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“Hi, Mom.” He stepped forward and kissed her cheek.
“Is this your date?” she asked, giving me a once-over and a polite smile.
I could only imagine what his mother saw. Pink cheeks, swollen lips, disheveled hair, guilty expression. His mother. Jeez.
“No. This is a friend of Felicia’s who was on the elevator with me. She’s also late,” Sean said, giving me a quick grin.
He had just thrown me under the bus with his mother. Charming. He also looked totally unaffected by our kiss. Or our groping and grinding session masquerading as a kiss. Maybe he made out with strangers in hallways all the time, but I didn’t and it had me rattled.
I cleared my throat and managed to say, “Hi, I’m Isla. The elevator actually got stuck. We’ve been trapped in it for ten minutes.”
“Welcome, welcome,” she said. “Come in. You look like you need a drink after being trapped with Sean. God knows I would.”
There was affection in her voice, but also a little bite. Sean kept his easy smile in place, but I could see his jaw twitch in response to his mother’s jab. I felt a smidge of sympathy for him, as well as for Felicia, who was getting this woman as a mother-in-law. She turned and retreated back into the party.
When Sean leaned over to me and murmured, “Give me your number,” I shook my head.
Did I want to go into a dark room and do dirty, sexy things with him? Yes. Yes, I did.
But something about him brought out heightened reactions on my part. I would lose my cool if I spent any sort of time with him.
I didn’t like to lose my cool.
If you lose your cool, you give someone the upper hand. And I wasn’t doing that.
Not even hot sex was worth that.
I wasn’t surprised the gorgeous brunette turned me down, but I was disappointed. I wasn’t even sure what had happened between us other than it was hot as hell. One second we’d been arguing in the elevator, the next we’d been crushed together and slipping each other tongue like the world was ending in five minutes.
“Why not?” I asked her, because if we had that kind of chemistry after ten minutes, what could we do with a whole night together? It was worth pressing her for an explanation. Let her use me to hate fuck out her anger at some other guy who had obviously made her bitter. I would take that hit and enjoy every single second of it.
“Because I don’t like you,” she said, entering my brother’s apartment.
It was loud inside, festive, with holiday decorations everywhere. She peeled her coat off and I tried to take it from her to hang it up, but she waved me off. “You don’t even know me,” I pointed out, wishing for once my mother had kept her casual disdain of me to herself. She hadn’t sold me very well to Isla.
Normally it was just a mild irritation that my mother liked to take cheap shots at me. It was because I was my mother’s dirty little secret. She had stepped outside of her marriage in her thirties, bored with being a housewife, had an affair, and gotten pregnant with me. I had found out purely by accident when I was seventeen after getting kicked out of prep school for drinking. I overheard my parents arguing and it was obvious that my mother thought her reckless behavior had replicated in my own DNA, since I was a bit of a loose cannon.
My mother thought of Michael as the golden child, and hell, he was. He was a doctor who hadn’t dated for years after his wife’s death and did a crap ton of charity work. He was a good man, who walked a straight line. Me? I was a bit of a fuckup in my earlier years, even before I found out my father wasn’t actually my father. Afterwards I had some really bad years as I tried to reconcile my identity and forgive my mother.
But I didn’t resent my brother at all. He was who he was and I was who I was. It had taken the kitchen to help me understand my origins didn’t matter. What I did as an adult was what was important and I worked my ass off.
“I don’t want to know you,” she said.
That annoyed me just a little. Isla was too instantly dismissive.
“You don’t have to either know me or like me to have a good time with me,” I said. “Obviously. Unless you’re the world’s greatest actress.”
It was the wrong thing to say.
She visibly bristled. “I’m an amazing actress,” she said, her chin up, eyes flashing in anger.
That made me think she was actually in reality an aspiring actress and I had offended her. If anyone was keeping score, I was losing the match with Isla.
I didn’t have a chance to respond before my brother approached us. Normally he would shake my hand and give me a bro hug, but he looked annoyed with me.
Welcome to the club. I had a trifecta going on. Mom, Michael, and Isla all thinking I sucked. I suddenly wanted a drink.
“Where the hell have you been?” Michael asked me. “You’re like an hour late.”
