"I haven't seen you around in forever," she said, stepping closer, tilting her chin up. "Where have you been hiding? We missed you at the Henderson’s last month."
She was touching his arm now. Light. Familiar. Her fingers resting on his forearm like they'd been there before.
"We've been great, actually."
I turned and smiled. The smile I'd perfected at Dallas fundraisers — warm enough to pass, sharp enough to cut. "It's so kind of you to ask."
Margarita Barbie looked at me. The smile stayed on her face, but something behind it recalculated.
Then she turned back to Clay, angling her shoulder toward me — a move so deliberate it might as well have been captionedI wasn't talking to you, sweetheart— and parted her lips to try again.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't think I was finished."
She turned back. The smile was gone now. I stepped forward. I was shorter than her by three inches, even in heels, and I didn't care. Something was coursing through me — not anger, not jealousy, something hotter and cleaner than both. Certainty. The bone-deep, Clay-Blackwood-given certainty that I was allowed to take up space.
"I'm Callie," I said. "I'm the woman he's going home with. Tonight and every other night. And you seem lovely, but this conversation is over."
Margarita Barbie stared at me. Her jaw worked. She looked at Clay — looking, I assumed, for an apology or a rescue. Clay's lip twitched. Just the corner. The barely-there twitch that I'd learned meant he was holding back something enormous. Margarita Barbie saw it too. Whatever she found in his face wasn't rescue.
"Right," she said. Picked up her margarita. Walked away.
Clay watched her go. The twitch became a grin — slow, spreading, the full-voltage Clay Blackwood grin that started in his eyes and didn't stop until it had rearranged his entire face.
He grabbed my hand. Pulled me off the dance floor so fast my heel caught on the edge of the wood.
"What are you —"
"You," he said, his mouth against my ear, his voice rough and low and vibrating through every nerve I had, "are the hottest fucking woman I have ever known. Please never stop being you."
He pulled me through the crowd, past the bar where Bev raised a margarita in salute without breaking conversation, down the narrow hallway past the kitchen, and into the single-stall bathroom. The lock clicked behind us.
"Clay, we are not —"
He kissed me. I kissed him back. My back hit the door and his hands were in my hair and we were both grinning — grinning into the kiss, grinning while he fumbled with my zipper and I yanked his buckle loose, grinning like two people who had lost their minds and were thrilled about it.
"Left side," I gasped. "The zipper's on the left side."
"I know where the zipper is —"
"You clearly do not —"
He found the zipper. I found his belt. The band kicked into the Garth Brooks number thirty feet away and the bass shook the walls and I laughed against his throat — breathless, wild, a laugh I didn't recognize as mine.
"Perfect timing," I said.
He lifted me. I wrapped my legs around him and the door rattled against its hinges and he pressed his forehead against mine with his eyes open and we were both still smiling — stupid, punch-drunk, ridiculous smiles — and then he moved and the smiling stopped and I grabbed his shoulders and said "Oh" and he said "Yeah" and it was fast and graceless and the best sex I'dever had in a bathroom, which was a category I hadn't known existed until sixty seconds ago.
"Fuck," he breathed against my neck. "Callie —"
"Don't stop — don't you dare —"
He didn't stop. His hand braced against the door, his hips pinning me, and I bit his shoulder to keep from screaming because there were people thirty feet away eating nachos and I had some remaining shred of dignity, though it was fading rapidly —
I came with my face buried in his neck and his name between my teeth, and he followed three seconds later with a groan that the Garth Brooks cover almost but not quite drowned out.
Silence. Both of us breathing hard. The door rattling faintly in the aftershock.
He was still inside me. His forehead dropped to my shoulder and I felt him shaking and for one terrifying second I thought — and then I realized he was laughing.
