CHAPTER FIFTEEN #2
I positioned Jagger between a bushy, variegated dieffenbachia named Matilda, and a healthy kalanchoe with orange flowers named Geraldine.
“These two ladies will help you learn the ropes and introduce you to the others,” I said to Jagger, turning him a little so the bow faced into the dining room, before nodding with contentment at his position.
“If I didn’t know that studies say talking to your plants helps them grow, I’d consider having you committed,” Naomi said, still leaning against the counter with her arms crossed.
“Now that Jagger the Cactus has found his forever home, can we talk about Jagger the Thirst Trap and the fact that he came here to bring you your underwear and a plant?”
“No, we can not.” I made my way back into the living room.
Naomi chased after me. “You spent two nights in a room with that lumber-snack and nothing happened? Bull. Shit. I refuse to accept that answer.”
“You refuse to accept that answer to what?” asked Gabrielle, coming into my house from the same door Jagger had knocked on a few minutes ago. “Was that Jagger McEvoy I saw leaving? Why was he here?”
Naomi got all smug. “He brought Raina back her underwear, and he brought her a cactus. Because he said it reminded him of her. Strong, prickly, and cute. But I bet it was also a thank-you-for-all-the-angry-sex plant.”
Gabrielle’s mouth went slack.
I glared death lasers at Naomi, but she didn’t give a shit.
“I am not having this conversation with you guys,” I said, shaking my head. “And we did not have angry sex.”
Their brows shot to their hairline.
“We didn’t have any kind of sex!”
Not penetrative anyway.
“Let it go.”
Oh fuck, now all I could think about was the fact that Jagger called me Elsa, and that I didn’t actually mind the nickname. I even liked it when he called me Rosebush, or a little cactus. Damn him.
Gabrielle made herself comfortable in her favorite chair in my house—an overstuffed, dark-green, velvet thing I bought at a vintage store in Seattle—and Naomi got into a comfy position back on the cream leather couch.
“We’re not leaving or letting it go until you tell us just exactly what went down in that inn,” Gabrielle said.
Oh, word choice. “What went down …” Fuck.
I must have flinched or done something, because my eldest cousin’s gaze flared. “What did I just say to trigger that response?” she asked.
I glanced at them both, my eyes shifting back and forth like I was at a tennis match. “Tell a soul, and I will murder both of you. Then I’ll bury the bodies under the grapevines, and we’ll have a killer crop that year.”
Gabrielle’s lip twitched, Naomi’s eyes gleamed.
“He … he went down on me.”
They both gasped at the exact same time.
Fucking hell.
“That was it?” Naomi asked, after she found her voice. “You didn’t have sex?”
“We didn’t even kiss,” I added. “Somehow we got on the topic of … well, not somehow. The first night, we got really drunk. Basically, because we both agreed that the only way we could even tolerate each other was to drink ourselves numb. Then we decided to watch a movie on his laptop. But when he turned it on, porn popped up.”
“Men are soooo predictable,” Naomi murmured.
“Somehow he coaxed out of me my preferred porn.”
Neither of them said anything.
“Which is the angle from the woman’s POV and the guy is going down on her,” I said quickly.
They both nodded, like they agreed.
“Anyway, the next night, we were both sober and hungover, and the conversation made its way back to that being my preferred porn. I let it slip—I would like to add that the man has an uncanny and irritating ability to get you to open up. It’s like he does some kind of hypnosis or something.”
“It’s the beard and the eyes,” Naomi said plainly. “I’d tell him my bank PIN if he smiled at me long enough.”
Gabrielle snorted.
“Anyway,” I rolled my eyes, “I confessed that while it was my favorite porn, I’d never actually had a man do that.”
“Was he shocked?”
“Of course he was. He then went on to say that some men enjoy doing it. That they get pleasure from giving pleasure. I said I didn’t believe it because, well …”
“Yeah, we were all married to similar men. We get it,” Gabrielle said with zero inflection in her voice, almost like she was reading off a teleprompter.
It was her way of protecting herself. She’d made herself so numb over the years in the hopes of just forgetting her old life that when any part of it came up in discussion, she disassociated really fast.
“He offered to prove me wrong.”
“No fucking way,” Naomi said, slamming her hand on the couch cushion and lunging forward slightly.
“I, of course, said as much. That I didn’t need him to do that.”
“I bet things got awkward as fuck after that,” Naomi mused.
“Pretty much.”
“But at some point, you caved? Obviously.”
I hung my head and nodded. “Yeah. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And he was offering. And he’s hot. Ugh …”
“Do you regret it?” Gabrielle asked gently.
I shook my head. “No. It was amazing. I came twice.”
They both smiled.
“Then I offered him … something in return, because no way did any man do that and not expect reciprocation. But he turned me down. He said it wasn’t about him. That he was fine. It was about me. He then, of course, went and jerked off in the bathroom, but he never expected anything from me.”
“So you think he wants something now ?” Gabrielle asked, though I could tell by her tone and the softness in her normally sharp amber eyes, that she didn’t believe that for a second.
Neither did I.
“I don’t think he wants something . As in reciprocation for what he gave me. I honestly don’t know what the hell he wants. But he’s confusing the fuck out of me.”
“I’ll tell you what he wants,” Naomi said, a big grin stretching across her face. “He wants a prickly little cactus, and not just for a couple of nights in a B&B.”
My belly did a not altogether unpleasant flip again.
Gabrielle’s gaze glittered as she smiled. “I think you might be right.”
I glanced into my dining room at the little cactus on my windowsill. Why was the idea of that not nearly as unnerving as I thought it should be?