Pucked Off (Pucked #5)(43)

“Yeah. Why?” I drop down on the couch and look around the room. “Where’s Miller?”

“On the balcony. He’s talking to Sunny.”

“Is everything okay there?”

“I don’t know. She’s having some cramps. She thinks it’s some kind of hiccups or something, and Miller wants her to call the midwife.”

I shake my head. “You know, a year ago if you’d told me he’d be talking babies, I woulda laughed.”

“A lot can change in a short span of time.”

“Isn’t that the truth?” I think about how things went down with Tash. How at the end of last summer it went from nothing to sex to me wanting just her to her not wanting the same. One minute we were whatever we were, and then we weren’t anything. “When you and Lily started hooking up, it was just for the fucking, right?”

Randy sits at the other end of the couch and runs his palm over his beard. “We were just—”

“—having fun. You used to say that a lot.”

Randy nods. “Yeah. I was a fucking idiot.”

“So it wasn’t just about the fun?”

“I mean, yeah, at first that was the whole point, but then things started to change.”

“Change how?”

“I wanted more.”

“I’m glad that worked out for you.” I mean it, though it might sound like I don’t.

Randy regards me for a few seconds, maybe judging my sincerity. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Why do you keep letting Tash screw you over?”

I tap on the arm of the chair. “I’m not gonna let her do that anymore.”

“What happened this last time?”

“I had enough. Like, every fucking time she makes me believe it’s just gonna be me and her, and that we’re gonna work things out or whatever. But then there’s always someone else involved, and it’s never what I think it’s going to be.”

“That’s kinda your thing, though, right?”

It sucks that even one of my closest friends believes this about me. Although, I’ve never given him a reason to think otherwise, because then I’d have to explain more than I want to.

“Not like you think. And when Tash and I started hanging out, it wasn’t like that. Not at first. And it wasn’t supposed to be anything, but then suddenly it was.”

“When did it change?”

“I don’t know. I think maybe it was when you and Miller went to that camp up in Canada last summer that it started to be…something real, I guess. Or I thought it was real. Nothing really happened between us until just before Waters’ engagement party, though. Tash likes to play games.”

“Miller thought something was going on between you two before that.”

“Before the camp thing?”

“Yeah.” Randy tips back his water and takes a long drink. “Think back to the night you and that chick drew a dick on Miller’s forehead. You were weird about Tash even then.”

I give him a look. I know now that was also the night Poppy came to my house. Mostly I remember seeing the dick pictures on my social media feed the next day. They’d gone viral, and gotten Miller in a world of shit with Sunny.

“That chick you were with? She’s the friend of Poppy’s you fucked.”

I try again to piece together the events of that night, but last season I spent about as much time drunk as sober, and it only got worse as I got into things with Tash. “You’re sure about that?”

“Yeah. Poppy was the one who removed the dick from his forehead. You don’t remember that at all?”

I’d probably been focused on the fact that Tash was coming over and there were still bunnies in the house.

I pull up my Instagram, but then I remember I deleted all the pictures because of the shitstorm the dick on Miller’s forehead caused. Well, it wasn’t the dick so much as the presence of the girl in the bed with him. I get now why it wasn’t the best move on my part, but at the time I hadn’t thought past how funny it would be.

I flip to my photo stream and scroll back through the pictures until I get to the ones from last summer. It takes me a while to find the dick forehead pics, but when I finally do, I have a hazy recollection of the girl in them.

“I don’t think I screwed that chick.”

“Dude, you don’t even remember meeting Poppy that night. How can you be sure about anything?”

The not remembering Poppy bugs me a lot. I keep trying to find her in my memories, but she’s not there—not the way I want her to be. All I get is the swish of a long, strawberry blond ponytail and the urge to pull the end of it.

I close my eyes, trying to pull up other memories from the night, anything to make a connection between that girl in the picture and Poppy.

As I start talking about the little I recall, more memories trickle in until it becomes a flood. “I remember going upstairs and stopping in my room to grab that girl a shirt. I wanted to check on Miller since he hadn’t come outside.” It had been my excuse to go upstairs since it was late and we had the training session in the morning. I didn’t want bunnies in the house when Tash got there. She was pissy with us when she knew we’d been out partying. Me especially.