23. Daisy
23
DAISY
“ W ill she never learn?”
I sat back next to Reese in the car.
For a hot second this morning, I had considered scrounging up the sporty socialite tennis dress Aunt Gigi had given me one year and that might, with two layers of shapewear, fit, but then I thought, Who am I doing this for, Aaron?
Fuck Aaron.
Or don’t fuck him.
Aaron had insisted we ride separately to the Hamptons. He would barely even look at me over breakfast.
Both Reese and the driver had had appropriately horrified responses to Aaron’s bullshit the other day.
“You’re not insane,” Reese assured me.
“There’s alcohol in the console,” the driver offered.
“We always knew Aaron had a personality disorder,” Reese told me, opening the bottle of champagne.
“But I definitely think being chained up and having Aaron anally fuck the virginity out of you is not a good idea for your first time. So bullet dodged.”
In the rearview mirror, the driver’s mouth fell open.
Yes, I was being judged. By everyone.
“People can be virgins at twenty-eight!” I said loudly. “That happened a lot in the Victorian period. It was normal then.”
“You’re twenty-nine,” Reese murmured.
“Just last month, though, so it doesn’t count.”
“Hashtag girl math.”
“I don’t know why Aaron won’t just have his way with me.” The champagne fizzed in my mouth.
“Lordy. We are really setting feminism back here.”
I squirmed in my seat, thinking about all that muscle and sinew pinning me against the wall. If he was trying to scare me, it had the opposite effect. Fuck me, right?
Or don’t.
“He thinks I’m revolting,” I wailed then guzzled my champagne. “He’s just toying with me to avoid having to actually sleep with me. A normal man would have slept with his wife by now, right? Maybe I smell.”
“Maybe it’s some sort of, I don’t know, hang-up, given his situation,” Reese suggested. “Maybe it’s not about you at all.”
“No.” I pulled the sex contract out of my bag. “See? This is the contract he gives all his hookups. Look at this.” I thumbed through it. “General sensory play. Sex toys. Introduction of a third party. Shibari. Like, I don’t even know what half this stuff is. I’m so out of my league here, and he knows it.”
“You could put your cards on the table. Maybe he has a virgin kink.”
“Guys like Aaron would only want a virgin if she were young and cute, like nineteen or twenty,” I argued. “An ingénue. I’m too old to be the sexy virgin. I’m just a red flag. I’m basically a cat lady.”
Dorian meowed from the front seat of the car, where he was watching the traffic pass.
“Unless the Colemans want to lose all their money, we have to do it.” I lowered my voice. “And it’s going to be horrible, and I bet I squirt and bleed, and then he’s going to tell everyone how bad I was. It’s going to be just like high school. Can we stop somewhere?” I begged the driver. “I need doughnuts and Starbucks for the car ride.”
“We’re already here, ma’am.”
“We are?”
Usually, the drive to the Hamptons took four hours, but now the driver was pulling to a stop at a marina.
“That asshole had us take separate cars for a ten-minute ride?” I screeched.
Reese sniffed me. “Do you think she smells?” she asked the driver.
Aaron was already waiting at the dock when Reese and I trooped up, followed by the driver, who was pushing our luggage on a cart.
He wheeled it onto a waiting yacht. Not a boat, a yacht. A big one.
Aaron’s family was boarding as Reese and I gawked.
He ignored me.
His mother gave me an ugly look, latching onto her son’s arm as he escorted her up the gangplank.
“Champagne, Mrs. Richmond?” one of the crew members offered, cutting in front of me before I could race over to Aaron.
“They’re talking to you.” Reese elbowed me.
“Oh! Ah, thanks.” I sipped the champagne as the crew member gave me a quick tour of the yacht.
On the main deck, Aaron’s little cousins raced around the boat, excited by the food, the sailors in their crisp white uniforms, and the sparkling water.
“Aaron, what is this?” I asked him.
“Is this not an acceptable way to travel to the Hamptons for her highness?” he sneered at me.
It was infuriating.
“I’m fine.” I crossed my arms. “I could have driven.”
“Been driven,” he corrected nastily.
“Or taken the bus.” My voice rising, “because that is how I normally get to the Hamptons.”
Aaron let out a mean laugh. “Spoiled—”
“Don’t say it—”
“Princess. Normal people don’t go to their family house in the Hamptons for the weekend, Coleman.”
“And normal billionaires don’t take a yacht. They take a helicopter. At the very least, it would be less time I had to spend with you,” I shot back.
“I refuse to fly in a helicopter,” Aaron said flatly. “Do you know the risk assessment on those things? We could all crash and die.”
“We should be so lucky.” I drained my champagne glass and went in search of something to soak up the alcohol.
Aaron’s mother stole him and began talking intently in the shade of the upper deck. I tuned them out. She was probably telling him what a horrible wife I was.
Just to torture myself, I pulled out the contract.
I stole glances at Aaron as I read, trying to forget how amazing his chest was. Would he go shirtless this weekend?
I should have taken a picture.
I forced my eyes back to the contract and sifted through the frankly gratuitous descriptions of sexual activities.
“Oh my god,” I murmured as my eyes drifted over another single-spaced paragraph of legalese. “This motherfucker.”
I jumped up and marched over to Aaron. He was hovering on the periphery of the Ragnor family, who were ignoring him in favor of his cousins.
“You—” I clamped my mouth shut, looked at the little kids, then dragged Aaron away to the side deck.
“You are such a liar, mister.” I poked him in the stomach with the rolled-up contract. “I knew you were doing this just to humiliate me. Did you have fun with your sick little joke?”
“How much have you drunk, Coleman? I’m telling the crew to cut you off.”
“I want my gift card.”
A grin lit up his face. It was a real smile, startling. His teeth caught on his lip, then he smoothed his features.
“So she read the contract after all.”
“I don’t know why you seem to think I’m an idiot. I’m an English major. That means I read all. The. Time. And yeah, I found your little gift-card rider. So pay up.” I held out my hand.
“You did that on purpose. I’m onto you,” I added. “I know you don’t give these contracts to the women you’re actually attracted to. You’re just trying to fuck with me.”
He paused, wallet in his hand.
“No, I make everyone sign them. You can ask Betty if you don’t believe me.” He looked up and shouted, “Hey, Betty?”
“What’s shakin’, sugar?”
The elderly woman, who wore a leopard-print wrap and a bright-pink visor, looked over the balcony of the upper deck.
“Don’t I make everyone sign this contract?” Aaron asked.
“It’s true.” Betty sipped her strawberry daiquiri. “He scares girls off with those things. I don’t know why you look so smug about it, Aaron,” she added, pushing up her sunglasses to look down at us. “You’re the one who’s going to die alone.”
He was triumphant as he slid a plastic hundred-dollar Amazon gift card out of his wallet.
“You, Coleman” —he slipped the card in the spaghetti strap of my tank top— “are the first woman to find the gift card.”
He hooked two fingers on the strap and pulled me close.
“And for the record,” he breathed against my cheek, “I don’t find you unattractive, just incredibly annoying.”