“And I’m like a cat, I don’t like getting wet,” Rani tells Artie. “But you have fun though.”
“Come on, then, cow warrior.” Forrest scoops his daughter up under one arm, carrying her like she is a sack of potatoes. Artie squeals with laughter as they disappear back into the castle.
“What. The heck. Happened?” Rani asks me at once.
“What are you talking about?” I ask her, trying to be nonchalant.
“Why are you being so weird?” Rani demands.
“I’m always weird,” I defend myself.
“Weirder,” she qualifies. “Why are you being even weirder around Forrest?”
“What? I didn’t even speak to him or look at him, or touch him.”
“I knew it!” Rani’s eyes widen. “The sexual chemistry between you just then was off the chart. What happened? I need to know, and I need to now.”
“Nothing really,” I say. “Well, except that we had to go and look for Artie in the middle of the night, because she’d gone on an adventure, but the ghost of the Blue Lady showed us where she was, and then we helped her reconcile with her lost daughter, and after that we put Artie to bed andthenafter that we had really, really, really, really, really hot sex. A lot. But that’s all.”
“WHAT?!” Rani shouts so loudly that the ravens scatter from the cedar trees, and a nearby peacock shrieks in terror.
“Shhhhh,” I tell her, motioning for her to keep her voice down. “It was nothing. It was just a casual, spur-of-the-moment sort of thing.”
“Uh-uh, nope, no way I am buying that line from you, Ava Green, the woman who hadn’t even kissed a boy until the day before yesterday or something and even then it was with her sexbot. How has this happened? And why am I the last to know about it? What the hell, so this is what happens when I stop having sex. You start having it. Well, I didn’t know we had a one in, one out system.”
“Rani, shhhh,” I tell her again. “Calm down and I’ll tell you. But not here. We need to get farther away from the chances of being overheard.”
Despite her best efforts to make me talk, I refuse to say anything until we are a decent distance away from the castle and the emerging wedding guests, who are starting to leave. I seem to home in on the cedar trees, from where I can see the little chapel, sitting in the morning sun. Standing here in broad daylight, it’s hard to believe that anything that happened last night was real, and maybe I would think I had dreamt it all if it wasn’t for Forrest’s stubble rash between my thighs.
“Go on then,” Rani says. “No one can hear us now.”
So, I tell her how Hal and I decided that we were not meant to be together romantically, but that before that I drank a lot of champagne, which maybe made me a bit less inhibited than usual, but also how I was completely sober by the time I got woken up by Cecily, and Forrest, Artie, and I had a midnight supernatural adventure.
“And anyway, he didn’t have a top on, and I wasn’t wearing any knickers so...”
“What, you fell onto his dick?” Rani asks.
“Are you cross with me?” I ask her, concerned.
“No, no.” She hugs me. “No, I’m just over here practising abstinence and maybe slightly regretting it. But I am not cross at you, I think it’s brilliant. So you just like went for it?”
“I think it just felt like the right time for both of us to get back in the saddle. Or in the saddle, in my case.”
“OMG, are you okay?” Rani asks me. “Do you feel different?”
“I feel tired, but yes, I am okay,” I tell her. “I am. It was... great and he was... great. There is one tiny problem.”
“What?” Rani asks me.
“I think I’ve fallen in love with him,” I tell her.
“Fuck,” Rani says. “You never could do things by halves.”
Chapter Fifty
“So, what do you want to do?” Rani asks, peering at me as if I am some completely new and unknown species, which in a way I suppose I am. We lean to either side of the thick trunk of the tree, hands linked as we talk.
“Nothing,” I tell her, with a shrug.
