Chapter 9
Shay folded the silk scarf carefully and put it on Rosie’s bedside table. “That has to be a record.”
Rosie licked her lips and stretched luxuriously. The way her body went taut made Shay want to start all over again. Rosie had a way of making every time they got together just as sexy as the first.
“I can’t get enough of the way you taste, and you come even harder after you’ve been tied up and teased—”
“For an hour,” Shay said. “What did you expect?”
Rosie laughed. “I didn’t expect to choke.”
“You’re complaining?”
Rosie shook her head. “Never. Like I said, you taste amazing… And you look amazing, by the way, which is one of the reasons I want you to help me sell wrenches and whatnot.”
Shay sat up, not quite grasping what Rosie had just said or how she’d made the switch from sex to tools. “You want me to do what?”
“Make you the face of Unity Tools and build a whole marketing campaign based around your garage.”
Shay propped herself up after fluffing her pillows, deciding to stay a while to see where this conversation led. “It’s not my garage. There are five of us.”
Rosie smiled. “I know that. And you all appeal to different markets—”
“You want to sell us?”
“No!” Rosie shifted to sit sideways and ran her fingers along Shay’s arm.
“I want to sell the tools, which your beautiful face will help me do. And you’ll get as many sets of the tools as you need for the garage, plus image-rights fees.
It’s free advertising for you too; you’ll get a whole new customer group to boost your turnover. ”
Shay blew out a breath and rolled her eyes. “Isn’t this just another company trading on our fears around inequality and profiting from it?”
“They’re not like that,” Rosie said, “although I had the exact same thought after I’d come down from the initial excitement of the idea of dressing you up in greasy overalls and shooting you with dark, moody lighting.”
Shay grinned. That did sound like fun. “It’s like you think I’m your walking, talking lesbian fantasy.”
“I do, and you are. You can fuck me in your garage on the hood of your muscle car anytime you want.” Rosie trailed her fingers over Shay’s breast and circled her nipple with her nail.
“But these photos would be for public consumption,” she glanced at her phone and wiggled her eyebrows, “unlike the ones I’ve just taken. ”
“Which you’ll never be tempted to use for revenge porn, right?” Shay’s question wasn’t serious. Rosie was crazy in bed, but she wasn’t that kind of crazy.
“I wouldn’t share those with anyone.” Rosie arched her eyebrow.
“A thing loses its value when too many people enjoy it. Anyway, the company is committed to donating ten percent of their net profit to LGBTQ charities and causes. It’s written into their articles of formation.
Plus, their whole management team is from our community. You can meet them if you like.”
“And you’d be in charge of everything, would you?” Shay could get on board with the idea if she got to see Rosie in action, all ice queen and bossy femme.
Rosie tweaked her nipple, and Shay lifted her hips from the bed. Damn, she couldn’t get enough of her touch.
“Like the sound of that, do you?” Rosie whispered before she shifted and took Shay’s nipple into her mouth. She straddled Shay, pressing her pussy against Shay’s stomach.
Shay put her hands on Rosie’s hips, but Rosie grasped her wrists and pushed her arms above her head.
“Do you want me to be in charge of everything?” Rosie asked.
“Sometimes,” Shay whispered and lifted her head to capture Rosie’s breast in her mouth.
Rosie laughed lightly and pulled away. “So you’ll talk to your boys about it?”
“My boys?”
“Boys with an i? Bros? Lori’s my girl, but I don’t think Gabe would take kindly to being called that.”
“Let’s not talk about Gabe right now.” Shay moaned when Rosie tightened her grip and ground her hips down hard on Shay’s stomach. She felt slick against Shay’s skin, making Shay want to bury herself inside Rosie again.
“But you’ll ask them?”
Shay nodded.
“I get the feeling you’d agree to anything right now as long as I don’t stop doing what I’m doing.”
Shay slipped out of Rosie’s grasp and wrestled her onto her back.
“I’ll ask them, but I’m making no promises,” she said and kissed Rosie hard before she could speak.
The only promises Shay made were ones she was sure she could keep, like the one she made to herself about keeping this situation simple.
What she and Rosie had was working well for both of them.
She’d just have to make sure that if the rest of the team agreed to do this tool company thing, it wouldn’t muddy the waters.
Solo swallowed the last of her beer and reached for another one from the cooler.
Shay pushed the box away from Solo’s grasp with her foot. “If you have another, I take your keys. I’m pretty sure Gabe isn’t ready to be a brom just yet.”
Solo frowned, and everyone else looked just as confused.
“It’s short for bro mom, like a masc parent who doesn’t want to be called Mommy.” Shay sighed. “Don’t you guys know anything?”
“I don’t want to know anything about parenting, thanks,” RB said. “I don’t want to be bound to another adult, let alone be responsible for a tiny human.” She waved her hot dog in the air. “I don’t need to know what a mini-me would call me.”
Gabe clinked her bottle to Woody’s. “Shay’s right though, and I might never be ready to be a brom—though that’s a great word.”
“Lori is already talking children?” Woody asked.
Gabe held up her hand. “Weren’t you supposed to be deciding whether you wanted another beer or not, Solo?”
Solo got up from her chair and popped the top on another bottle, then she dropped her car keys onto the table beside the BBQ. “I need this more than I need to drive. I’ll get a Lyft home.”
“Are you ready to tell us what’s happening with you and Janie?” Shay asked.
“Yeah, spill, Solo,” RB said. “It’s been like working at a morgue this week. I could get more conversation out of a dead guy.”
Gabe glared at RB, and Shay did the same when RB looked to her for backup.
“Come on, RB,” Shay said. “This isn’t a joke. It’s Solo’s marriage and family we’re talking about.”
“Okay, okay, I get it. I’m sorry. I’m just trying to lighten the mood.”
“Sometimes the mood has to be what it is. Right, Solo?” Shay squeezed Solo’s shoulder, and she nodded. “But we’re your family, and you can talk to us about anything.”
Solo took a long pull on her beer and dropped back into the soft lounge chair. “I’ve moved into the spare room. Janie doesn’t want to share the same bed with me anymore.”
Shay shared a worried glance with Gabe. If this was the end, Solo could go off the rails spectacularly; she’d never been good at handling bad situations, preferring to lose herself in the oblivion of alcohol than deal with them directly.
Which was why no one could’ve been more surprised than Shay when Solo called to invite her to their wedding.
She could never have imagined that Solo would settle down, let alone be the first one of them to do so.
In her peripheral vision, she saw RB almost bursting to make some amusing comment, so she shook her head. This wasn’t the time for their usual banter.
“Has she told you any more about the person she’s talking to?” Gabe asked.
“She won’t tell me anything about him, other than he’s a lawyer at her firm. And she says there’s nothing going on between them. She says he’s just a friend.”
Talk about mic drop. Judging by the look on everyone else’s faces, they’d assumed the same as she had: that the other person was another woman.
Now that Shay thought about it, Solo hadn’t mentioned gender when she said Janie was “talking” to someone.
The bombshell opened up a whole heap of other questions.
“I thought… Is Janie…” Shay sighed. If she couldn’t find the right questions, it was up to Gabe. She widened her eyes at Gabe, and her answering expression made it clear she didn’t know what the hell to say to that either.
“She’d never been with a woman until me,” Solo said finally. “Well, not since college, and she said they’d just made out.”
Shit. This was beyond any of their little family’s experience. What if Solo had just been a blip in Janie’s otherwise gold-star heterosexuality? Solo could compete with another woman, but a man presented a whole different challenge, especially if that’s who Janie had been used to in her bed.
“She’s bisexual?” Gabe asked.
Solo took another slug of her beer. “I don’t know, and I’m not sure Janie has a label for herself. It was a non-issue when we hooked up, and we didn’t really discuss it because it didn’t seem important. We were together, and the past was irrelevant because we were committing to each other.”
“And now?” Shay picked at the edge of the beer label.
“Now she’s talking to a guy and says she needs some space to work things out.”
“Okay, that’s what she wants.” Shay looked at Solo. “What about what you want? Do you want to fight for your family or let her go?”
Solo frowned. “I don’t want to let her go. And I’m definitely not letting my kids go. But I don’t know how much control I’ve got over any of it.”
Everyone was silent for a few minutes. They were used to fixing broken engines—relationships were a whole lot harder to put back together once the cracks started appearing.
But that had been Rosie’s old job, hadn’t it? “Would you go to counseling?” Shay asked.
Solo nodded. “I’ll try anything. But I don’t know if Janie would go with me.”
“Maybe not, but she said that you’ve stopped seeing her since the kids came into your life. You could spend some time working on that issue and yourself. It would show Janie that you’re serious about fighting for the relationship. About fighting for her.”
Solo edged to the front of her chair, and some of the sadness in her eyes seemed to lift.
“That could work,” Solo said, sounding hopeful. “Do you know someone?”