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“No.” It comes out in a sigh. “Not really.”
A heavy arm drops around my shoulders, startling me. Tom’s warm, boozy breath bathes my face.
“If you’re gonna dance with anybody, it should be me…I met you first.”
“Technically, I met her first,” Emma says.
I can’t shake off his arm. I duck my head, sneaking a glance back at Dane.
He’s gone, the empty wine bottle abandoned on the sand.
* * *
14
DANE
Ican’t sleep for shit when I get home from the bonfire, and the next day is worse. I keep waiting for Tom’s truck to racket past, torturing myself with the idea that he might already be at Remi’s house, that he might have been there all night long if he came home with her after the party.
I shouldn’t have left like that, but I couldn’t stand those carrot-topped fuckers swarming her. Whispering in her ear.
Emma never liked me. She looks sweet, but she’s possessive.
Now she’s latched onto Remi, just my fucking luck. Apparently, we have exactly the same taste in women—who would have thought, when Emma and I have nothing else in common.
By all appearances, neither do Remi and Lila—but there must be something that drew me in, and Emma, too. Because here I am, obsessed with the wrong woman all over again and right back to making terrible decisions.
It was just supposed to be coercive sex. No emotion involved.
So why am I pacing the main floor of my house, watching the window?
Tom finally does drive past, alone in his truck and looking like shit, which cheers me up slightly. I hope Remi’s pissed that he didn’t show up to work until two o’clock in the afternoon.
She’s due at my place at seven.
I watch the hours tick past, anxious and almost angry, like she’s already decided not to come.
What did they say to her?
It doesn’t matter. If Emma hasn’t filled Remi’s ear with poison, someone else will. It’s only a matter of time.
I hate them all, those fucking hypocrites.
It won’t matter…as long as Remi keeps coming back.
At 7:04, I hear that familiar rattling engine I’ve come to anticipate like Pavlov’s dogs, saliva flooding my mouth. I come out onto the porch because I don’t care if she sees me waiting.
“Sorry I’m late.” Remi slams her car door to make it stay closed. “Tom wouldn’t shut up.”
She crosses over to the porch and joins me without even grabbing her tool bag out of the trunk. She’s dressed for work, but all her gravity is toward the cool of the house, not the half-fixed fence in the sun-blasted orchard.
That’s where I want to go, too.
I look at her, unsmiling. “Did you just tell me that to make me jealous?”
She tilts her chin up, those black eyebrows wicked in mirth. “Depends…did it work?”
“No.” I seize a handful of her hair and kiss her impudent mouth. “But only because I was already jealous.”
