Chapter 37
Thirty-Seven
T herapy over video chat wasn’t as good as in-person, but it was a decent alternative after Mia flat-out rejected finding someone in Miami. Marigold had gotten her to admit that she might have been avoiding entering her mother’s room, and that if she was going to stay in the house, she should work on occupying the whole thing. That she had to find a way to honor what had once been by making space for the truth of now.
Friday morning bled into afternoon before Mia gathered the nerve to step into the room that held the lingering scent of her mother’s perfume—faint but impossible to ignore. The room, only slightly larger than one of the standard bedrooms, had an attached bathroom. After the kitchen, it was the only other thing her mother had remodeled.
Mia drifted into the bathroom and sat at the small chair tucked under the vanity built into the counter. The bathroom wasn’t huge, and her mom had gotten rid of one of the double sinks to make room for the vanity.
Looking at herself in the mirror, sitting where her mother sat every morning to put on her makeup—and returned to every night to take it all off—Mia let herself miss her. She didn’t open the drawers full of organized compartments. Instead, she put her palms to the cool, stone top and imagined her mother sitting there.
What had she felt when her own parents passed and she moved into this room? This bathroom. How had she felt when the house was hers? She’d been older than Mia was now, but Mia didn’t think it made much of a difference. When did anyone feel ready to let go of someone they loved?
It hadn’t happened right away, Mia remembered. It had easily taken her mother a year to move into this bedroom. Had taken her much longer than that to change anything.
With a deep breath, Mia stood. She’d come back, she vowed, but today wasn’t the day to move her mother’s things. Impressed that she’d existed in her mother’s space without breaking down, she walked out of the room, but this time she didn’t close the door behind her.
She was in the pool house, sweating her ass off while she hauled out box after box of stuff suitable for donation when she heard Tori’s voice. Glancing at her phone for the time, Mia cursed.
“You back there?” Tori called.
“Yeah!”
Mia stepped out into the quickly fading day, messy hair piled on her head where it wasn’t plastered to her forehead and neck. In a dust-covered T-shirt and shorts, she wasn’t exactly ready to go. Tori, however, looked sleek with her hair combed back and held in place with product. It made her dark eyes, lined to perfection, impossible to look away from. In tailored eggplant colored pants and a thin black sweater with the sleeves pushed up, she looked deadly.
“Jesus,” Mia breathed, stepping back from Tori so she didn’t ruin her incredible presence with her mess. “You look fucking incredible.”
Tori grinned with one side of her mouth before raising a single, perfect, judgmental brow. “And you look not ready to go to your own friend’s thing.”
Filthy thoughts ran through Mia’s mind while she looked at Tori and worked very hard not to touch her with grubby hands. “What if we just don’t go?”
Laughing, Tori slid her hands into her pockets. God, was there anything she did that wasn’t painfully sexy?
“Don’t threaten me with a good time,” she joked. “I don’t know why Daniela is obsessed with having people over. Like, girl, shouldn’t you be doing newlywed things?” She chuckled. “I hate having people in my house,” she added, as if Mia didn’t know that Tori would be happy to live in a castle surrounded by a gator-filled moat.
A balmy breeze carried Tori’s cologne toward her, smooth and clean and just earthy enough to make Mia want to bail on her friend’s party. But she resisted and moped her way to the shower.
She only had time to wash and iron her hair and throw on a simple yellow dress before rushing out of the bathroom while putting on tinted lip gloss. Like a dutiful partner, Tori was standing by the door, gift bottle of wine under her arm, trying not to look impatient.
When Tori looked up from her phone, her face brightened. “Wow,” she breathed like Mia was in something more glamorous than a dress from H&M and flats from DSW. She’d always looked at her like that, Mia realized. Had always made Mia feel like she was so much more than ordinary.
“Ready?” Mia rocked onto the balls of her feet and kissed Tori. Soft enough not to transfer all of her shimmering gloss onto her lips, but long enough so Tori felt how badly she’d missed her.
Tori wrapped her free arm around Mia’s waist, hand landing at the small of her back in the most panty-dropping possessive move. She pulled her in until Mia was flush against her. Until she was aching for more of her. In her life, no one had ever kissed with their entire body like Tori did.
“We don’t have to be there long, right?” Mia was negotiating against herself, she knew. “Like what? An hour? Tops?” She kissed Tori again when all she wanted to do was slip a finger into her belt and unfasten it.
Tori grinned, leaning back to wipe the gloss that had left the confines of Mia’s bottom lip. Mia had the strangest urge to catch it with her teeth, but she resisted. If she gave in any more, she was going to text Daniela and fake food poisoning.
“An hour,” Mia groaned. “I can do an hour.”
She was going for her bag on the little table by the entrance when she noticed a plain parcel she hadn’t put there. “What is that?” She pulled the thin strap of her brown leather purse over her shoulder.
The way Tori bit her bottom lip and shrugged made clear exactly what was in the box. Mia’s eyes widened.
“Is that it?” she whispered, even though they were alone.
“You could open it and find out,” Tori teased.
Attention darting between the box and Tori’s mischievous expression, Mia decided that if she opened the package there was no way they were leaving. “You have an evil side, you know?”
Tori laughed, but didn’t deny it while she held the door open for Mia. Walking out to the Jeep, Mia wondered how someone so sweet could be so filthy. And how the hell she’d gotten so lucky.
Sitting around Daniela’s fire pit, even though it wasn’t nearly cool enough for it, Mia tried to pay attention to her friends. Her gaze kept drifting across the pool where Tori was standing with another group. Mia couldn’t help being mesmerized by the way Tori shifted her weight between her loafers. The way her eyes crinkled when she laughed. The way she slipped her hand into her pocket when she was listening intently.
“So you guys really weren’t together then, huh?” Sasha Delgado broke Mia’s staring.
Sipping her wine, Sasha fixed her dark eyes on Mia. Aware of her surroundings again, Mia registered that half a dozen women were looking at her expectantly.
“What?” Mia looked down at her wine glass only to find it was empty and she was a little buzzed. When the hell had she finished her chardonnay?
“I’m not convinced it wasn’t some kind of long-game kink,” Daniela decided. She noticed Mia looking at her glass and pulled a bottle from a cooler at her feet. “Like some emotional tantric thing.”
Mia leaned over, arm outstretched, so Daniela could refill her glass. She was going to disagree, but everything about her life felt like it had been leading up to Tori.
“I had a threesome once,” Sasha confessed unprompted, drawing everyone’s attention to her.
“What?” Mia chuckled into her white wine.
“Gilbert wanted it for his thirtieth birthday. I mean, he hadn’t shut up about it for the last ten years, so I decided what the hell.” She laughed to herself. “He thought I was setting him up. Like if he went through with it, I was going to leave his ass. He almost fainted when I approached this gorgeous woman at a hotel bar in Manhattan and, well,” Sasha shrugged like she was talking about going grocery shopping, “it was a good time.”
“And you did stuff to her?” Mia was trying to play it cool, but she knew she was failing. Luckily, everyone was too engrossed in Sasha’s story to notice.
“Oh yeah. I didn’t let Gilbert touch her,” she replied with a chuckle. “He had a good time, though.”
“How did you know what to do?” Mia leaned closer, keeping her voice as low as possible.
The rest of the group looked just as interested in Sasha’s response.
“I don’t know.” Sasha let Daniela refill her glass. “It wasn’t all that different.”
Someone practically cackled. “Girl, I’m sorry,” she said in a way that meant she wasn’t at all sorry, “but how small is Gilbert’s dick?”
“That’s not what I meant.” Sasha rolled her eyes. “But you know how it is anytime you sleep with someone new. You don’t know what they like yet.” Her grin said Cheshire Cat and her eyes said she was remembering a moment fondly. “You have to figure them out.”
“Yeah,” another woman said, “but you don’t eat a banana and a peach the same way.”
Sasha glared. “First of all, ew, use your words. Second, don’t you have a peach ? What do you like? Always a great place to start.”
Mia leaned back into her chair. If she asked the question burning on her tongue she was going to give herself away, but she was desperate enough not to care. “It’s not like I can tell exactly what she’s doing when she’s doing it. So how do I reverse engineer those results?”
Sasha’s usually aloof expression warmed. “You haven’t reciprocated?”
Mia closed her eyes like she didn’t understand object permanence. Like she might will herself away if she wanted it bad enough. “I know. I’m fucking awful. I just don’t want to disappoint her. What if she realizes I’m not good enough?—”
Sasha’s chuckle kept Mia from unraveling. She opened her eyes to find her friends looking at her with compassion rather than judgment.
“Does Tori have a problem with how things are progressing?” Sasha asked like she already knew the answer.
“No. She said she wants to go at my pace?—”
“Then don’t worry about it,” Sasha said like she was rendering a verdict.
“God, I bet she means that too,” Daniela joined in. “So what was it like? Was it good?”
Mia bit the inside of her cheek, gaze floating across the pool to Tori. “It’s rude to brag, isn’t it?”
Daniela laughed. “Girl, spill it!”
Taking a gulp of her drink, Mia asked her own question. “Did you know you could have an orgasm every time? More than one?”
“How many more?”
“So, so many more,” Mia’s wine-soaked brain replied.
The group’s wistful attention turned in unison to Tori.
“Maybe she can teach Luis something. The number of times I’ve told him not to jab his tongue at it.” One of their friends mimicked a snake’s strike with her hand, sending a ripple of laughter through the group.
Mia sat back while the conversation moved on to something else. She laughed along, but her mind was already elsewhere—across the pool, in Tori’s hands, under her mouth. If Sasha could figure it out in a hotel bar, Mia could damn well figure it out with Wi-Fi and determination. She was going to make Tori feel desired, worshipped, undone.
Apparently feeling the weight of her gaze, Tori turned her head toward Mia. When she met her eyes, Mia grinned. From the rim of her glass while she sipped her drink, Tori gave her a surreptitious little wink.
Yep, she was going to ruin Tori—slowly, thoroughly, shamelessly—even if it killed her.