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“Holy shit,” Cash said.
I had actually shocked him. I was definitely tipsy. I hadn’t meant to actually say that out loud. But I hadn’t eaten dinner and I hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before. Or the fifteen years of night befores before that one. “Holy shit, indeed.”
Cash eyed me like I was a bomb he needed to defuse. “When was the last time you had sex?”
For a second I couldn’t make eye contact with him, but then I realized I’d started this conversation. I needed to finish it. And I don’t like lying to anyone, certainly not to a man who had become a friend and who generously allowed my kids to go horseback riding on his ranch. I shifted in my heels. Unlike Cash, who was dressed super casually, as the invitation had indicated the party would be, I had taken the opportunity to put on tight jeans, a scoop neck satin shirt, and heels.
I spent ninety percent of my life in yoga pants and sneakers. At least I had since John had been killed in a car accident. It was a thrill, if not a little destabilizing, to be in heels.
“With my husband, before he died. Well, obviously before he died. But sadly, an entire two weeks before the car accident. I took getting laid for granted in those days. Stupid me.”
“So it’s been three years?”
“And change.” Three years, four months, and eleven days. Thinking about that day John died, getting that phone call, still had the power to make my shoulders tense and my teeth grind.
“How long were you married?”
“Almost thirteen years.”
“You were what, nineteen, twenty, when you got married?”
I nodded. “Twenty. We had been together since my eighteenth birthday.” I sensed what he was getting at. I wasn’t exactly an ideal candidate for jumping on a dating app, aka a hookup app, and navigating the waters of casual sex. I wasn’t and I knew it. It was why I hadn’t and why I was currently mildly drunk at my sister’s New Year’s Eve party lamenting out loud the lack of dick in my life.
Cash tossed his now empty paper plate into the trash at the end of the island.
For a second, I didn’t think he was going to say anything else, but then he put his large hands on my shoulders and looked down at me. It disarmed me. Given I’m six feet tall, not a lot of men tower over me like he did. But he had a good four inches on me.
“Sera.”
“Cash.” I fought the urge to giggle. He sounded so serious and he was close to me. I could see the flecks of gold in his brown eyes and where he’d missed a spot on his chin when he had shaved. He was wearing a subtle aftershave.
“Promise me you won’t meet up with some random stranger. It could be dangerous, but more likely it will just be disappointing.”
I knew he was right. But Cash was easily seven or eight years younger than me and he sounded so stern. So fatherly. It added to my urge to giggle.
“I’m not going to meet up with total strangers. I can promise you that.”
He eyed me for another second, then nodded, like he’d decided he could believe me. Then he cocked his head and shifted his hand from my shoulder to my hair. He flicked the ends of it, making me shiver a little. What the hell was he doing? I didn’t think he’d ever touched me before tonight and now this was the second time he had in two minutes.
“Did you dye your hair? Weren’t you blonde before?”
Really? He’d been standing and talking to me for ten minutes and he had finally noticed I’d gone from a blonde to a brunette? “Yes, I was blonde. My whole life, mostly, aside from dying it pink once in high school. I just needed a change.”
After my teenage daughter had posted my photo on dating apps and given me the username TallHotBlonde. It was beyond mortifying. And nothing about my current state of being felt “hot.”
“It looks nice.”
That was a lukewarm endorsement.
“Blondes have more fun. I’m not having any fun so it seemed like false advertising.”
“If you get pounded, you’ll dye it back to blonde?”
Now I did laugh. “I guess so. I hadn’t thought it through exactly.”
“I prefer your natural blonde, I’m not going to lie.”
As if I had asked him. “And I would prefer to be having fun via getting pounded, but now we’re just trodding back over old territory.”
“What if you and me solved our mutual problem together?”
It was my turn to choke. I had been taking a sip of my martini and at his unexpected words, I coughed and sprayed vodka and liqueur over my own hand. “Are you suggesting… that we… that you and me… ” I couldn’t say it. I would start giggling again.
Me and Cash? Doing the dirty? It was a ridiculous, silly, impossible, intriguing, practical proposition.
“Yes.”
