Chapter Eleven
“I can’t thank you enough for making snacks for girls’ night,” said Ella. She felt a little guilty every time Joel helped her out. But not guilty enough to stop asking him. Or more to the point, his food was so delicious that it erased all memory of her guilt.
“My bi-weekly paycheck is all the necessary thanks,” he joked as he whipped off his apron. Instead of his usual chef’s whites, he wore jeans and a plain white tee with the sleeves rolled up.
Nope. She might live in a tower, but Ella refused to behave like an entitled princess. “Please. You stuck around an extra hour after your shift ended working on treats for us. That goes way above and beyond your job description. I appreciate it.”
A clanging crash sounded from the depths of the kitchen. Pre-dinner prep was in full swing. Joel didn’t bother to comment. Just lifted his head to glare at the poor, butter-fingered sous-chef, who snapped out an apology. With the calm of a man in unquestioned control—and an authority that, frankly, Ella envied—Joel turned back to her.
“Ella, this has nothing to do with a paycheck, and you know it. We’re friends.”
Geez, she hated owning the hotel. Or maybe owning it wasn’t so bad. It was owning it combined with technically being the buck-stops-here girl that complicated things. As head chef, technically Joel reported to Eugene. Except that Eugene said he was more of a peer to Joel, and dumped his official supervision in Ella’s lap. Along with Eugene himself. The two of them were definitely self-starters, and didn’t need her help. If anything, they felt like family—the brother and uncle she never had. So she did her best to keep their roles very separate from their personal relationships. No matter how awkward—no, make that weird— it felt.
“True. But I never want you to feel like I’m taking you for granted. It’s a tricky line to walk, with us being friends and employer/employee.”
“Only if you let it be.” Joel ran his hand through his mop of dark curls. “Tell you what. To even things out, I’ll take you up on that mini-massage you offered, if you’ve got a break tomorrow. I carved up a whole lamb and tweaked something.” He thumped his shoulder with a wince.
“Oh, no. Are you sure it can wait till tomorrow? I don’t want you to be in pain.” She fluttered her lashes down before looking up at him sideways. “Or to file a workers’ comp claim.”
He winked. “Nice straddle of the line there, boss. Nah, I’m fine. I’ll slap an ice pack on it and grin and bear it. Besides, you don’t want your food to get cold. When are you going to learn to cook for yourself, by the way?”
“Just as soon as I don’t have a Culinary Institute trained chef thirty feet from the steps to my bedroom. If anything, it’d be an insult to your great talent in the kitchen if I didn’t come to you with all my cooking needs.”
“Stop buttering me up. I already made your food.”
“What’ve we got?”
Joel put another silver-domed plate on both serving trays. “I made you fried plantains with a garlic-mojo dipping sauce, manchego and spinach puffs, empanadas, shrimp ceviche, and avocados stuffed with lobster salad.”
“Sounds delicious. And like it’ll go perfectly with the pina coladas I whipped up. Seeing as how even I can handle putting rum, ice and a mix into a blender.” She revealed the frosty glass decorated with a tiny orange umbrella she’d hidden behind her back. “I brought you one, as a thank you.”
“For Christ’s sake, put that away.” Joel pushed her arm beneath the steel pass-through shelf separating the frenetic stove and prep area from the walkway to the dining room. “You think I want my sous-chefs to see me with something as girly and ridiculous as an umbrella drink? They’ll lose all respect for me.”
She set the drink onto one of the two trays and lifted it. “Joel, you cooked your way through two tours in Afghanistan and earned a Purple Heart before coming back and graduating with honors from the Culinary Institute. Rumor has it you pulled the bullet out of your thigh with your own kitchen tongs. Trust me, everyone in this kitchen is in complete awe of you.”
He lifted the other tray and pushed open the kitchen door for her. “Being a living legend requires careful maintenance of my image.”
“So you don’t want the drink?” she asked as they walked without a sound on the thick Oriental rugs lining the hallway.
“Of course I do. I’ll just take it once we off-load these trays up in your room.”
“Then what? Big plans for your night off?”
Both of them paused to nod and smile at an older couple laden with wine sacks and uneven gaits that attested to a long day of wine tasting. The woman let out a discreet hiccup as they passed.
“Well, there’s the ice pack I mentioned,” said Joel. “I plan to get up close and cozy with that for half an hour. Then I was going to meet Ward and Justin for burgers and at least one too many beers. Maybe knock on Gray’s door while I’m up here and see if he wants to tag along.”
Ella set the tray on the floor, fished out her key and unlocked the door to her secret staircase. “Aren’t you missing something in that big plan?”
“What?”
She planted her hands on her hips. This issue had been tapping at her for months. “A woman. You never talk about women. Not dating them—not even hooking up.”
“A gentleman never kisses and tells.” Joel pushed past her and up the stairs.
Like she’d let him get away that easily. “I’m serious. When was the last time you were out with a member of the opposite sex on a Saturday night?”
“When was the last time you were?” he shot back as he put his tray down on her coffee table/dining table/foot rest/good place to pile mail.
Well. Dropping a manhole cover on her head couldn’t have shut down this line of inquiry any faster. “Point taken.” Although maybe, by this time next week she’d have a real date with Gray under her belt, and she could hassle Joel again from a position of sexed-up self-righteousness. Which made her wonder just how many positions Gray knew. He seemed pretty inventive so far.
“I’ve got more than a decade on you, kid. I’m in a good place. You’re the one who’s too young to spend her nights locked up in a tower.” Joel kissed the top of her head. Ran a quick hand down her ponytail. “Think about having your next girls’ night in a bar.” He headed down the stairs, adding over his shoulder, “Where you can add men to the mix!”
His voice mingled with the higher tones of Piper and Casey as they passed him on their way up.
“So glad to see Joel here. Guess that means we won’t be stuck eating microwave popcorn and slicing tubes of raw cookie dough ourselves,” said Piper. She made it about two steps in and then froze. Casey plowed into her. They both landed on the floor in a tangle of arms and legs.
Ella giggled. “You two look ridiculous.”
“You look…different.” Piper lay on the floor, gaping at her. Her comment stopped Casey’s swearing and turned her head to face Ella. Then Casey’s jaw dropped open, too.
“Holy crap, what have you done?”
Their reaction should be caused something epic and shocking. Like a nose piercing. Or a tattoo of a unicorn down her forearm. More than a little self-conscious, Ella snuck a peek at herself in the octagonal mirror by the door. “They’re just bangs. No big deal.”
Piper rolled onto her knees. Good thing she was wearing yoga pants and not her customary short, tight skirt. “Cutting in bangs is always a big deal. If they look bad, it takes months of torture to grow them out. If I was considering bangs, I’d consult you guys first. I’d get Dawn’s opinion, too. Heck, I’d probably poll all the female visitors that came through the winery that day.”
“Me, too,” Casey chimed in. “You can’t get enough opinions when it comes to changing your hairstyle.”
“You haven’t changed your hairstyle since I met you,” Ella scoffed.
“Because whenever I get a wild notion to change my luxurious locks, I crowd source. And listen to their collective wisdom.” With a smug smirk, Casey stroked her long braid, which hung almost to the small of her back.
Now they were giving her a complex. Which stung, because Ella thought the bangs were sassy. She shuffled over in front of the mirror again. Stared a little longer. Fluffed them. Swept them to the right, and then to the left. And still thought they were sassy, damn it. “Do they look that bad?”
Piper moved next to her, throwing an arm around her waist. “No. Not at all.”
Casey crowded in on the other side. Cocked her head in assessment at all three of them reflected in the mirror for all of a second before declaring, “They’re adorable.”
“So get off my back!” Annoyed, Ella stalked over to the table and began transferring plates to it from the trays. With probably more of a clatter and slam than either the plates or the table deserved.
“You lucked out, this time.” Piper took the empty tray away and set it by the door. “Why didn’t you run this past the journal?”
“I don’t have to let the entire town weigh in on every little decision I make,” she huffed out.
“Since when?”
Oh. Okay. This was her chance to be honest. She’d been hiding this from her best friends for some time now. Ella had worried that they’d tell her she wasn’t ready to fly solo again. And for all the input and support they’d given her, that was the one decision Ella knew had to be hers and hers alone. But she’d made the decision to pull back from the journal months ago. Made the decision to stand on her own two feet and wholly own her life again. The only thing she hadn’t decided was to tell all the people who loved her so much that it was time for them to pull back, too.
Ella pulled a throw pillow off the blue and white striped easy chair. She sank into it and held the pillow against her stomach, bracing for their displeasure. Or hurt. Or anger. “For a while now.” And held her breath. Because these women were her only family now. Their approval meant a lot. Their disapproval would knock the air right out of her. But it wouldn’t change her decision.
Casey threw herself onto the white sofa, arms splayed across the back. “It’s about time!”
Not the words she’d expected to hear at all. Even in her relief, she had to question them. “What?”
“You only needed us, the town, to help you for a little while after Disaster Day. Then the journal turned into more of a safety blanket. You didn’t need it. You just needed to know that it, that all of us, were there to lean on. That with your parents gone, there was still someone, something you could turn to in times of trouble.”
“Then it became a habit. A bad habit. Which are the hardest to break.” Casey toed off her sneakers and sprawled out full length. “Like my putting my feet on the furniture. Bad habit, but one that’s far too comfortable to kick.”
“It’s a white couch, Case,” Ella said, out of habit, for about the thousandth time.
“And I’m wearing white socks. Don’t freak out,” Casey replied, also out of habit, for the other thousandth time.
Okay, maybe Casey had a point. Habit, rut, whatever. She’d been mired in it for far too long. Ella wished someone had picked up an emotional sand wedge and whacked her out of it about a year ago. “Why didn’t you guys say something sooner?”
Piper sat cross-legged on the floor. “Did you ever see someone take a security blanket away from a toddler? The screams, the tantrums, it’s like the world is ending. You have to wait until they decide to discard it themselves. We just had to wait it out until you were ready to give up your reliance on the journal.”
Ella hated it when her friends ganged up on her with their rightness. It sucked all the wind out of her sails of righteous indignation. But they were, unquestionably correct in their assessment. Moving on now felt good. It felt right. However long it took was worth it, to be this clear-headed again and focused on the future. Able to fully focus, without any fog of grief anymore, on Gray. On how much fun they had together. On how his compliments made her feel like a strong, smart and sexy mashup of Wonder Woman and Helen of Troy. On how his touch his kiss, his taste flooded her with feelings too long forgotten.
Piper tapped her on the knee. “Although, to be clear, we all use the journal from time to time. And I still say you should’ve reached out to at least a few people for something as epic as cutting in bangs.”
“Duly noted.” Ella stood and crossed to the tiny kitchenette. Wished she could run an ice cube over her chest without anyone asking why. Tamped down all thoughts of Gray, because there was no place for being pantingly horny during girls’ night. Giving the pitcher on the counter a final stir, she said, “Anyone else ready for a drink?”
“More than ready,” Casey groaned. “I had trouble shaking Pierce tonight. He texted four times asking if we could have dinner. Even after I told him it was girls’ night.”
Finally. Somebody else’s problem to focus on for a change. Ella speared cherries and pineapples with the tiny paper umbrellas before balancing them on the rim of the glasses. “Why’d you turn him down?”
“It’s girls’ night.”
“I know, but we do this all the time. Rescheduling wouldn’t have been a problem if you wanted a booty call.”
“I didn’t.” Casey said it in the same don’t be such an idiot tone of voice she’d use to point out that yes, there are indeed seven days in a week and the sun is still yellow. “That’s the point. Pierce and I had date night last Thursday. We adhere to a very strict schedule. There’s no reason he should want to see me this week.”
“Sounds like you’re the one who doesn’t want to see him. Cause I can think of lots of reasons he’d want to see you.” Ella waggled her eyebrows and framed the silhouette of an hourglass with her hands.
“We’re not boyfriend/girlfriend. We’re very casual. Very regimentally casual.”
Piper thwacked her with the pillow Ella had discarded. “That’s a lot of verys .”
“Well, we’ve got a system.” Casey lobbed the pillow back. “It’s worked fine for almost a year. He shouldn’t mess with the system.”
It was a messed-up system. But Ella thought she’d wait until Casey was lubricated with a few drinks to point out its inherent flaws. Right now, Casey’s aim with the pillow was a little too good. She handed out the glasses filled with frothy, almost frozen goodness.
“Ooh, pina coladas!”
Ella whisked the domed silver covers off the food. “And the appropriate food pairing.”
Piper closed her eyes and smiled after the first sip. “It makes me think of that trip all three of us took to Key West after college graduation.”
Now that was just the reaction she’d hoped for. “It’s supposed to do exactly that.”
“Rather nostalgic of you.” After another sip, her amber eyes re-opened. Followed by a pointed lift of one expertly shaped red brow. “It certainly explains why you’re wearing that ratty sweatshirt from your cheerleading days. What’s with the walk down memory lane?”
“Gray inspired me.” She took a sip, too, hoping the icy slushiness down her throat would tamp down the heat that flooded her core at just his name. Pavlov’s dogs had nothing on her insta-lust for Gray Locke.
“Is he from Key West?” asked Casey.
“No.” And it kind of amazed Ella that after all his secrecy, she finally did know where he was from. “I was thinking about how alone Gray is. How he doesn’t have the years of great memories with amazing friends like I did.”
Swinging her glass high, Casey declared, “Nobody has friends as amazing as us.”
Never were truer words spoken. But Ella wanted to get through the gist of her thoughts before the typical girls’ night mutual admiration society kicked into high gear. Because she knew better than anyone that it was dangerous to wait on telling people how important they were. Life could change in an instant. “I’m serious. What we have is truly special. I don’t want to take it for granted. Commemorating our good times together is the least I can do.”
“As much as I appreciate the coconut rum goodness in my hand, I still don’t see the connection to Gray.”
“Losing my parents was hard, but it wasn’t the end of the world. It felt like it for a while, but I still have twenty-four years of great memories with them stored up. Gray,” she paused, biting her lip. He probably wouldn’t appreciate her spilling his big secret about his dad, not even to her closest friends. Not without asking permission first, anyway.
“What about him?”
“Gray’s father cut off all contact with him years ago. No warning, no chance to say goodbye. And part of the fallout was that he lost all his friends, too. His life collapsed in on him.” The more Ella thought about it, the tighter the knot grew in her stomach. No, not her stomach—her heart clenched for him. “He didn’t get a chance to make the goofy, fun, stereotypical high school memories that we did. The core friendships that form over football games and pop quizzes and field trips, the ones that are supposed to last your whole life and can never be replaced— he’s missing those. In fact, if Gray had to choose one descriptor to put in the yearbook next to his photo, it would be alone. ”
“That’s awful.”
“Technically, I’m alone now. With my parents dead, no other relatives around. And yeah, that part of me that laid in bed at night, crying, and called myself an orphan—that part says I’m alone. But now,” her voice caught on the leading edge of an epic storm of tears. Tears not for her this time, but for Gray. “Now I know that I’ve never been, and never will be, as truly alone as Gray. And I thank my lucky stars for it. For you. Both of you.”
“Holy catharsis, Ella.” Tears welling at the corners of her eyes, Casey launched herself at her friend, arms wide open. A second later, a wordless Piper piled on, too. They clung to each other, sniffling and cry-talking vows of love and friendship for a few minutes.
Piper eased back first. “If two sips of that drink made us this maudlin, I’m little scared to see what we’ll devolve into by the end of the first round.”
“Own your tears. Don’t blame the rum,” Casey scolded. And drained her glass halfway for emphasis. Which resulted in a quick wince and a hand to her temples. “Brain freeze, damn it!”
Ella pointed at the array of plates filling the table. “Have an empanada. They’ll burn your tongue and even you out. You know how much Joel loves piling on the chili powder.”
While Casey wolfed one down, Piper threw open the white sheers covering the French doors to the balcony. “I bet we can knock back at least one round of drinks out here before the cold drives us inside. I even brought a fleece, just in the hopes that we could have our first balcony night of the season.”
“Great minds think alike.” Ella tapped hard with her foot at the bottom of one door, banged her fist against the top of the other one, and yanked hard. Living in a castle had its far from glamorous moments. Old doors stuck, warped by the spectrum of upstate New York weather. Drafty didn’t begin to describe her rooms. But she still loved being in the round tower with its exceptional view of the lake. “I wiped off the chairs and brought out some blankets. I love our sessions on the balcony.”
Casey carried the drinks outside, and set them on the picturesque but crooked flagstones. “Did you invite us over here just to clear out our tear ducts? Or can we commence with the time-honored traditions of girls’ night—stuffing our faces and talking about boys?”
“Well, you refuse to talk about Pierce.” Ella sat in the Adirondack chair and breathed deeply of the twilight air. It held a faint tinge of sweetness from the last of the cherry blossoms. A heron squawked as the ripples from its wings spread out from the lakeshore in a widening circle. “Or at least not to say anything interesting about him.”
“He’s not that interesting. He’s a dentist, for crying out loud. Pierce is just a nice guy.” Casey leaned against the iron railing, legs crossed at the ankles. “How about you, Piper? Got your eye on anyone special?”
That earned her an eye roll. “Nice deflection, Case. And no, I’ve developed no burning case of the hot and lusties since I talked to you at lunch. A mere five hours ago.”
Casey shrugged a shoulder beneath her long-sleeved tee emblazoned with a cartoon pine tree caught in a firm hug from a woman with a dreamy expression on her face. “Just checking. Look at how fast it happened to Ella.”
Well, it’d been nice to have the interrogation spotlight off of her for a whopping two minutes. Ella figured she might as well use this segue to get her big announcement out in the open. If it didn’t go over well with her friends, there was always the rest of the pitcher of pina coladas to help console her. “Actually, that’s why I invited you over.”
“The hot and lusties?” Casey pretended to fan herself with the end of her braid. “Cause I thought we decided not to throw caution to the wind and embark upon a lesbian experience during, yes, that memorable trip to Key West. Remember, that night when we stayed up dancing from sunset to sunrise?”
Laughter gurgled out so hard Ella grabbed the armrests to keep from folding over. “You’re right. The great lesbian experiment is and always will be off the table for us.” Time to bite the bullet and just tell them, already. “I’m doing enough experimenting with Gray.”
Piper leaned forward, the setting sun casting her face in shadow but creating a fiery nimbus around her hair. “We’re getting to the good stuff early. Do tell.”
Their time spent under the waterfall at the pool was the most sexually adventurous Ella had ever been. Part of her wanted to not just tell her friends, but stand up and scream the details with smug glee across the lake. But she held back. What she’d done with Gray was so special, so intimate that, for once, she’d rather keep it all to herself.
“I’m not going to tell you what we did,” she declared. “But I will tell you what we’re going to do. I’m going to sleep with Gray.”
Her friends exchanged long, wordless looks with each other before pinning her with their combined squints of disbelief. In preparation for their volley of objections, Ella slurped up some of her drink.
After biting her bottom lip, Piper said slowly, “I can see why you wouldn’t want to run that tidbit past the mailbox journal. Nobody wants Orson the trash collector thinking about their sex life.”
“I bet Mrs. Orson does,” Ella shot back.
She shook her head. “Regardless, don’t you want to run this by us?”
Hadn’t they all just agreed it was about damn time she let people stop voting on her life? This felt like a one-step-forward, two-steps-back reaction. “I just did.”
Another head shake. “No, I mean really talk it through. Pros and cons.”
“You know how fond Piper is of her lists,” Casey mocked.
“Seeing as how my mind’s made up, that would just be a waste of time. Besides, I thought you guys wanted me to break my dry spell.”
“Sure we do.” Another exchange of significant looks, like they were characters on a soap opera. Ella was quite sure that soap actors had more stage directions for looks per script page than actual lines. “But you barely know this man. You haven’t even been on a date with him.”
Another slow sip of her drink. In fact, that emptied it. Ella practically leapt out of the chair to retrieve the pitcher from inside. Glad to be out from under their intense scrutiny, she called over her shoulder, “That’s not exactly true.”
“Come again?” said Piper. “I thought you were waiting to get a green light from the journal?”
Why did it matter? Again, they’d both just agreed the journal was an emotional crutch she should’ve ditched a long time ago. So Ella launched into her explanation as she came back out to the wide balcony. “Technically, yes. I don’t know how to break it to the town that I don’t need their help anymore. I know I can’t quit cold turkey. So I wrote in the question about dating Gray. And then we very carefully not-dated.”
Casey gave her the same stern look usually reserved for tourists who disregarded the official warning signs not to walk across the waterfalls she guarded so fiercely at the state park. Equal parts smackdown and don’t even think of lying to me . “What the hell does that mean?”
“We didn’t do anything specifically date-like. But we have spent a ton of time together.” Ella felt like she knew Gray better than the last three guys she’d dated put together. Despite the fact that she still had no idea what he did for a living, or what his favorite food was. Or even if his mother still lived in the town that had treated them so shamefully. What she knew was the inner Gray, his resilient spirit, his good humor, and his caring nature. The rest was just frosting on the cake. Frosting that would be oh-so-fantastic to lick off of him…
Casey didn’t look convinced. “Really? What does he do, sit in on your massage clients? Pass you clean towels on the hour?”
“We share a long breakfast every day. Nothing’s less sexy than breakfast, right? And we do late dinners every night in the kitchen with Joel. That’s like having an official chaperone. Totally not a date. And now we do yoga together.”
Gasping, Piper clapped her hands over her mouth. Then let out a long rush of air. “You can’t claim that’s unsexy. Bendy moves in spandex? I defy you not to get turned on doing that with him.”
Ella certainly wouldn’t lie to her friends. Especially since it didn’t require any special bendy moves from Gray to turn her on—just his regular walking and breathing accomplished the same effect. “The intention behind yoga was for stress relief. The sexy factor was a great side benefit.”
“So Gray’s not a complete stranger.” Casey threw up her hands into the air. “Fine. Under any other circumstances, if he’s as great as he seems, he might be the perfect person to slake your dry spell.”
Then she passed the verbal attack baton off to Piper. “But you shouldn’t do it with him . Not with a tourist who leaves in a week. That’s just setting yourself up for failure.”
“No, it isn’t. Gray happens to be quite talented in this area.” Ella felt a slow, satisfied smile spread her lips as she remembered his thoroughly knee-wobbling kisses. “He’s not going to fail me at all.”
“Those long legs and that tight ass. Yeah, I bet he’s got some serious moves.”
Casey snapped her fingers an inch from the redhead’s face. “Piper, focus.”
“I’m sorry, but did you not see him in those jeans today? You’d have to be a nun with a case of pneumonia not to notice that the man’s smoking hot.”
“I’m not denying Gray’s inherent hotness.” Casey nipped inside, and returned with the plate of flaky empanadas. “Or the fact that his light eyes/dark hair combo is pretty much hypnotically sensual.”
Now that they’d begun making a laundry list of his attractiveness, it made Ella squirm. “Um, how about you all stop thinking about his hotness? I’m the only one who’ll be sampling the goods. There’s no sharing.”
“That’s just it. I don’t think you can sample.” Casey started to take a big bite, thought better of it, and then waved the steam away from her lips. “Ella, you’ve never once taken a bite of a brownie, then pushed it away and declared that you’re full.”
“So?”
Casey took a cautious nibble of the fluted crust. “So, you’re not a sampler. You go all in, whether it’s your refusal to split a gigantic brownie with your best friends in the whole wide world—”
Really? Ella couldn’t believe Casey wouldn’t let it go. Couldn’t believe she’d equate what promised to be an off-the-charts sexual experience with Gray to eating a square of brownie. “Are you still pissed about lunch today? I got you your own damn brownie. There’s no clause in the friendship pact that says we have to share. Get over it.”
Leaning her elbows on the rail, Casey shot her a combo disgruntled glare and disdainful lip curl. “I only wanted half. Your other half. The half that you didn’t need, and will make you guilt jog for an extra ten minutes tomorrow. Sharing would’ve saved you that torture.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Piper pushed out of the chair to refill her glass from the pitcher Ella still clutched. “Casey, you’re bumbling your way through this. She’s trying to tell you that you’re simply not a one-night-stand girl. Sure, you can have a fling, and Gray will perform magnificently, but then…you’ll get attached. You’ll want more of him, just like you wanted that whole brownie. You won’t be able to let him go with just a taste.”
Casey crowded in closer, too. Close enough to drill her index finger into Ella’s upper arm. “Except that he’s leaving. So you have no choice in the matter. Do you really want to open yourself up that inevitable loss?”
Feeling penned in, both physically and emotionally, Ella moved to the opposite end of the balcony. Ran a hand over a tendril of bright green ivy trying to make the leap from the wall onto her balcony. “So what if I used to be Ms. Commitment? I can be a fun-for-now girl, damn it. I’m sort of starting from scratch over here. Clean slate, due to three years of total inactivity on the dating front. I’ll freaking fling if I want to.”
Another exchange of meaningful glances between her friends. Talk about feeling ganged up on. It was supposed to be the three of them against the world, not two of them against her. She’d known that announcing her intention might not go over well. Ella never thought, however, that they’d try this hard to talk her out of it. A few stock back-and-forths about whether or not she was ready was all she’d expected. Not this dire warning of a supposedly inevitable downward spiral. With this sort of reaction from her best friends, Ella imagined that if she had mentioned sex with Gray in the journal, the town would’ve shown up at her door with flaming torches and driven him out of town on a rail to prevent it.
A pair of hands settled on her shoulders. Piper’s signature tuberose scent wafted forward on the breeze. “We held your hand through three years of devastating heartbreak, Ella. Forgive me if I’m in no hurry to see you go through anything even close to that again.”
Well, geez. Ella couldn’t be mad at them for trying to keep her happy and whole. But she also couldn’t let them think that stagnating in unexciting happiness was the only acceptable option. “Life’s a gamble. That’s what I’ve learned. Protecting myself from heartbreak, locking myself up in this tower—that’s not living. Rolling the dice on having a good time with Gray is barely a gamble. We’ll have a good time. I’m quite sure he’ll be amazing. He’ll make my eyes roll back in my head. And there’s no reason to skip giving myself such a fantastic experience. At the very least, I’ll have a yummy memory.”
“That’s the same reason I wanted to try half your brownie,” Casey grumbled. But there was laughter in her voice and in her big green eyes.
Deep down, Ella knew that they might be right. When Icarus flew too close to the sun, look at how far he fell. On the other hand, how glorious were those moments up in the sky, basking in its radiance? The bottom line was that she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she didn’t seize this moment. Because Ella knew all too well that moments had a funny way of disappearing without warning. Just like Gray might in a few days.