Well Matched (Well Met #3)(22)

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That Thursday night, Caroline brought cupcakes to our neighborhood book club.

“Oh, great,” Marjorie muttered from where she sat next to me on the couch. “She got laid again.”

I snorted into my wine. Marjorie wasn’t wrong. Ever since Caroline’s divorce was finalized a year and a half ago, she’d become . . . promiscuous. Word floated around, on the nights that she didn’t make book club, that her marriage had been pretty dead for the five years previous, and with it her sex life. So now that she was single again she was making up for lost time. And every time she did, she brought cupcakes to book club to celebrate.

Not that I was judging her for it. It meant free cupcakes for me. And I probably would have done the same thing in her shoes. When I’d actually been in her shoes, roughly seventeen years ago, I’d had an infant, which had been a deterrent against getting any further action in my life. So get some, Caroline, was my opinion. Not that anyone ever asked. I was the quiet one in the group, and that was the way I liked it.

After all, I still remembered those early days in Willow Creek, of buying this house and moving in with my young daughter. After some pointed where’s Mr. Parker? kinds of questions, I’d drawn the curtains. Shut myself into my house. Hidden myself and my daughter away to keep us safe from small-town gossip. Sure, I’d been single for a few years at that point, but the shame, the sting of being rejected by the man who’d promised to always love me, was still there, like it was stamped on my forehead for everyone to see. It was easier to assume the worst in people rather than feel like that again. But then Marjorie had extended the olive branch, inviting me to book club and bringing me into the neighborhood fold. It was nice, for the most part. But sometimes I wondered what they said about me the nights I wasn’t there.

“How has everyone’s month been?” Caroline put her Tupperware platter of postcoital cupcakes on the coffee table and took off the lid. “Anybody do anything fun?”

“Not as fun as you.” I leaned forward and snagged a cupcake and a napkin from the pile next to them. Red velvet, hell yeah. She caught my eye and we grinned across the table at each other in divorcée solidarity.

“You need to get out there, April,” Caroline said. “There’s lots of stuff going on. Ladies’ nights, meetups. You should come out with me sometime. Earn yourself some cupcakes of your own.”

“She’s got a point,” Marjorie said. She reached for a cupcake even though she’d been disparaging them a minute ago. “Caitlin’s off to college soon, right? You can get back to working on yourself then.”

“I’m good.” I sounded nonchalant as I picked the wrapping off the bottom of the cupcake and licked frosting off my thumb. I always sounded nonchalant, because that was the easiest way to get through life. “Your idea of working on yourself seems to involve going out, crowds. Things that involve putting on pants.” I shuddered. “Can’t I live vicariously through you and your sex cupcakes?”

Marjorie choked on her mouthful of cake, and Caroline shrugged in an exaggeratedly helpless manner. “I tried. I want to see you happy, that’s all.”

“Oh, I am. As long as you keep bringing cupcakes to book club.” I polished off said cupcake and reached for another. I wasn’t getting laid, but I was getting plenty of sugar. Close enough, right?

As Marjorie turned the talk away from my lack of a sex life and back onto the book we’d been reading, I ran my finger around the edge of the second cupcake, scooping up the frosting and depositing it directly into my mouth without needing cake as a vehicle. For a split second, I imagined telling the group about Mitch. About how I’d agreed to pretend to be his girlfriend this weekend. I thought about the girl talk that would ensue, and while there was a part of my soul that craved that kind of connection with other people, I knew I’d shrivel under that kind of spotlight. I didn’t want it. Caroline and her cupcakes could have it.

Anyway, this whole thing with Mitch and me didn’t count. It wasn’t real. A friend helping a friend—nothing that would lead to sex cupcakes. Nothing more than a weekend hanging off of one of Mitch Malone’s giant biceps, doing my damnedest to throw enough loving glances his way to fool every member of his family.

Oh God, this was going to be a disaster.





Seven





Caitlin hardly said a word to me before school on Friday morning. She glared at Emily’s bag in the guest room, huffed a few times at me, and then she was off. I could have made a big deal about it, but my mind was already a few hours ahead, on Mitch’s gargantuan red pickup truck pulling into my driveway and getting this weekend started. I already wanted it to be over.

My pulse spiked when he arrived, but I forced some deep breaths as I gathered my things and locked the front door behind me. It was going to be fine. It was all going to be fine.

“All set, honey?” Mitch stressed the last word as he hoisted my suitcase without asking, stowing it in the back of his extended cab, next to his leather duffel-shaped overnight bag. Seeing our bags nestled together like that didn’t do anything for my anxiety. This wasn’t me. I didn’t go away for a weekend with a man. What was I doing?

But I forced myself to breathe through the anxiety. I was an adult. I could do this. I made myself smile and roll my eyes at him—the kind of reaction he was used to from me, as opposed to terror. “Let’s go, babe.” I pulled myself up and into the passenger seat.