Chapter Twenty
“Does Tony let you sleep at your sleepovers?” Ivy asked after Brad smacked his head on the window because he fell asleep. Again.
Brad groaned and rubbed his forehead.
“He gets up for work so early. And he’s chipper. If you’re going to wake up at five thirty, at least have the decency to be miserable about it like a normal person.”
“This is why we can’t buddy bid. I can’t survive a red-eye and you refuse to check in before ten a.m.”
“I don’t know how you work those early-morning flights. So much coffee. I have enough grace in my body for one—one!—person to say they’ll take a black coffee, then ask for cream and sugar after you hand it to them with the audacity to act like you’re the incompetent one.”
Ivy took a right down Sycamore Street and then a left two stop signs down onto Grouse Street.
It didn’t seem to matter that she hadn’t been in Coeur-de-Lac in ten years; the town layout was engraved on her brain.
The entire morning that she and Brad had been driving around to drop off invitations to her dad’s retirement party, she hadn’t turned on her maps app once.
These were businesses and houses she’d been going to her entire life.
Coeur-de-Lac had certainly grown as the nearby university expanded, but the bones remained the same.
“When they do that, I say, ‘I’m sorry. I thought you wanted a black coffee. Without cream and sugar.’ Big smile. Click brake and roll on. Leave them to contemplate their life choices.” She pulled Brad’s rental car up next to a mailbox. “You’re looking for Beverly Houk.”
Brad leafed through the stack of invitations they’d filed into a shoebox and selected the appropriate card. He rolled down his window just enough to drop the invitation into the mailbox, then quickly rolled it back up. Ivy marked off Beverly Houk on the spreadsheet her mom had made.
“Speaking of life choices…” Brad grinned at her with gossipy glee. “How was the rest of your night? Did you do a little more smoochy-smoochy?”
Ivy wanted to play it cool, but her skin burned with an incriminating blush. Brad squealed with delight.
“Tell me everything!”
“Are you going to tell me everything you’ve been up to with Tony?” She arched her eyebrows.
It was a poorly judged move. Normally the two of them had no secrets, and Brad was still operating under that arrangement.
“So he does this thing,” he started, moving his hands in explanation, “where he—”
“Never mind! I don’t want to know. I still have to look him in the eye after you leave.” She gripped the steering wheel and took a deep breath.
“Dear god, what kind of kinky shit did you get up to?”
“We didn’t! We—ugh. I climbed on top of him in his truck and rode him like he was a prize-winning pony.”
Brad’s eyes widened. “You had sex in his truck?”
“No!” Ivy shouted, then groaned. “I dry humped him like we were high schoolers.”
Brad’s laugh filled the car. He bent over, gasping for air, and dropped the box of invitations.
“You…ba-ha-ha-ha…dry…” He wheezed and finally made some effort to calm himself. Once he’d taken a few deep breaths and wiped the tears from his eyes, he started collecting the cards from the floor. “I guess that explains your hickey.”
“My what?”
Ivy slammed on the brakes and Brad lurched forward, his head smacking into the glove box.
She pulled down the visor and flipped open the mirror, inspecting her neck closely.
There was indeed a small spot on the side of her neck, barely a bruise, but still there all the same.
Heat coursed through her body. She’d talked to her parents that morning.
She’d had a full conversation with them while she had a hickey on her neck.
A hickey she’d gotten making out with Grant Underwood in his truck.
Embarrassment warred with pride, and pride won by a hair.
She’d never had a hickey before because she hadn’t discovered the joys of promiscuity until she had her own health insurance plan and a matching 401(k).
Her first hickey, and she’d gotten it from a guy so far out of her league she’d never even considered him a possibility.
Ivy rubbed at the spot with her thumb, like that would make it go away.
“If you keep messing with it, you’re going to make it worse.” Brad smacked her hand away. “Give me your phone.”
She did so without question, which might have been a mistake.
“I’m going to take a picture so you can send it to him. He’ll love it. Trust me.” He held the phone close to her neck, then passed it back to her.
“This doesn’t scream ‘desperate’?”
“Ma’am, you crawled on top of him while you were parked in front of your parents’ house. You passed desperate about ten miles back.”
Ivy attached the photo and stared at the message box blankly. “What do I say?”
Brad sighed dramatically. “Can the straights do nothing by themselves?”
“I have never made my ineptitude a secret. You knew what you were getting into when you met me.”
“Okay, how about ‘look what you did’?”
She stared at him. “That’s it?”
“Stop making everything so complicated and get your mediocre straight flirt on.”
Ivy rolled her eyes but typed out the simple message and hit send while her pulse skyrocketed to dangerous levels, then handed her phone back to Brad.
“I can’t look. Tell me what he says.”
She put the car into drive so she’d have something to concentrate on besides the agonizing wait to see if Grant would even respond.
He’d seemed very into her the night before, but men could only think with one head at a time, and she knew exactly which brain had been in charge.
She wouldn’t blame him if he woke up regretting his decisions, because she’d been possessed by the horny monster, too.
They made two more stops before Brad burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“Pull over,” he instructed, and she threw on her hazards alongside a snow berm. “He said, ‘I’m not ashamed and I’d do it again.’ Girl, you’re in danger.”
“He did not.” Ivy snatched her phone back and read the message for herself.
Grant: I’m not ashamed and I’d do it again
Grant: You can give me one to make it even
“Oh god, he said more.” She turned the screen to show Brad the new message. “What am I supposed to do with this man?”
“Give him a fucking hickey.”
“Bradley!”
Brad threw his hands up. “He told you that you could! Bring back the lost art of the hickey, dammit. Make that man look like a leopard. He’s begging you to brand him.”
“That is not begging,” Ivy said, pointing at her screen for emphasis.
Brad snatched her phone away. “You’re useless.” His thumbs flew across the screen before he passed the phone back to her. “If you don’t name your first child after me, I’m never speaking to you again.”
Ivy: Beg
“I never would have said that!”
“I know. Because you’re a chicken. But you were thinking it. You want him to beg you.”
She did. She wanted Grant to beg her on his knees because it was probably the only way she was ever going to believe he really wanted her.
Her phone vibrated once in her palm, and she didn’t even have to open the message because the preview was enough.
Grant: Mark me. Use me. Please.
She didn’t even get a chance to show Brad before another message appeared.
Grant: Pretty please ??
“If you wanted to, you could probably walk him like a dog,” Brad commented, looking over her shoulder.
“You need your internet privileges revoked.”
“Like you’ve never fallen down a weird porn rabbit hole.” His forehead wrinkled in concentration. “I feel like all that’s left is to name a time and place.”
She stared at their text thread, the consequences of her own actions staring back at her.
Was this what Icarus had felt like when the wax started to melt on his wings?
She’d flown too close to the sun with no plan for coming down.
A time and a place was premeditated, but she could only be bold spontaneously.
Grant: Pretty, pretty please
“He wanted to get together tonight.” Her voice was thin with anxiety.
“That’s perfect,” Brad declared, then adjusted to her mood. “What’s going on? We were having fun and now you’re a whiter shade of pale.”
“What if I’ve built up his expectations and I’m awkward and disappointing?”
“Were you awkward and disappointing last night?”
“No,” she mumbled.
“Exactly. Stop worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet and remember that if it goes really, really badly, your parents are moving and you never have to come back here.” He tapped her dark phone screen. “Now, text that man back before you give him anxiety.”
She agonized over a way to cool the jets without killing the mood, and then the answer came to her in a flash of brilliance.
Ivy: I’ll consider it
She handed Brad her phone again because she wouldn’t be able to drive if it stayed in her possession.
“Since you brought up never coming back…what’s your plan with Tony? You’ve been pretty hot and heavy the last few days.”
“I think a little mandatory distance will be good for us. I mean, we haven’t exactly been talking, if you catch my drift,” Brad said.
“You have all the subtlety of an avalanche.”
“There’s something really nice about long distance. Our great-grandparents wrote love letters during wars.”
Ivy tilted her head. “Are you comparing your sexts to your great-grandparents’ wartime love letters?”
“I’m being serious. I really like Tony, but I know that if I stayed here, I’d be moving into his place by the weekend.
I want the chance to miss him. I want to pine.
I want to be a little fucking miserable over him.
And if he feels the same way, it’ll be worth my time to come back.
” Brad took out his own phone, probably to text Tony.
“I also haven’t told him about all the reality TV shows I watch yet.
I want to keep that mystique going for a little while longer. ”
“You haven’t talked about it yet? But it’s such a big part of your life.”
“My Real Housewives addiction? Absolutely not.”
Ivy left her hand palm-up near the gear shift and a moment later, Brad took it and squeezed.
“I guess I’m a little chicken, too.” He took a deep breath, then sighed. “What if he doesn’t want to try long distance? Is it too much of an ask at this point?”
“The only person who can answer that is Tony,” she said. “But if it was me? I’d want to date you even if you were going to the moon.”
Ivy gave Brad a reassuring smile even though her stomach was twisting into a tight knot.
Would Grant still be interested in her when she went back to work?
The last time she’d left Coeur-de-Lac, she didn’t hear from him for ten years.
Sure, he said wonderful things to her face, but what would happen when she could only be a person in his pocket?
For now, it felt like she and Grant were safely contained in a glittering snow globe.
Inside its protection, they didn’t have to concern themselves with the outside world.
Life in the globe was simple. The only things she had to worry about were her dad’s retirement party, and how soon she’d be able to sit in Grant’s lap again.
They wouldn’t be able to stay inside the snow globe forever. Logically, Ivy knew that—knew that eventually, reality would scoop them up and shake, shake, shake, until they were trapped in a blizzard so fierce, they wouldn’t be able to see past their own noses.
She only hoped that when the storm cleared, they’d still be able to find each other.