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I smile when I see the list that’s started isn’t in her handwriting. “Noel helping you with ideas?”
“I made him take me to that home and hardware place for the lock last night. He started looking at the magazine rack, and—” She waves a hand to the list.
I sit beside her, and when she offers a slice, I take it even though she got ham on it.
I take a bite as penance and make all the non-gaggy appreciative noises before choking it down.
“You already know I met Liam the night I was supposed to marry Ray. You know something happened.”
I try to set the offending slice back in the box, but she nudges it back toward my mouth.
“Something like a wedding in Vegas that you never breathed a single word about? Something like that?”
Ugh. Fine.
I take another disgusting bite, feel the bits of ham on my tongue. Swallow without retching.
Barely.
Then after a big breath, I tell her. All of it. What happened with Ray. My ill-fated plan for revenge. Liam’s strict policy not to sleep with drunk girls… even when he’s married to them.
“Wait,” she interrupts, chin dropped and eyes saucer wide. “You two haven’t had sex?”
Err… “Well, I mean… notthen.”
She leans back, fanning her face. “Oh my God, don’t scare me like that!”
She takes the offending slice out of my hand and bites off a sizeable chunk. “Okay, so get to the good stuff. Was it all up-against-the-wall craziness when you got”— she makes finger-quotes —“‘snowed in’ that first night?”
“Not the first night, either.” When she pushes the pizza toward me again, I shove her back. “But New Year’s Eve…”
“I knew it!”
And once she’s pumped me for every too-private-to-share-under-any-other-circumstance detail, circled back to Ray’s betrayal, and then bounced forward to Liam blowing the whole wedding secret right out of the water, we’re both slumped on the couch.
She’s stunned. But me? I feel freer than I have in more than a year.
“Now that everyone knows, is it like Liam said? You guys in it for real?”
“No. We’re in it for two years, and then we’re going to decide that the NHL life is too hard on our relationship, and we’re going to have an amicable split.”
“But you got it on like Donkey Kong? Isn’t there a chance—”
“This thing between us just got exponentially more complicated. The last thing we need is to muddy the waters even more with sex.”
“But—”
“And yeah, it would be convenient. But I don’t want to be someone’s convenience. Something tells me Liam wouldn’t either.”
Misty rolls her eyes at that. “Okay, but—”
“Two years isn’t that long.”
“Two years isn’t that long if you’re living alone. But stuck sharing space with the guy who blew your mind with his magic peen?”
I laugh, though it’s not quite as easy as before. “We’ll be fine.”
She sits back and crosses her arms, lips tucked in between her teeth long enough that I lean in to bump her shoulder. “What?”
