Page 122 of Handsome Devil
“She does.”
“So, this is for Mommy again?”
“Fuck you,” I grumbled.
“Don’t be so hard on him,” Shane said. “You’d marry someone your family liked too if it meant you got thirteen billion dollars out of it.” He flicked his chin at me. “Just divorce her later if you need to. Or see whoever you want on the side.” He eyed me, considering. “Is that your plan?”
“Nope,” Lex answered for me. “He likes this one. Just like he did in high school.”
“You know nothing,” I muttered, to neither of them in particular, or maybe both of them.
“I know you,” Lex said simply.
“So you think the plan is to stay with her?” Shane asked Lex, like I wasn’t even there.
Lex was silent for a minute, as he took a final drag and then pinched out the end of his joint. “It’s worse than that,” he said, flicking the roach into the night. “He doesn’t have a plan.”
Finally, somewhere near midnight, right about the time I was about to go looking for them, I heard the girls coming up the path.
Lex had been wandering down to the beach every half hour or so to see if they needed fresh drinks and generally keep checking on them, because I was pretty sure he’d been given a directive on that. Anything happened to Katie Mayes, wife of Jesse Mayes, Lex got drawn and quartered by his motorcycle club. Apparently that big dude Jesse hung out with was his best friend, and he was pretty high up in the organization.
My cousin had always been loyal to me, and I knew he was loyal to that club.
He even cut himself off from the rum punch after a few, unlike Shane, who really had zero responsibility here other than witnessing this shit show.
I got to my feet when I heard the girls coming, and so did Lex. I went down the steps from the patio to meet them on the path.
“Hi,” Katie said, when Devi and I said nothing, just looked at each other. “I’ll just… grab another drink.” She raised her coconut with the straw into the air, then headed up to the patio, where I heard her talking to Lex.
Devi just stood on the path, idly brushing sand off her little dress and more or less ignoring me. She was wearing her crocheted wedding dress over an orange bikini. I could see her skin through the loose knit.
I’d tried not to stare at her skin through those holes at the wedding, but now that it was night and we were alone… I stared.
“Nice day at the beach?” I asked her.
“Yup. Beautiful. How’s the pool?”
“Too many sausages for a good party, but not bad.”
Silence.
“It’s getting late,” I said. “We should go up.”
“Yeah. I just want to talk to Katie for a sec. And grab a shower. You know. Sand.”
Really? She’d just talked to Katie for hours on end. Was she seriously planning to avoid me all night?
Or for the next four months?
I slipped my hand around her arm, gently, and tugged her over to the bottom of the staircase that wound up to the master bedroom, a little more out of earshot of the patio. Then I let her arm go.
She looked up at me; a guarded look.
“You don’t have to sleep with me tonight,” I told her, even though there was a steady flow of blood and anticipation already making my dick throb, and urging me to take that the fuck back. “We just have to sleep in the same room. So it looks real.”
“Okay,” she said, like it was a non-issue. Like she hadn’t even thought about whether or not we’d be sleeping together tonight. Or fucking.
But if it was a non-issue, she wouldn’t be avoiding it like this.
