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It doesn’t matter.
It’s not the end of the world.
Yet when I think about Sunday, my belly gives an uncomfortable warble.
I’ll be at Kayley’s father’s club with her, and I just know I’m going to end up on my own, imagining a world in which I’m the girl who gets swept off her feet, in which I’m the girl with the heart-red envelope.
Kayley has been talking excitedly about seeing her boyfriend the whole semester, so I can hardly blame her if she does end up off someplace with him.
It’s not her fault I’m alone.
Then my thoughts flit to Liam Larson, Kayley’s dad, and my belly does something else entirely.
Tingles start to dance around me, moving down to my inner thighs, creeping close to my panties. I’ve never met him before, but I’ve seen photographs online, and I’ve watched recordings of his MMA fights.
He was a fighter in his twenties and early thirties, and now – at forty-two years old – he’s a businessman who owns bars and combat gyms all over Maine.
In the videos of his MMA fights, his heavyweight body is tight with muscle, a seven-foot giant carved of marble, tattoos covering his arms and his chest and all the way across his back. His hair oaken brown, now mostly silver, and left a little long, smoothing over his forehead.
But that’s not the image I did something bad to last night.
No, the image that made me crawl beneath my covers and prop the laptop on my bedside table – the image that guided my hand down between my thighs to still the pumping need there – was one taken a few months ago.
It was an article about his help coaching the children at Crest Fall Combat Gym, the gym in Kayley’s hometown. It was of him standing at the front of the class in baggy shorts and a tank top, his arms exposed and glistening in the stark lights of the workout room. His hair was silver and cut shorter than it had been in his youth. His face showed the subtle sheen of a five o’clock shadow, his strong jaw covered in iron.
He was staring seriously at his charges. But I felt like he was staring seriously at me.
I zoomed the image in, cutting out the children until only Liam filled my screen.
I touched myself.
I couldn’t stop.
It was like some crazy compulsion had taken hold of me, something beyond my control.
I imagined something impossible.
I imagined Liam grabbing me by the shoulders and shoving me up against the wall, bringing his lips to mine and kissing me savagely.
A silly girl’s fantasy rose in my mind, something far too immature for a woman of twenty years old.
I imagined him whispering to me in his gravelly voice, a voice I’d heard only in interviews online.
“You’ll never have to spend Valentine’s day alone again,” he’d snarled in my mind. “You’ll never have to feel alone again. I’m here for you, Lola.”
I snap my eyes open, the fantasy becoming far too vivid and compelling in my mind.
My sex tingles with the remembered pleasure, the way I squirmed between the sheets, as if for a moment Liam’s manhood was between my legs, plunging, owning.
I reach under my chair and take my Kindle from my bag.
I need to calm down before we reach Crest Fall. I have to get rid of these crazy notions whirring around my mind ever since I first laid eyes on Liam Larson’s photographs online.
Putting aside the fact that he’s Kayley’s father and I’d never do that to her, the cold truth is that he’d never want a woman like me.
I know that he and Kayley’s mother are separated and haven’t spoken in years, but despite that, he still wouldn’t want me.
He’s a millionaire.
He’s a ripped-as-hell ex-MMA fighter.
He probably has women lining up around the block for him, sleek, stylish, socialite women who know all the best ways to please a man.
What do I have to offer him?
I spend the rest of the flight trying to focus on Wuthering Heights, but every time Bronte tells me, Heathcliff, I see Liam instead. I imagine myself being swept into this turbulent romance, only in this story there’s a happily ever after. I push those thoughts aside each time they arise, but that’s the problem.
They won’t stop.
We’re landing in Maine late Thursday night, which means I only have to get through Friday, Saturday, and Sunday before we fly back to school. Surely I can do that without losing my mind, without torturing myself with impossible fantasies concerning my best friend’s dad.
I’ll just lock it all away.
Even if the thoughts flutter through my mind from time to time, I’ll console myself with the certainty that he’d laugh in my face if I ever voiced them aloud.
Finally, we land, the plane giving a slight judder as the wheels make contact with the landing strip. I grip the arms of my chair and take in deep, slow breaths.
