Page 182 of The Wild Card

It’s not slow this time. It’s not lazy Saturday morning sex. This is hours of pent-up frustration and a ruined orgasm and the unbearable agony of making small talk with my parents while my body was screaming at me to drag this man to the nearest horizontal surface. Or vertical surface. Any surface.

He’s murmuring against my neck—half-words, my name—and I’ve got my fingers in his hair, holding on because the rhythm he’s set is relentless and perfect and building toward the exact place I was this morning before the Buick from hell rolled into our driveway.

“Em, I’m—” he starts. “Getting close.”

“Me too. Don’t stop. I swear if anything interrupts us right now, I will commit actual crimes—”

The unmistakable sound of tires on gravel.

No.

No!

Crew stops moving. We stare at each other. His jaw is clenched so hard I can see the muscle twitching. I’m fairly sure my eye is doing the same thing.

“If that’s your mother again,” he says very quietly, “we’re moving to Alaska.”

A car door slams. Then another.

Then Foster’s voice echoes across the property, “JENSEN! OPEN UP! WE BROUGHT CHAMPAGNE, YOU ENGAGED SON OF A BITCH!”

And Sadie’s, right behind him. “EMMIE! I’M SO HAPPY FOR YOU! I’M GOING TO CRY! I’M ALREADY CRYING!”

I drop my forehead to Crew’s shoulder.

“This isn’t happening.”

“It’s happening.”

“Crew, I am naked on a wall and you are inside me and our best friends are in the driveway with champagne.”

He exhales through his nose. Slowly. The way he does when he’s talking himself out of something drastic. Like possibly committing a double homicide.

Then he pulls out—and the sound I make is not dignified. It’s a whimper. A genuine, pathetic, full-body whimper, because this is the second time today and my body is staging a revolt.

“Twice,” I say as he sets me down. My legs are jelly. I grab the bookshelf for support. “Twice in one day. That has to be a record. Some kind of horrible, unsexy, cursed record.”

“Get dressed.”

“I don’t want to get dressed! I want to finish having sex with my fiancé in our cabin without the entire state of Oklahoma showing up!”

More knocking. “JENSEN! I can see your truck! I know you’re in there!”

Crew, still naked, scans the room for something—I don’t know what he’s looking for until he grabs the potted fern off the bookshelf.

“What are you doing?”

He holds the fern at waist level.

“Oh my word,” I whisper. “You are not answering the door holding a potted plant over your—”

He’s already walking. Shirtless, barefoot, one hand gripping a potted fern like a fig leaf in front of his junk. He grabs his wallet as he passes the table.

I flatten myself against the wall—still naked, still throbbing, fully unhinged—and listen.

The front door opens.

There’s a beat of silence, then Foster laughs. “Dude. Are you naked?”