”

She smiled this sleepy, dreamy, perfect smile. “Love you,” she said as she closed her eyes and curled up in the sheets.

She’d said the same words earlier, but that had been like a cannon shot over my bow. That I love you was shock and awe. This was quieter and softer and easier to soak all the way into my heart. Four letters, the be-all and end-all. I’d said it to her, too, but not until then, with her curled up in bed—sleepy, damp-haired, and helpless—did I really get it. Love. Fucking life-changing, world-wrecking, happiness-making love. Love that made my body ache, love that made everything finally make sense. “I love you, too,” I told her and put a kiss on her cheek.

37

Max

I was having a nightmare about being suffocated by a sweater—like a crime-show hospital-bed mob hit, but way fluffier—when I realized it was actually Julia Caesar lying on my face. I picked her up and put her on my chest, where she sat with her head hanging down between her shoulders like a tiny, exhausted walrus.

I pulled a couple of pieces of cat hair off my tongue and ran my hand down the silky fur on her head and back. She pushed her bony head against my hand and adjusted her mouth over her underbite. With more force than was at all necessary, she kneaded her paws into my pecs. “Easy, tiger,” I whispered. She eased up about one percent.

It was late, I could tell that right away by the slant of the sun and also, of course, from the way Julia was giving me the eye. Breakfast. Sound familiar? Yes? So then make it for me.

But I wasn’t going anywhere, not yet, and I didn’t care if I was getting the stink-eye from a chubby apex predator. Only one thing mattered, now and always, and that was Rosie. Next to me, she was still tucked up in her adorable little ball. She was naked, and her hair was a perfect mess. With the lightest touch I could manage, being careful not to wake her, I smoothed the sheets over her and swept her bangs aside. I could’ve stayed in bed forever and watched her—she was painfully pretty, breathtakingly sweet. My Rosie.

Julia, though, she had no interest in loving gazes. Her plucks on my chest got more intense, and I felt the very tip of one of her claws scratch my skin. “Okay, okay,” I whispered to her. I slipped out of the sheets and pulled my boxers over my totally raging Rosie hard-on, made sure the horse was safely in the stall, and scooped some cat food out for Julia into her bowl. Julia stared at the vaguely fish-shaped pieces of vaguely fishy-smelling cat kibbles. Then looked up at me. You cannot comprehend the depths of how this offends me.

I shook my head at her. “No SPAM,” I whispered. She placed her paw to something that looked like a slightly squishy goldfish and dead-eyed me like she couldn’t imagine what she’d done to deserve this unending daily abuse. I flashed back to a meme I’d once seen, about a cat keeping a diary. Day 8,718 of my captivity. The human has attempted to feed me fish from a paper bag again. Their hunting skills are not improving.

I reached down and gave her a pat to make up for the cat food, and she gave me a somewhat muted purr. Then I cracked the window and lifted the screen for her as the swallows took off en masse.

Downstairs, Cupcake greeted me like I’d been gone for seven hundred years. She got so excited that she mistook the little kitchen rug that Rosie had put in front of the sink after the flood for a chew toy and yanked it around the kitchen like a big, multicolored mop. To distract her, I took a cookie from the bag and tossed it into the living room, and then stashed the rug on the top shelf of the pantry. I got the coffee ready and set up Rosie’s breakfast tray. While the water boiled, I looked out at the big yard. The sun was shining through the morning mist, and the birds were chirping. Julia was gulping down what might have been a whole bird—were those legs sticking out of her mouth?—but I didn’t look too close. Paradise was paradise; it was that simple. The place was really just gorgeous, hardly any spot in the world I liked better. I could almost imagine Cupcake trucking through the high grass, chasing dandelion fluff. But it’d only be safe to do that with a fence.

Like a fucking mirage, it came to me, hazy and dreamy in the morning mist. It danced up before me, plank by plank…

A white one, with points on the slats. Pure Americana. The vision of happiness. A picket fence.

But then my eyes fell on the For Sale sign next to the front walk. It swung in the light breeze, its red, white, and blue letters slightly faded from being used so often elsewhere before. The toast popped up from the toaster, and I wondered about how this was all going to play out. Would she want to stay here, I wondered, if she could? Or would she want someplace new, maybe even a place I built for her? With a detached studio, with a lot of land, right up against the woods? Or maybe on the shore. She loved the ocean, and I could imagine her there, working away, wandering around in the dunes, waving to me as she kept her sun hat from blowing away with her other hand.

I inhaled hard and blinked off the daydreams, spreading peanut butter on the hot toast.

The kettle boiled, and I poured it over the coffee grounds. Picket fences and seaside studios? I was getting ahead of myself, and I knew it. The fact was that before any of that, before I sank a single post and before I looked up plans about how to make kids’ jungle gyms, there was something I had to do first. A question I needed to ask. A huge fucking step that made cliff jumping off Katahdin look like a joke.

I was ready. But I couldn’t do it empty-handed.

* * *

The bank manager was flipping the sign on the door to OPEN when I walked up. Her name was Jeanie, and she’d been working at Truelove Bank and Trust for as long as I could remember. “Mr. Doyle!” she chirped and held the door open for me. She had a dusting of what looked like powdered sugar on the front of her black shirt. Her hair was a puff of frizzy red curls.

“Morning, Jeanie.”

“What can I do for you?” She led me into the bank and picked up a donut off a paper napkin on her desk. Another small blizzard of sugar fell softly over what was already there. “Donut?” She gestured to a small box of donuts from the grocery, stacked up in two tidy horizontal rows.

Normally, the answer would be a hell yes. I was a red-blooded Maine carpenter; I never said no to donuts. But today I was on a mission. “I’m good, thanks.” I pulled my keys from my pocket and chose the smallest one, which I held between thumb and forefinger. “I need to get into my safety deposit box.”

Jeanie’s eyes twinkled. She’d been the one who opened the box for me in the first place. She knew what it contained, and she paused with the donut halfway to her mouth. She knew what was in there because I’d shown her, and because she’d seen it on my mom, too. “Oh, Mr. Doyle…does that mean?”

My keys swung like a pendulum from the ring. “Yes, ma’am.”

Jeanie tucked the rest of the donut into her mouth and clapped, sending the powdered sugar twinkling into the morning sun.

38

Rosie

The proof was in the pudding: I was actually disappointed to see the breakfast tray, because it was where Max should have been. Compared to waking up next to him, breakfast in bed by myself was a down-and-out bummer.

I was in this thing, and I was in it deep. And I loved it.

Closing my eyes tight against the sunshine, I thought back to last night. All those I love yous had swirled around in my dreams. I hadn’t heard the words but seen them, like they’d been written in the sky. All night I dreamed of nothing but happy, delightful memories. Of him, me, and the lifetime of things we had already shared. But also, the many things I was still discovering—the way he made love, the secret sides, all the things below the surface. They lured me under like a penny shining at the bottom of the pool.

The smell of the freshly brewed coffee, though, was enough to pull me out of the pool that was Max. I rubbed my eyes and sat up against the headboard, sipping some still-warm coffee, pre-sugared and the color of khakis. Just like I liked it.

Julia Caesar looked up at me from the floor, and I patted the mattress. She snapped her head away and considered an outlet by the bookshelf. For some reason—maybe because I’d spent such a magical night and was waking up to yet another magical, sparkling morning—her response made a switch flip inside me. I’d just about had it with her cranky, unpredictable nonsense. I’d just about had it with this I-wasn’t-looking-at-you routine. So I leveled with her. “Listen, you old broad. Knock that off. Let me be your friend.”

Her big, gold eyes darted up at me, and she held my stare for one second, then two. A world record for us. It was like she’d understood me. Finally.

Because I talked dirty to her? Gave her some attitude? Got a little bitchy? No, it couldn’t be.

So I tried again. It didn’t seem right to be rude to her—she was too distinguished, too old, too crabby. I couldn’t be nasty to Henry Kissinger’s feline doppelganger, I just couldn’t. So again, I went for the friendly approach. “Who’s a good girl?”

She stared at the heating vent.

“Don’t be so cranky, you old battle-ax.”

She looked up at me with utter, wide-eyed adoration.

Holy smokes.

So I patted the mattress again. “Come on, you salty little hussy,” I whispered. Her tail came up in a curlicue, and she jumped up beside me. Her purrs made vibrations against my leg, like the buzzing of a phone. “Good girl,” I cooed, and the purring stopped.

Holy mother. Was this the answer? Had I cracked her code? Did Julia Caesar like…dirty talk? “Naughty little brat,” I whispered. She rolled onto her back in utter pleasure.

As I scratched her soft, slightly squishy belly, I thought back to my gram. I never, ever remembered her calling Julia anything particularly endearing. In fact, there’d been quite a bit of just ignore the old broad.

From my bedside table, I took my phone and snapped a photo of Julia licking her paws. I sent it to Max with the caption:

She likes dirty talk, Max. I called her a hussy, and she rolled over!

But he didn’t answer right away, or even after a few sips of coffee. I didn’t even get his yummy typing dots, and I wondered where he might be.

Please tell me you went to get donuts. I’d kill for a Boston cream.

That got an answer, after a moment. Which was:

Better than donuts. Promise.

Battery dying, fuck. Be there before you know it.

Just stay put.

I let out a purr that made Julia’s ears prick up. “Sorry. That wasn’t meant for you.” I let my phone plop down into the covers and lay back against the pillows. I took a slice of peanut butter toast and tore off a piece of crust for Julia. “He’s bringing me something better than donuts, you crotchety old queen,” I told her. “Can you believe it?”

Which she answered with a purr so deep and so happy, it vibrated the springs in the mattress.

Snuggled up in the sheets, I kept my coffee in my lap, clutched in both hands. I closed my eyes and listened for the sound of Max’s truck. Julia fell asleep in record time, filling the air with a faint and totally adorable snore. I was so comfy, and her snores were so mesmerizing, that I must have fallen asleep…because the next thing I knew, I’d spilled my coffee into my lap.

“Oh God,” I gasped and jumped up, sending Julia scampering for the windowsill and knocking over the bud vase with its freshly cut rose, too.

“Why, why, why,” I muttered, standing horrified as coffee dripped off my nightie onto the floor. I tried to soak up as much of it as possible with the napkin Max had left on the tray, but it didn’t make a dent. Holding the wet fabric in my hand, with creamy coffee dripping from between my fingers and spilling down my legs, I stepped out into the hallway to grab a spare towel from the linen closet.

But just as I did, I heard a snarl, a bark, a thump, and what sounded like a burglar downstairs.

I spun around and saw what I’d done.

I’d left the bedroom door wide open.

Uh-oh.

39

Max

Utter chaos was what I saw as I came down the driveway. Rosie was outside, in her nightie, but there was a big, brown mark on the front like something terrible had happened. Running around in circles at her feet, making a figure eight around the big old oak tree, was Cupcake. Her ears were straight up, and she was barking like crazy. My first thought was raccoon, but then my second thought was, in the daytime? I threw my truck into park and followed Rosie’s gaze. High in the oak, I saw Julia Caesar, clinging to a branch that was bowing dangerously under her weight. I honestly didn’t know what would happen if she fell. She wasn’t exactly a model of feline grace and beauty. Maybe it was just a question of physics—could a sphere right itself in midair?

“What happened!” I called out to Rosie as I slammed my truck door. “Did you get sick?”

Rosie cocked her head. “What!”

I pointed at her nightie, at the big, brown splotch that was over her lap.

“No! That’s coffee! There’s been a bit of drama!” she hollered over Cupcake’s yaps and barks and a weird monkey-like squeal that I’d only ever heard on Planet Earth.

“Clearly!” I hollered back.

Rosie made a move to grab Cupcake, but she was too quick, and Rosie was slow in her bare feet. Cupcake sprinted around the trunk and then put her two tiny front paws on the massive old oak—it was like an illustration Rosie did once of an ant looking up a chair leg. But Cupcake didn’t care how far away Julia was. There was a cat. In the tree. Which was a huge problem that everybody needed to know about.

I put two fingers in my mouth and let out a whistle, the whistle guys on the docks used, or like people would use to call a horse. For one brief instant, Cupcake’s yaps went quiet, and she stared at me, still with her feet on the tree. Her tail wagged slowly in the sunshine.

“Oh my God, you’re amazing,” Rosie gasped. “She hasn’t stopped barking since Julia got out of our room.”

Our room! Fuck me. But focus, Max. Focus. I crouched down and opened my arms wide. “Hey, little lady! Come to Daddy!”

As I said the word, Rosie squeaked and pressed her hand to her heart, like she was going to faint. But it had worked, and Cupcake charged for me, ears back, tail wagging, and scrunching herself up with full-body wiggles. I lifted Cupcake up in my arms, while she slathered my face with kisses. Before she remembered that the cat was still in the tree, I headed back into the house. Rosie trotted along beside me, her steps unsure on gravel, like she was walking over hot coals.

“Max! We can’t leave her in the tree!” She plucked along on her tiptoes and looked back at the big oak. “She’ll die out there! She’ll be eaten by bears or, or…” Rosie gasped, “…lured away by a stranger with the promise of a ham sandwich!”

“Don’t worry, beautiful,” I told her as I got both her and Cupcake safely inside the house and closed the door. I pulled out my phone, but it was stone dead. “Let me use your computer a second, okay?” I handed Cupcake over to her. Rosie bounced the dog in her arms like she was trying to burp her. In that moment, I totally understood why people say, Dogs are great practice for kids. Copy that, 100%. And sign me the fuck up.

“Computer is on my desk. Password is…” She trailed off and stared at me, mouth slightly open, blush lighting up her cheeks. I could tell she was embarrassed, by her quick blinks, but she didn’t look away. “All lowercase, one word.”

I lifted my eyebrow. “Which is?”

She answered, “maxmax.”

Fuck. Fuck.

* * *

While Rosie distracted Cupcake with her miniature stuffed hedgehog, ice cubes, slices of apple, and this adorable thing where she made a walking puppet with her index and middle finger, I opened up Rosie’s laptop and typed in maxmax.

On the home screen was a digitized version of the snails floating to the moon, with bits of popcorn falling from the basket, so fucking adorable that it damn near made me groan out loud. But somehow, I managed to keep that particular moment of total unmanliness at bay and opened up her browser. I typed, How do you get a cat out of a tree? into the search bar.

They suggested putting a ladder up or a plank. I glanced outside. Fuck, that’d be some ladder, never mind a plank. Same problem for the second option—try to shoo it away with a broom or a towel? I watched Julia bob precariously on her too-thin branch. She had to be thirty feet up. Towels and brooms weren’t gonna cut it either.

But then, option three. Google had done me a solid. There it was. I skimmed my eyes over the words to make sure I had the gist. It would be tricky, but it was worth a shot. “Hey, did your grandma use a cat carrier for Julia?” I asked Rosie.

She nodded as she walked her finger puppet up Cupcake’s tiny front leg, and Cupcake nibbled playfully on her knuckles. “In the closet. She actually really likes it. I find her in there after I’ve used the blender,” Rosie said. She stood up from her crouch. Under the very edge of her nightie, I saw a row of bruises on her thigh, from where I’d held on to her as I had my way with her.

Jesus.

I turned to look out at the tree again. The branch was still bobbing, curved almost in a semicircle. But there were parallel branches, almost even with her. It wouldn’t be easy, but it just might work. If there wasn’t enough rope in the barn, I could always run down to the docks. One way or another, we’d get her out of there. Even if I had to use a ham sandwich to do it.

Game on. Operation Rescue Julia was in full force. But just as I was closing up Rosie’s laptop, a new email message popped up in the corner as an alert. My eyes landed on it, just out of pure reflex, not because I wanted to snoop. I saw the words Ms. Madden and congratulations and your submission to our publishing house.

For a second, I stared in disbelief at the gray box. In my gut, I knew I shouldn’t click on it. I absolutely, under no circumstances, should be reading her emails. I was not that guy. But those words on the alert—a classic case of the moth to the flame. My finger moved on the mouse, and the arrow hovered over the message. I read the preview and reread it. Even from half a sentence, I knew this was big news. My heart was absolutely exploding with happiness for her, and I couldn’t help myself. With a single click, the message was on the screen.

Dear Ms. Madden,

Thank you for taking the time to submit your portfolio to us. Our editorial board has reviewed your work, and we would like to offer you a position as an in-house illustrator for Magnusson Publishing, as an associate illustrator for our children’s imprint, Gray Moose Books. Find the starting salary and benefits described on the following page. We look forward to meeting you next week.

Sincerely,

Samantha Poindexter

Acquiring Editor, Gray Moose Books

I wanted so badly to flip the computer around and tell her the news, to prove to her that what I’d always told her was true. That she was crazy fucking talented, and that one day, the world would see it, too. Now the world had seen it, and it was just sitting in her inbox for her to see, too. But I didn’t want to steal her thunder. I wanted her to have the same heart-bursting joy that I was having. I never wanted to take anything from her, especially not this. So with a few clicks, I marked the message as unread and closed up the windows to cover my tracks. She came back into the living room as I was putting her closed laptop on the coffee table. It took all my strength to keep the shit-eating grin off my face.

“Thanks, gorgeous,” I told her as I took the cat carrier from her, as well as a can of SPAM from the pantry, and headed outside.

40

Rosie

I was just biting into a ripe pear when my phone dinged to say I had a new email. I poked the home key with my slightly juicy fingertip, but it couldn’t read my print, so I wiped it off on my nightie and tried again. As my email opened, I saw all the words in a jumble and I froze mid-bite. I felt like I was trying to read backward or that what I was seeing wasn’t really English. It was word salad yet again. Over and over, I tried to make sense of what I was seeing as pear juice dribbled down my chin. A droplet landed on my toe, and Cupcake licked it off.

“Oh my God,” I said into the pear, still reading and rereading in disbelief. My first instinct was that the email had to be a mistake. It had to be an error. Or maybe there was some other Ms. Madden who’d gotten the job. It couldn’t possibly be me.

I looked at my email address and my name at the top of the note. No mistake. It was meant for me.

The job. I’d gotten the job.

The first rush of adrenaline hit me so hard I thought I might faint. I actually had to plant my hand on the counter to keep my knees from going out from under me. But right on the heels of that excited jolt was another realization. Life was not what it had been when I applied for the job. I looked out of my kitchen window and wiped the pear juice from my mouth.

Now, my life was with Max.

There was no question that asking him to go with me was absolutely ridiculous—as silly as asking a lion to go live in Antarctica or a polar bear to move to Cairo. He hated cities, and he always had. Once I’d dragged him to New York for a concert. I’d babbled on about MOMA and public transportation and Mexican candies in bodegas in Washington Heights. But it had sucked the lifeblood right out of him, like a dying trout on a hot dock. He hadn’t complained, but afterward, he was so clearly soul-drained I promised I’d never drag him to New York again.

New York, where my dream job was waiting.

What in the world was I going to do?

I watched him sling the rope up over a branch parallel to Julia, but it got stuck on a broken offshoot, and he had to yank it back down to try again.

A little paw scratched my leg. I looked down to see Cupcake, at attention. Hello. I’d like some, please!

She ogled the pear and pressed her paws together on the top of my foot. Smells really good!

I bit off a piece and let her sniff it. She jerked her head back at first, shocked by a brand-new smell. Then she licked it, tentatively, and took it from my fingers. She carried it over to the corner of the kitchen and dropped it on the wood.

Again, I looked out at Max as he gave the bundle of rope another lob over the branch. Missed again, and he pulled off his T-shirt to wipe the sweat from his face. The broken heart glinted in the sun.

Two weeks ago, I’d have known what to do. Now, I realized, I still did. But it wasn’t the same thing at all.

41

Max

Standing outside in the muggy heat, being eaten alive by mosquitos, I tried to lob the rope over the branch just above Julia, and I waited to hear Rosie squeal when she got the good news.

But she didn’t.

The loop on the rope got stuck on a branch, and I yanked it down to try again. Meanwhile, Julia made noises I’d never heard outside of a horror film. Minutes passed. The cicadas screeched. The clouds passed. I looked back at the house and saw Rosie through the kitchen window, washing her hands at the sink.

With every passing instant, I became more certain that she’d learned she’d gotten the job and that she wasn’t going to tell me.

She was going to pass up the job for us. She was going to give up the dream for me.

It was one of the things I loved most about her—loyal and stubborn. But this, this was so fucking different. This was the big dream. This was the thing she wished for when she blew out her candles.

I wouldn’t let her miss this chance.

At last, the goddamned rope made it over the branch, a thick and solid one just above where Julia was clinging on for dear life. I anchored the free end of the rope around the trunk and used a second piece to tie the door to the cat carrier open. I opened up the tin of SPAM and put it at the back of the carrier, and then I hoisted it up slowly toward Julia so I didn’t spook her. It was like a low-budget inverted Coast Guard rescue operation, except it wasn’t a human at the end of a basket in the water, it was a cat. So I was going to have to be patient, wait for the wind carry the scent of the SPAM to her, and let her addiction to nitrates do the rest. The wind shifted infinitesimally, and Julia turned toward the carrier and twitched her whiskers, but she was still hanging on to the branch so hard that bits of bark tumbled down like crumbs. I sat down on the bench under the magnolia and reached for my phone. I didn’t have it because it was inside on the counter, waiting to be charged. In its place, I felt the ring box.

Julia began the slow negotiation of turning herself around on the branch, one paw, one half inch at a time. I waited and waited. But still, Rosie didn’t squeal.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Julia made a flying leap into the cat carrier, and it swung in the air like a wrecking ball, but I felt like shit because Rosie still hadn’t said anything about the job. As I lowered the cat crate down, I indulged the delusion that maybe, just maybe, she didn’t know yet and she wasn’t keeping it from me. Because Rosie was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a liar. She was as honest as the day was long, and I just couldn’t let myself believe that she would keep this news from me, all for the sake of us. To me, she was more important than any of it. Even this feeling that had changed everything in my life.

Gently, I let the crate come to the ground and looked inside. Julia was gnashing huge mouthfuls of SPAM right out of the tin, like a wild and starving scavenger. I reached in to take it because by the looks of things, she’d already eaten my daily sodium allowance, and if I didn’t stop her, God only knew what would happen next. She’d shrivel up like a salted cod or something. As my hand entered the carrier, she hissed and bristled. But I wasn’t buying it. “Knock that shit off, Caesar,” I growled back at her. She froze with a piece of SPAM still clinging to her whiskers, looking at me in pure astonishment. Ears flat. Eyes wide.

With the carrier door closed, I made the seemingly endless trek to the house. One hundred yards to the moment of truth. I could see Rosie through the kitchen window, looking down at something. Her phone, I figured. But she didn’t look up and say, Max! I have the best news! She didn’t say anything at all. Instead, as I walked through the front door, my worry was confirmed: she looked like she’d just been caught with her hand in the cookie jar, and she dropped her phone into her apron pocket. “Oh, hi!” she said with an embarrassed blush. “You did it! My hero! I locked Cupcake in the bathroom with a soup bone. Coast is clear.”

Holy, holy shit. She was lying to my face. I knew it—I could feel it, like the temperature had changed. She knew, and she was going to pretend it hadn’t happened. I slid the can of SPAM across the island and glanced at the still-illuminated screen, visible through the fabric of her apron. “Everything good?”

Rosie blinked a few times and smiled her sweetest, most wholesome smile. “Yep! All good!”

Still, I told myself, it was possible that she didn’t know, just possible that she wasn’t looking me right in the eye and lying to me, so I didn’t jump to any conclusions yet. “Say, did you ever apply for that job at wherever it was?”

Her eyes moved up toward the ceiling. “Umm… ReadyMadeLogos.com?”

The screen on her phone went dark in her apron pocket. I noticed that now my phone was plugged in where hers had been earlier, next to the bananas. “No, at the publisher. Gray Moose.”

“Oh!” She made a don’t be ridiculous face. “No. I’d never have had a chance. I didn’t apply.”

“You had your portfolio all set.” I knew that for sure; we’d spent a whole afternoon going over illustrations of crickets that played their legs like violins and illustrations of Randy the Raisin, in his purple Converse, exploring the dust jungle under an old refrigerator. “I even proofread your cover letter.”

She swiped her hand through the air. “Yeah, but who needs the stress?” she said. “Not me!” The smile was a good one, but I could see that on the edges it was a little bit…forced. It wasn’t the easy-breezy toothpaste commercial smile she flashed at me all the time. This one was pained, like she’d had to hold it for someone to take a photo.

I gave her a long stare and waited, willing her to tell me. To come clean.

But still, she didn’t. Instead, she smoothed her hair and tightened her apron strings. “So, handsome. What do you want for lunch?”

Inside my chest, my heart fucking split in two. She was doing this for me, for us, standing in front of me, lying to my face and pretending everything was the same as it had been half an hour ago.

Which it was not. It most definitely was not. “I’m going to give the dock a call and see what’s up with my boat.” I woke up my phone and saw it had enough juice now to make a call. Without another word, I headed up to her bedroom to put Julia Caesar somewhere out of Cupcake’s line of sight.

“Max?” she asked as I made my way up the steps. I paused with my foot about to hit the tread where her ass was that first night. I turned and looked over my shoulder.

Now or never. Say it, beautiful. Don’t lie to me.

“You okay?” she asked. Her pretty painted nails sparkled against the dark wood of the newel post. She twisted her left foot back and forth on its tiptoe so that her flip-flop swished against the hardwood below. “Everything all right?”

Not all right. One thousand percent not all right. I would not let her give up her dreams for me—no fucking way. Never. She was bigger than this and bigger than me, and I wouldn’t make her choose. Never. “Yeah. I’m fine. It’s just the heat.”

* * *

Through my phone, Rich from the docks hollered, “Got some structural damage to the keel, son! Real pisser!”

I heard Rosie open the bedroom door, but I didn’t turn to face her. Instead, I grabbed my duffel from under the bed. It was a first-rate, class-A douchebag move, and I knew it. But I was too pissed to talk it over with her—too frustrated to be reasonable. I wanted to protect her future more than I wanted to put myself in the way of what she deserved to have. “Sounds good, Rich.”

“Son! I think there’s a problem with this line! I’ll say it again! Keel is fucked! Time to sell her for salvage!”

“Thanks for all the hard work. I knew you guys could get it sorted out.”

The door squeaked closed, and her soft footsteps came nearer. I turned away from her as I grabbed my socks from the bottom drawer. The mattress squeaked softly as she sat down on the bed.

My ear was full of the sound of Rich tapping the phone with his finger, and I thought it was going to bust my eardrum. I turned down the volume with a few presses of my thumb. “You hear me? Son? Not livable! Sell her for parts!”

“That’s less than I figured it would be,” I said and grabbed my boxers. “I’ll pay in cash. I know that’s easier for you guys.”

“What the hell’s going on here, son?” Rich boomed. “We having two different conversations? Someone splice this line? Christ! I’ll spell it out for you! Sierra! Alpha! Lima! Victor! Alpha!”

Before he could spell out salvage all the way, I told him, “Thanks, man, be there soon,” and I zipped up my duffel. I ended the call and put my phone into my jeans. I’d let her hear what I needed her to hear, and I steeled myself as I hoisted my duffel bag over my shoulder and turned to face her.

Rosie’s eyes were wide and stunned. “You’re…leaving?” She fidgeted with the edge of her nightie and blinked like she was fighting back a rush of tears. “Why are you leaving?”

“You’ve got stuff to do, and Julia can’t live with a dog.” I did a thing I never fucking did and actually shrugged. It was as douchebag as I could possibly get. I was one pair of loafers and some ladies socks away from being that guy Rosie had iced at the Anchor Nurse. Number one asshole. That was me.

“But, Max,” she said, standing slowly. “I don’t want you to leave.” She reached out and put her hand on my forearm. It was fucking electric. It was everything, it was every dream, it was every hope. It was everything I’d ever wanted, right in front of me.

But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t keep her moored to shore. I would be her friend, but I wouldn’t be her ball and chain. I wouldn’t do it to her, I would fucking not. But I couldn’t resist one last kiss on her cheek—one last sweet, perfect kiss, on the perfect face of the perfect woman. She smelled like heaven. She was heaven, in the flesh. “See you when I see you.”

I closed her bedroom door behind me and jogged down the steps, taking a last big step over a baby gate that Rosie had put up as an extra line of defense. Cupcake came up on two legs to greet me, whirling around in her adorably weird little dance. I scooped her up in one arm like a football, keeping her close. From the hook by the door, I grabbed her leash and her harness and snatched her hedgehog off the sofa. Without looking up at Rosie’s window, I packed up the truck. I put Cupcake in her basket, buckled her up, and started up the engine. I floored it down Rosie’s long driveway with my goddamned heart breaking in two, while U2 hit me with the death blow from the mixtape I’d made myself. “With or Without You.” Fucking Bono. Bastard.

42

Rosie

I was absolutely stunned. I listened to the gravel fly from under his wheels, and I sat down on the edge of my bed very, very slowly. I tried to focus on real things—the birds chirping, Julia’s purring, the texture of the piping on the edge of the mattress under the fitted sheet. But none of it seemed real. This had to be a nightmare. Max couldn’t have just left, without a word, without an explanation. In shock, I stared at the open, empty drawers of my dresser, at the place where his socks should have been and his boxers and his soft T-shirts. At the little square of space I’d cleared out for his boots and flip-flops. He was gone. He was really gone. I put my hand to my lips, which were trembling, but I was too stunned even to cry. What had I done? What had I said? How could this have happened?

With my knees to my chest, I curled into a ball on the side where he slept, pressing my nose into the place where his head had been, the place that still smelled like him. With my eyes closed and my face against the cotton, I tried to make sense of what had just happened, but I absolutely could not understand it. It was like I’d been watching a movie and had to run out of the theater to pee, making me miss that one important scene. I felt so lost, I felt so confused. One second, he was fine—texting me about something better than donuts, beaming at me as I stood in my nightie out in the yard, then sitting down with my computer to figure out how to save Julia. And then the next second, it was like everything had changed. Like he’d discovered something that…

Oh, no.

I sat up in bed and fumbled to get my phone out of the pocket in my apron. I opened up my mailbox. I scrolled past my daily pollen update and yet another sale from Zulily, why, oh why, and there I found it, the email, which had arrived at 11:02 a.m. I tried to pinpoint when Max had sat down to check on how to get Julia out of the tree. Or what time I’d woken up. Or anything at all. But being with Max was like being in an endless midsummer afternoon—time meant nothing when we were having such fun. An hour took a day. A day took a minute. Everything was jumbled up in a world of long stares and caresses. Time didn’t matter when we’d been so busy falling in love.

But if he’d seen the email before I had, if he knew about the job, and I hadn’t mentioned it…Shit. Shit.

I had to be sure. I needed proof. So I launched myself off the bed and hustled downstairs, with Julia thundering after me like a little buffalo. I grabbed my laptop from the coffee table and sat cross-legged on the couch. Julia assumed her position on the tattered sofa arm. I pecked at my keys to wake it up and then had to enter my password three times because I was so flustered. Maxmat, maxmak, mazmaz. Jesus! Finally, I got it right, and my desktop appeared, with a background photo I’d taken a few days ago of Max kissing Cupcake. I moved my cursor down to the dashboard and saw that unusually for me, all my browsers were closed. I never closed anything, ever. But now it was all tidy and shut. It was the first bit of proof that something must have happened to spook him—normally, he’d leave his stuff open next to mine so that my tabs would read, Which way do the spirals on a snail’s shell go? and How much does a raisin weigh? followed by Mitered bevels oak baseboard and Stihl power drill replacement battery.

But not today. Today, Chrome was closed up like a bad mussel in my proverbial questionable paella. Bad business. Very bad. Half to myself, half to Julia, I said, “Moment of truth.”

I held my breath and opened my browser, guiding my cursor to the History tab. The stupid beach ball waiting thingy spun at me for a while, and I pecked at some more keys. Finally, the list populated. At the top of the first column, I saw it:

How do you get a cat out of a tree?

Time stamp, 11:01 a.m.

My heart took a tumble through my chest. The timing was exactly right. But what had he seen? I pulled my phone from my pocket and sent myself an email. In the subject line, I typed: Please… In the body, I typed out my biggest fear. And then hit the little paper airplane.

A heartbeat later, my computer dinged. The ominous gray box popped up in the corner.

Please…don’t let this be what happened.

But it had.

43

Max

I drove to Fletcher’s, planning to lick my wounds while I watched World War II documentaries and drank Miller out of a can like a real man, but that’s not what happened. What happened, unfuckingfortunately, was this:

I got to Fletcher’s and didn’t explain anything when he opened the door, except grumbling, “Man cave.” I shouldered past him and dropped my bag in the front hallway without letting myself look at a photo that I knew was on the wall of Rosie and me, with Captain, on the beach from last summer. Christ. I’d headed straight down into the dark, posh basement with Cupcake and Captain, who were obviously so much in love that it made me want to man-cry and pretend it was an eyelash. Still, though, I kept my shit together and turned on the cable box. As if the cable gods set it up, the first thing I saw on the screen was Legends of the Fall. It sucked me in like a dinghy into a whirlpool, and before I knew it, it was an hour and a half later, and I was watching Brad Pitt confront that goddamned bear, with tears streaming down my face.

“Dude, you okay?” asked Fletcher from the top of the steps.

Christ. I pressed my T-shirt to my eyes. Awww, fuck it—there was such a thing as a bro code, and Fletcher was pretty good with that shit when it came down to it. “Legends of the Fall,” I said, my voice all dark and baritone, like I’d just woken up or been punched in the balls. “Bear scene.”

Fletcher groaned, and I heard what sounded like him thumping the drywall softly with his fist. “So, how are we gonna play this? I’ll pretend you got allergies, yeah?”

The bro code was totally intact. “Yeah, definitely.” I tried to hide my sniffle. Didn’t fucking work. Of course, even I knew the tears streaming down my cheeks had fuck-all to do with the bear or Brad Pitt. It was like my heart had been shredded, like I was in the middle of some ancient Greek goddamned catharsis. I felt like I was grieving for something I’d never known I had, but definitely didn’t have anymore.

Rose. Marie. Madden.

“Got it,” Fletcher said, and his steps creaked down the staircase.

He was a guy who took a few seconds to get the pulse of a situation before he made a move—and that’s exactly what he did. He looked at me and at the tearstains on my T-shirt. So I didn’t have to look at him through blurry, stinging eyes, I looked at Captain and Cupcake, snoring softly in a big, furry pile, her curled up in a ball inside him. Big spoon, little spoon…

Oh Christ. It was like Anthony had unleashed the beast inside me—the ugly-cry beast. I gritted my teeth and watched the credits roll. I tried to hide my sob with a cough.

“Whoa,” Fletcher said. “This about Rosie?”

I rubbed my face, spreading my tears over my stubble. “Maybe you should come back, dude. I gotta do some deep breathing or something.”

Fletcher eyed me for another long second and then shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere, man.” He sat down in the recliner next to mine. He paused the movie, mercifully sparing me from an orchestral reprise of the theme song, which I was pretty sure would have put me in the fetal position on the floor. As the room went silent, I felt like I could breathe again. Sort of. If not for all the snot.

“Take a minute.” He sounded like he was telling me to walk off an injury in flag football. He flipped over to the Sox game and pretended like everything was totally normal, totally cool. He grabbed a Kleenex from a box and handed it over without looking at me. I pressed my palms to my eyes so hard I saw flashes. While the Sox brought out their pinch hitter, Fletcher said, “If you need somewhere to stay…my house, your house, all that shit.”

“Thanks, man. I just…” I wiped my tears away with my thumb and forefinger. “I had to let her go. I don’t know what made me think it would ever work. If we’re talking leagues, she’s in the pros. I’m fucking around in intramurals.”

“You’ve always felt that way about her,” said Fletcher. “Since we were kids, you’ve been talking about her like she’s royalty.”

I dug my fingers into the muscles at the back of my neck and took some deep breaths. It was totally fucking true. There were women, and then there was her. No fucking wonder I was down here in the dark, weeping like a baby.

Suddenly, there was a very familiar rumble and an equally familiar squeak. My heart shot into my throat. I’d know that sound anywhere: it was her, in her Bug, lurching into a parking place, getaway style. I’d seen it a million times and gotten my coffee all over my crotch because of it more than once. Fletcher glanced at the window well on the far side of the man cave and then back at me. And then the doorbell started ringing, over and over again, like some midnight prank. I could imagine her doing it, holding her finger down on that button so that the first chime went on and on and on.

“I can try to cover for you, dude, but she’s seen your truck, and we both know she’s not leaving.”

Dinnnnnnnnnng-ding-ding-ding. “I see your truck, Max!” Rosie yelled. “You know I’m not leaving!”

“Called it,” Fletcher said as the catcher ran out from home to catch a pop fly by third.

“I need to talk to her. It’s good,” I said. I hurled myself off the recliner, grabbed one more Kleenex, and headed up to face her.

* * *

She was always beautiful, but when she walked on the shore, she was one of those sirens that would make a man beach his boat on rocks he’d always known were there. She pitched me a hundred different ideas—I could come with her, we could swap weekends, or even do every other weekend if I didn’t want to come to the city at all. People did long-distance all the time. But in spite of how fucking beautiful she was, and how logical all those plans were, I stood my ground. The reason wasn’t because I hated the goddamned city, but I wanted her to be able to fly free. She was wild like that, and I didn’t want to hold her back.

I took her in my arms as the waves hissed along the sand, over our toes. “This is your big moment. You need to be free to grab it.”

“I don’t want to be free from you,” she whispered. “I never want to be free from you, Max. These last two weeks…”

I untangled a tendril of hair from between her lips, caught on the sea breeze. “Best of my life. But listen now, beautiful. I mean it. You’ve been dreaming about this for forever. I’m not gonna stand here and complicate it. You go. I’ll be waiting.”

Now it was her turn for tears. They shimmered in the sunlight, and her blinks got quicker and more urgent. She glanced away from me, into the sand, and then she slipped her fingers into the pockets of my jeans.

For an instant, I felt like I was looking at the two of us with X-ray vision, because in that pocket, it was waiting for her. The ring. Only a few more inches and she’d find it. I’d never been a guy who believed in signs or coincidence or that anything was meant to be. But she’d made a romantic out of me, and I started thinking like I never had before. All this magic had started with a chance peek into a skylight, and at least once every day since, I’d looked up at the sky and thanked God that it had. She was the one who made me happy, fucking happy in my bones, for the first time ever. She was my epiphany. She was my hope.

So I left it to hope. If she found it, I’d ask her. If she didn’t? I’d wait.

Her hands were small, tiny compared to mine. The ring was in my left pocket. The fingers of her right hand moved down, down, down.

“I don’t want to lose you, Max.”

“You won’t.” One more inch, beautiful. Just a little more.

But her hands were too small, my pockets were too big. It wasn’t meant to be. So I pulled her to me, and I kissed her as hard as I’d ever kissed her. We stood there long enough to sink into the sand and until the tide started to come in over our feet. “You gotta go to New York, Rosie.”

“I’m terrified,” she said, so softly that I almost missed it. “I’m terrified I’ll fail. I’m terrified I’ll be fired. I’m terrified I won’t be good enough.”

How wrong she was, she’d never fucking know. “I get that. I do. But you have to try.” I tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. “Bite those stars, like your fireflies do. Do it for me. Just try, okay?”

Her lips trembled, and she slipped her arms around me, pushing her cheek to my chest. “Okay.”

44

Rosie

One week later, I stood in front of a badly warped full-length mirror in an Airbnb in Washington Heights—chili mango pops!—that Max had insisted on paying for. I’d picked it out myself—the location across town from Gray Moose, the neighbors didn’t speak English, and the maximum water pressure was equivalent to the dribble from a very old public water fountain. Yet it was quiet, clean, they allowed cats, and it was cheap, which was what made it bearable for me to let him foot the bill. The whole setup was adorably miniature—the stove was half-sized, the fridge just as small. European Lilliput chic. Even the mugs were tiny. The only thing that wasn’t miniature was the window, and the long red curtains that Julia swung from like King Kong, or like one of those guys on those extreme obstacle course game shows who get stuck halfway up the Velcro wall and can’t get down.

Even though it was morning, it was dim in there. My view was of a brick wall barely two feet away, and as far as I could tell, actual sunlight never touched the window panes. I turned on a lamp, and a cockroach skittered under the bed.

I resisted the very real urge to scream like a ninny and took a steadying breath. To the ever-growing list of things I needed to get, I added cockroach traps. Was that a thing? God, I hoped that was a thing.

I touched up my lipstick and tried to look confident, chic, and perfectly convinced that I deserved this job. I was exactly none of those things. I was nervous, petrified, and missing home and Max so much that it made my heart ache, burn, tighten up in my chest and stay that way for minutes on end. Like a charley horse from love.

Julia paused her endless attack of the drapes to study the radiator, which sounded like there was some industrious little mouse living inside it, knocking on the pipes from time to time. I checked my phone and saw a text from Max, wishing me good luck, followed by a selfie he’d taken with Cupcake.

Cue the heart pain. I actually had to press my hand to my chest.

But I lifted my chin and grabbed my umbrella and rain jacket. I debated whether or not to wear my galoshes—though they’d be good for this weather, they were dark green, smudged with Maine mud, and not exactly snappy, so I decided to stick with my heels. Sensible, black, profesh. To complete the illusion that I had any idea at all what I was doing, I rummaged through one of my suitcases and found an old shoulder bag I hadn’t used in years and years—it was a fancy thing, shiny patent leather with silver accents, far too fancy for Truelove. A Marshalls purchase, in fact. From my gram. The last time I’d used it was for a job interview at a different publisher’s, two years ago, which I didn’t get. I dusted off the edges, put my things inside it, and gave myself the final once-over. Then I gave Julia a pat, a treat, and a scratch between her ears and headed out the door.

I hit the down button at the elevator and waited. I tried to make a mental map of the city—I needed to go uptown, maybe. I thought—but it all meshed together in my mind. Streets became avenues, and I never knew if I was heading for higher numbers or lower ones. Everybody else seemed to know, like salmon with an instinctive understanding of a river, but not me. Put me on a street corner in Manhattan, and I was as confused as a dizzy hamster. Put me underground, and I was absolutely confounded.

The elevator door rumbled open. I took my spot in the back corner and checked my phone to decide how best to get to the train. Up? Down? Over? And why did Sixth Avenue have another name, why? One floor down, a tiny lady with a huge rolling shopping basket joined me. She didn’t look up, and she didn’t smile, and we both looked at the plastic floor with its raised circles as we rode down to the slightly grimy old lobby.

Out on the street, I dodged some muddy spray from a passing bus and headed for a corner deli to get at least something small to eat. The last thing I needed on my first day at work was my stomach growling so loud that it stopped conversation. But inside the deli, just like outside on the street, everybody else seemed to know what to do except for me. They all knew what counter to use, when to order, when to pay. For a while, I just hung back and tried to learn the ropes. As far as I could tell, there were no ropes, so I bit the bullet, stepped forward, and ordered a breakfast sandwich.

“You pay yet?” the guy behind the register asked. He had brown hair and a blond hairnet and a teardrop tattoo under his eye.

Lost salmon. Completely lost salmon. “No. Should I?”

“That’ll be ten.”

Somehow, I restrained myself from shrieking, Ten dollars for a sandwich! I tried to keep the outrage off my face, and I dug through my wallet for the money. Even this made me feel like I was awkward—everybody else was so quick with everything, and I felt people getting impatient behind me. And of course, I only had $9.10 to give him. Of course.

“Sorry…I’ve only got…” My blush was coming, and it was coming hot, fast, and embarrassing.

The man behind the counter glared at me and scratched his hairnet impatiently. My heart sank. “You just visiting?”

“No,” I said, “Job. New job. Today.” Oh, good job, Rosie. Very good. Single-word answers. So sophisticated. “Sorry.”

Slowly, his face transformed from stern and hard-set to soft-eyed and grinning. “I gotcha covered,” he said and reached right into the tip jar, grabbing a dollar. “You keep that dime for luck, sweetheart.”

“Thank you,” I told him as I took my sandwich from him, warm and delicious-smelling, wrapped in waxed paper. “So much.”

“Good luck at the job,” he added softly and warmly, and then turned his head away and bellowed a ferocious, “Next!”

I wolfed down the sandwich as I walked—it was amazing. The bagel itself was a religious experience, and whatever was happening with the eggs and the bacon, my God. I swam along with the business-casual salmon and wiped the crumbs from my mouth and the front of my blouse. I pulled out of the stream and stood by an abandoned shopfront, which, oddly, had an enormous display of dusty pool noodles in the window. I looked at my phone. Downtown. I needed to go downtown. I stared at the subway entrance. 168th Street Station, it said, followed by a blue A, a blue C and a red 1.

The subway was yet another undeniable reminder that I didn’t belong here and that everybody else was playing by a rule book I still hadn’t gotten to see. Not once in the few days I’d been in town had I actually put my subway card into the slot the right way on the first try. So again, I hung back and watched. They were like finely tuned machines, these New Yorkers. I watched a guy go through the turnstile as he put in his earbuds while drinking a smoothie, and he didn’t even look at the slot where he had to put it in. I watched a woman pushing a stroller of twins and FaceTiming at the same time zoom right on through. It was like driving to Boston. Everybody else knew all knew about the E-ZPass, and there I was in the cash only lane, counting my dimes and nickels.

But I could do this. I knew I could. I just knew it.

Chin up, I approached the turnstile. I took my card out. I put it in like I was positive it should be, took a step…and proceeded to slam my thighs into the locked bar.

I tried to back out, but there was a line forming behind me. I tried again and again and got nothing but sore thighs for all my attempts. Coming in the opposite direction, a smartly dressed guy in horn-rim glasses looked me in the eye. For an instant, I felt cowed and embarrassed. Just a small-town girl way out of her depth. Except, instead of brushing past me, though, he stopped. And smiled. And reached over the turnstile, flipped my card around—strip down and to the left!—and said, “That’s the way.”

I was so relieved that I took a moment to myself by the wall, next to a homeless man sitting on the ground with a clean, empty tuna can in front of him. He smiled at me, and I smiled at him, and I gave him the dime that I had in my pocket. “That’s honestly all I have.”

“Appreciate it,” he said and grinned.

Yes. I could do this. I was figuring it out. I might not be a Manhattan salmon yet, but I was learning to swim.

But I wouldn’t make the mistake of putting my subway card in my wallet, definitely not. It needed to be somewhere that I wouldn’t lose it and that I could get to it quickly. And so I opened up my bag to put my MTA card somewhere within easy reach—in the built-in coin pocket. I undid the tiny zipper, looked inside…and there it was.

The other half of the broken heart necklace.

I turned it over in my palm, and I was filled with butterflies again. All this time, all these years, that was where it had been. I ran my thumb over the smooth edges of the break with its hard corners. I grabbed my phone from my pocket and took a picture for Max.

Look what I found! Getting on the train. Xoxoxoxo

I fell in line with all the native Manhattan salmon, clutching the necklace in my fingers, feeling like maybe I really could do this after all.

45

Max

As I turned off my chop saw, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Wiping the sweat and the sawdust from my face, I gulped down some water and pulled it out to take a look. Even from the tiny thumbnail shot, hard to make out because of the sun glare, I could see what it was. The necklace—she’d found the goddamned necklace. I wiped my hand off on my jeans and unpinched my fingers over it to make it bigger, and that also showed me the soft, delicate, lovely skin of her hands. There, on the shiny silver plate, barely tarnished at all, were the letters that completed mine. I undid my necklace and put it on my phone screen, zooming in on the half in her hand to get them to be the same size.

Max & Rosie

Forever

Goddamn it, yes. That was it, exactly what I’d needed to see to cheer me up from missing her so much. I put my phone on my knee and refastened my necklace around my neck. I looked out into the yard and at the For Sale sign swinging in the breeze. I looked at the petunias she’d planted in the old wooden boxes I’d made for her grandma years ago. A million different colors, no rhyme or reason, just pure happiness in flowers.

I missed her so much that it made me feel sick.

Cupcake helped, though. I’d set up a makeshift pen for her in the shade of the magnolia, made of four metal garden stakes and some plastic fencing that came on a roll. She chased her fuzzy hedgehog around and then rolled in some drying magnolia petals. I reached down and gave her tummy a scratch. I stepped over the fencing and lay down in the grass with her. She climbed up on my chest and stood with her paws on my pecs, looking down at me.

“Hi,” I said and gave her a scratch under her collar.

But in my pocket, I felt my phone buzz again. At first, I thought it had to be Rosie, maybe even sending me a photo of her wearing the necklace. From the pattern of buzzes, though, I knew it was a phone call. I held it up with one hand, angling it against the glare. A local number, but not one I knew offhand. I hit speaker and answered the call.

“Mr. Doyle?” said a voice on the other end. I could almost place it, but not quite. Until she said, “This is Doris, at Truelove Veterinary.”

I looked at Cupcake. A yellow butterfly flew past, and she leapt off my chest to chase it. My heart started to go into free fall. Please tell me I forgot to pay my bill. Please tell me I left my credit card. Please fucking tell me that you’re only calling to check on her. Please, fucking please, don’t break my heart again…

“Doris. Don’t tell me…”

A series of barks in the background filled my ear, and then Doris said softly and sadly, “I think I’ve located Cupcake’s owners. I’m so sorry.”

* * *

When I walked into the vet, Doris looked up from the counter and frowned before placing her hand to her heart. “I thought for sure we were in the clear,” she said with a painful frown.

I would not fucking cry. I would be strong. I clutched Cupcake to me harder, and she cleaned the sweat off the edge of my collar. She smelled a whole lot like Fritos, and she was a little bit plumper than when I’d rescued her. But I knew this could happen; I knew it was an option. “What did they say?”

She sighed. “They’d left their dog with a house-sitter, so they don’t have many details. But they’re looking for a female Chihuahua mix, fawn.” Doris looked at Cupcake and nodded, as if confirming the description exactly. “They explained they’d let their chip registration lapse. Her name is Skittles.”

The fuck it was, I thought. “Skittles” was the name of a turtle or something. This dog wasn’t a Skittles. She was a Cupcake, no fucking doubt about it. My Cupcake. Rosie’s Cupcake. Our Cupcake.

But not for long. I blew out a long breath and closed my eyes. No crying, Max. No fucking crying. “All right,” I said, my voice all gravelly and hoarse.

“I’ll put you in the respite room,” Doris said quietly. “They said they’ll be here soon.

Doris led the way to a room at the end of the hallway that wasn’t an exam room, but a much friendlier, more welcoming room with a small sofa and calming photographs of gently babbling brooks and close-ups of flowers. I realized almost immediately this had to be where they put people to give them the really, really bad news. The room where the vet would say, Why don’t you sit down?

I did sit down, and Cupcake sat next to me on the plush, fancy, nicely upholstered bad-news couch. On the far side of the room was a framed poster that said, Heaven is full of animals.

God. Damn. I situated Cupcake in my lap, her paws to my upper thighs, her little tush near my knees. I felt like it was important to be brave for her so she wouldn’t be sad, too.

“It’s been awesome, cutie,” I said, with a lump in my throat the size of a fucking baseball. She cocked her head to one side. “So awesome.” She cocked her head again. “I’m sure they’ll take great care of you.”

Even if they don’t let you pick out your own cookies. Even if they won’t spoil you rotten every fucking minute. Even if they aren’t Rosie and me.

She flapped her paw out in the air and snagged my T-shirt with her toenail. I picked her up and bounced her at my shoulder, the same way Rosie had. Her hot stomach was warm against my chest and her paws even hotter. I pressed a kiss to the funny, warm, rough pad of her front foot and inhaled hard so I’d never forget. Some footsteps and voices approached from outside—a kid’s voice asking, “What if it isn’t her, Mommy?”

I could not handle this shit. I was a manly man, but this was the fucking limit. The room got blurry, the posters got hazy, and a tear tumbled down my cheek. Cupcake caught it with her tongue right as they opened the door. Doris couldn’t even look at me, and I noticed her nose was slightly red like she was about to burst into tears, too. “These are the Thompsons,” she said and let a family of three into the room. A little girl marched in first, every step making a tiny fart from her itty-bitty pink Crocs.

I couldn’t even look her, so I kept my eyes on Cupcake. I was going to be such a fucking goner after this. I’d go buy five gallons of mint chocolate chip, as much beer as I could find, and spend the next week wallowing in Fletcher’s basement watching Braveheart and sobbing 24/7. Fuck, fuck.

The little girl fart-stepped her way closer. She had thick glasses that made her eyes as big as a cartoon character’s. She wrinkled up her nose like she still couldn’t see quite right. She put one slightly dirty plump finger to her glasses frames and pushed them up her nose. This was it. I was a goner. This chubby kid was going to take my dog, and I was done with this horrible fucking world.

But then, very slowly, the little girl’s round and slightly sunburned face contorted itself into an agonized, cheek-pinching, eyebrow-rippling, nostril-dimpling sadness, and she shrieked at the top of her lungs, “That’s not Skittles, Mommy! That’s not Skittles!”

* * *

Skittles wasn’t lost either. She was a few towns away, at the pound in Scarborough, which meant that Cupcake was officially mine. Fuck. Yes. The family left the vet, with the bug-eyed girl fart-skipping and beaming. I didn’t even try to contain my smile as I filled out the adoption papers, and neither did Doris, who carried Cupcake around to meet everybody, from the vet techs to the resident cats. Weirdly, Cupcake had no problem with the cats at all.

“Say, Doris,” I said, scratching my cheek with the end of the pen. “About introducing dogs and cats. Got any tips?”

She considered Cupcake like she was measuring her for a dress or something. She gave her a nuzzle on the cheek. Cupcake closed her eyes and flattened her ears as she gave her a noisy smooch. “What’s the cat like?”

Dude, I didn’t want to be rude about it. Didn’t seem right, speaking ill of the…whatever she was. But I did want to know what to do if Rosie came back to me. When. Not if. Christ, not if. “Old. Scottish Fold, grumpy. Likes SPAM.”

Doris turned to me. “Julia?”

God bless life in a small town. “That’s her.”

Again, Doris considered Cupcake, pursing her lips and narrowing her eyes. “Have they

met?”

I filled in my phone number and started checking off the boxes. As the guardian of this animal, I promise to give her regular meals and fresh water every day. Check and check. “Yeah, it was a disaster. Julia ran up a tree, and I had to rescue her.”

“They met in the house?” Doris asked. “On Julia’s turf?”

I paused with the pen perched over the top of the next box, Do you promise to keep your animal current with vaccinations, heartworm preventative, Lyme vaccines, and routine bloodwork? “In the living room.”

Doris raised her shoulders, making the pandas on her scrubs dance up and down. “Probably best to try to get them to meet on neutral territory. Outside, maybe. That’s what I’d try.”

I signed my name and initialed a few lines and then reached across the counter. Cupcake squirmed in the air, kicking her legs and kissing the air as Doris handed her over. She put one paw on my shoulder and lowered her head as Doris gave her a pat.

“See you two for her next checkup,” Doris said, grinning, as she took the clipboard from the counter. Together, Cupcake and I headed out onto Main Street. I snapped a selfie of the two of us in front of a big plump wooden bear with a carved yellow bird on his head.

Guess who’s here to stay?

OMG!!! YAAAAAAY!!!!!

You good?

Yes! Just about to get to work. So happy about cupcakes

cup

OMG Autocorrect why

CUPCAKE!

Knock ’em dead, gorgeous.

Love you. So much.

Love you more.

My whole body ached with the words, but still, I stayed strong. I wouldn’t back down now. And anyway, in the meantime, however long it might be, I had a tiny Chihuahua to spoil senseless, starting now. “How should we celebrate, little lady?” I asked Cupcake as I carried her along. On my right, we passed a new storefront. Pepe’s Pet Emporium. The place looked expensive and fancy. Not at all the sort of place I’d have ever thought about checking out, until now. In the window was a crazy cute rhinestone collar, pink and gold sparkles everywhere. Doesn’t your pet deserve a personalized collar made from Swarovski crystal? Inquire within! said the handwritten sign.

“I think we should inquire,” I told Cupcake as she gave me a nice wet lick up my nostril to say, Inquire! Inquire!

As I opened the door to Pepe’s, the reflection of a different storefront was projected back at me in the perfectly clear glass. Red, white, and blue letters. The idea was so fucking obvious, I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to think of it. The perfect place to live. And something that we definitely needed to inquire about, too.

46

Rosie

The Gray Moose offices smelled like new paint and hazelnut coffee, but there was no talking at all. It was kind of disorienting—I’d expected something like a newsroom, maybe. People bustling around, sharing ideas, storyboards with sketches of smiling geckos, and princesses as small as peas. But that wasn’t how it was. It was silent like a library under the authority of a militantly introverted librarian. It was so quiet, in fact, that the noise of the air conditioning from the ceiling vents whirred like a white noise machine, by far the loudest thing in the place. At the front desk sat a chic-looking girl with straight-across bangs, like a Sixth Avenue Zooey Deschanel.

“Hello, can I help you?” she asked.

“I’m Rose Madden, I…”

“Oh!” She rose gracefully from her chair and extended an equally graceful, lean white hand. “So good to meet you. Rosie, isn’t it?”

I hoped to heavens that my palm wasn’t sweaty and gave her hand a shake. Her bangs were so straight and clean, it made me wonder if she’d just had them trimmed that morning. She could’ve been a ballerina, she was that pretty, that thin, that exotic. And with a matte fuchsia lip to die for, the type of thing I could never pull off, no matter how hard I tried. “I’m Emilia,” she said. “Let me take you back to meet Ms. Poindexter.”

She led me back into the offices, which were equally silent and quiet. There were desks where people should have been, but weren’t. Everything was immaculate, like an ad for office furniture. But there was nobody, and still no noise besides the air-conditioner wind.

It was weird. Very weird. But I didn’t have time to ask the chic Emilia about it before she opened the door of another corner office and said, “Sam, this is Rosie Madden.”

The woman gasped like I was her long-lost niece. “Darling! I totally forgot you were coming today! Where is my mind? So good to meet you!” She hopped up from her desk and held out her arms for a hug. She was as chic as Emilia, but in a very different way—lots of linen, short-cropped white hair, tawny skin. Absolutely beautiful.

After the hugs and fancy air kisses, I sat down in the comfy chair across from her big maple desk, like a farm kitchen table from another time. “Can I just ask…where is everybody?” I glanced out at the empty workspaces. “I’m ready to start on whatever you’d like.”

Ms. Poindexter looked a bit confused, but then slowly a realization seemed to dawn on her. “Honey, our in-house illustrators don’t actually work in-house.”

I clutched my black purse to my chest. Yet another page in the rule book that hadn’t gotten to me in time. How had I missed so many memos? “They don’t?”

She shook her head slowly. “They live all around the world. I invited you to the city to meet for the afternoon. There’s a place down the street that does the most amazing coconut prawn soup.” She kissed the tips of her fingers. “Heaven.”

Now I was even more confused. I’d spent the last week looking for an apartment that cost as much in a month as I paid in property taxes in a year in Truelove. But here, linen-fancy Ms. Poindexter was talking about coconut soup?

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Nobody works here?”

Ms. Poindexter made something that looked halfway between a cringe and a smile. “We keep the workspace for tax purposes, and they drop in when they can.”

“Is that…” I blinked hard, trying to reorient myself with this new and totally amazing idea. “Is that…an option? Can I work from Maine?”

Ms. Poindexter held her handmade mug of tea with both hands and smiled behind the swirling steam. “Only if you’ll let me come visit! Because boy do I love a good lobster roll!”

* * *

After lunch, I used some of the cash that Max had given me to treat myself to a cab. I was too impatient to wait for the ancient elevator where I was staying, so I took the steps two at a time and flung open the door to my Airbnb, where I found Julia with a strip of the curtains in her mouth.

“Good news, you old battle-ax!” I told her as I closed the door behind me. “It’s time to go home.”

Like a woman possessed, I flew into action. I packed up the assorted tiny, slightly sticky, travel-sized bottles from the bathroom—they were always sticky, I could never understand it. I got all of Julia’s things organized into her canvas bag, emblazoned with the phrase, TO BE A CAT IS DIVINE. I shoved all my stuff into my suitcase willy-nilly, not even attempting to fold my things. Once I’d half zipped my suitcase, I pulled out my phone to check the trains.

First one was leaving tomorrow.

Not going to cut it, I thought as I zipped my half of the heart back and forth across my neck, hooking the chain over my lip and staring at my phone. Calling Max would ruin the surprise, and I just couldn’t wait to see the look on his face when I appeared unexpectedly with this amazing, life-changing news. For him, for me, for both of us.

I woke up my phone and did some Googling. It really didn’t matter how much it cost—it was worth it. Within a matter of minutes, I’d signed up for Zipcar, reserved one just a few blocks away, and left forty dollars for the curtains with a note that said, “So sorry!”

Sharing a ham sandwich, and with all the windows down, Julia and I zoomed out of the city against traffic. We headed north, with the sun shining in the driver’s side window, on our way home.

Home.

* * *

The sun was just setting when we turned onto my driveway, and I saw Max in the front yard with his shirt off. Heavens. He turned when he heard the engine and shielded his eyes from the low summer sunshine with his cupped palm.

Like a bat out of hell, I tore down the driveway, gravel spraying out from behind my tires, and slamming on the brakes like I was skidding into a pit stop. I flung my door open, undid my seat belt, and sprang out of my seat. “Hi!”

“Holy shit!” he said and opened his arms wide. “It’s you!”

I slammed my door and trotted toward him. I kicked off my heels and didn’t fix my pencil skirt as it rode up my legs. “A better question is, what are you doing!” I asked and stared at the For Sale sign in his hands. “Did someone buy the place?”

Max’s face got serious. He nodded once, and my heart dropped.

“No,” I gasped. “No, no, no. All the way home, I was having a fantasy about a vegetable garden with a deer fence and planting beds full of peonies and you playing with kids in the yard. This front yard, our front yard.” I took the For Sale sign from him and clutched it to my chest. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t my real estate agent call? Who bought it?”

Still, though, he frowned. He had his eyes down, looking at the gravel. He ran his hand through his hair. He gritted his teeth, and the muscles in his jaw fluttered. Then he lifted those beautiful eyes and hit me with that All-American heart-stopper smile. “This guy.”

“You did!” I squealed, my eyes suddenly welling up with tears of utter, pure, perfect happiness.

“I did,” he said. “We did.”

I dropped the sign and wrapped my arms around him. He picked me up off the ground and twirled me so that soon the forest was nothing but a deep green blur. “But what are you doing here?” he said into my ear. “Something wrong?”

“Everything’s right,” I said as I spun. “I’ll explain later, but I just had to see you. I had to get back. I had to come home.”

“Home,” he said, beaming as he set me down, while the world spun and spun behind him. “So you’re here to stay? To stay-stay?”

I couldn’t suppress my squeal and clapped my hands together. The wind in the trees picked up, and my wind chimes dinged a little louder. “Yes!”

“Well, in that case,” he said, taking a deep breath and reaching into his pocket. “I’ve got a question to ask.”

Then, to my utter shock, my total astonishment, and my overwhelming joy, my very best friend in the world and the love of my life took something from his pocket…

And got down on one knee.

47

Max

Three months later

Standing on the roof, I watched Cupcake and Julia investigate the edge of the woods together, like two old-school partners in crime. It still surprised me, seeing them together, totally chill and happy, but Doris at the vet had been absolutely right. Outside was the ticket. Inside, there were still sometimes snarls and snaps, but outside it was like Milo and Otis, only with funny-looking body doubles. Complete with matching rhinestone collars.

Carefully, I made my way to the new skylight that I had installed above the bathroom. I put a few nails between my teeth, and I was about to tap one into the copper flashing when I saw her again. My Rosie, standing in the patch of sun beneath me.

I held perfectly still, leaning back slightly to make sure my shadow didn’t catch her eye. Her ring sparkled in the sunshine, and the shimmery spots from the prisms dotted her perfect skin.

On the counter, she had her phone, and she kept pressing the button to keep the screen from going to sleep. I could tell that she was nervous from the way she paced around and straightened out her lotions. From where I was, I could see her face in the mirror, just barely. She looked serious and focused. As beautiful as ever.

From somewhere outside my line of sight, in the shadows, away from the patch of sun from the skylight, she took something that looked like a thermometer but not exactly. I squinted, trying to make it out. On the counter, I saw a bright pink box and an unfolded set of instructions printed on thin paper.

Wait…

She tapped her phone again, and I saw the numbers of the timer ticking along.

Was she…

No. Maybe.

Was that…

Holy fuck.

…a pregnancy test?

Was my Rosie taking a pregnancy test?

She closed her eyes and braced herself against the sink, her fingertips on the porcelain. Her chest rose and fell a few times, and then she reached for the white tester.

Her face in the mirror lit up in the most beautiful smile. She clasped one hand to her forehead, and the other one went to her belly.

I sank down onto my knees on the hot roof. The joy, holy shit, Christ above, the joy. A baby. Her baby. Our baby. As I knelt down, my shadow spilled over the patch of sun, and Rosie looked up. I could see that her eyes were glistening.

“Are you?” I asked her, holding each side of the skylight, still on my knees, like a guy praying for the very first time

And then Rosie smiled that big smile I loved so much, held the pregnancy test up above her head for me to see, and made me the happiest guy that ever was.

THE END

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