The Hot One(2)

As for me? Mister fast on his feet, quick with a word, never met a situation he can’t talk his way out of? Scratch all that right then and there. Because I dropped the cubes. I dropped the beanbag. And I dropped the orange balls in a pile of wreckage at my feet.

My jaw fell, too.

But the best part? All that came out of my mouth was a muffled Hey.

Yep. Eight years later and I could only utter a monosyllable.

Height of my mother-fucking unbrilliance.

She rolled her eyes and shook her head as she trotted past me. Over her shoulder, she called out, “How’s the juggling working out for you now, Tyler?”

Oh, zinger, how you slay me.

The lady won.

The lady killed it.

“Great. I kept it up,” I shouted.

She gave herself away for a sliver of a second, and if I were in court, I’d have known then I had her. She let her gaze linger far too long. Giving me that patented you-were-in-my-fantasies-last-night look I knew so well, her eyes roaming down my face, my chest, and yeah, there, right fucking there, to her favorite part.

She loved that part.

But this wasn’t a courtroom battle.

Because when she cast her pretty brown eyes to my niece, I saw Delaney adding up the years and computing possibilities. “Looks like you sure did,” she said, deadpan all the way.

She snapped her gaze from me, zeroed in on the path in front of her, and sprinted.

With her friends and the dogs flanking her, she tore past and left me in the dust with my balls, my jaw, and my composure lying in the dirt at my feet.

To say I’d been thinking of her every day for the last eight years would be a lie. To say I’d gone those eight years without ever once thinking of her would be an even bigger fib.

But I sure as hell didn’t expect to run into her one fine Sunday morning in the park. I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t ready. And my first thought was to catch up and explain that I hadn’t ditched her to have a kid. Closing the distance would have been easy. I can run like the wind. I can put one foot in front of the other and hoof it. But I had my favorite person with me, and no way was I going to drag Carly in a chase after a girl I once loved like the sun.

Still, I tried.

I grabbed Carly’s hand and yelled. “Delaney!”

She didn’t even turn around, and soon she was a speck rounding the bend.

I suppose, in retrospect, the last words out of my mouth when I dumped her shouldn’t have been, “It’s too hard to juggle classes and you.”





Her Prologue





I’m cursed.

There’s no other explanation for this thing that happens to me every time I get close.

I’m not talking about horseshoes close, either.

I mean every single time I take the rabbit out for a ride.

The bunny makes it clear it needs a certain stallion to get over the hump.

Do bunnies even like horses?

I don’t know, but it pisses me off that my traitorous body seems to need one man, and one man only, to fly off the cliff.

I don’t ask for this kind of sexual haunting. Hell, I don’t even believe in ghosts. But the ghost of boyfriends past has been inhabiting my fantasies for years. I try like hell to rely on Henry Cavill, Chris Hemsworth, or Michael Fassbender. I mean, really. Michael Fassbender. And we all know what he’s packing.

But nope.

My brain won’t bend to his Fass.

I’ve learned to stop fighting it. I just go with it when my ex pops into my solo flights. I grit my teeth and bear it, and let him join Bunny to take me to the magic land. Then I turn off the pink toy, tuck it into the drawer, and drift asleep, satisfied, but also not.

That’s been my life for the last year and a half. The biggest and littlest Os come with double-A assistance. So Bunny and I have gotten a lot closer. Sometimes, we make it a double.

And in the mornings, I pretend I didn’t get off to Tyler Fucking Nichols.

That man.

That cocky jerk who broke my heart.

But even if he inhabits my naughty imagination, I do take some solace in knowing I’m over Tyler. I’m so over the way he ended things eight years ago. I’ve moved on, thank you very much. This is purely a physical possession, nothing more. Hell, it’s not really a surprise that my mind wanders to his particular talents, given the way he owned my body when we were younger. But I sure do wish he’d stop crashing my BYOB— that’s bring your own batteries—parties.

One Sunday morning, I stumbled upon the key to exorcising him.

Here’s how it all went down.

I popped out of bed, washed my face, brushed my teeth, pulled my hair into a ponytail, and tugged on my running shorts.

A little later, I met up with my good friends Penny and Nicole at the entrance to Central Park, and we began our training run for a 10K race we’re doing in a few weeks. I figured it would be just another morning jog, followed by a plate of two eggs, any style, with a strong mug of green tea at my favorite sidewalk café, The Charming Breakfast Spot.

Instead, I saw him.

Juggling.

Of all things, the man was juggling.

The spitting image of irony.

At the edge of the grass by the running path, he spun five objects in an oblong blur with the most adorable little brown-haired girl by his side. Who looked just like him.

And in the blink of an eye, I seethed.