Page 84 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

“What?”

“Wings!” he said.

I clapped my hands like an excited child. “Yes!” I cried. “Wings!”

Once the business of ordering the food was done, I became keenly aware of him next to me on the couch. I felt like a vampire mesmerized by the pulse in his throat or something, but we couldn’t start making out before dinner. So I asked questions about his flight and work and whether he’d ever been to California before (he had, though not to Fullerton, because, duh, why would anyone visit Fullerton?). It felt like we were strangers, and I didn’t know how to break through into feeling like we knew each other.

“Your dad is quite intimidating,” JB said. I had briefed him on my dad, but it was another thing to experience it in person.

“Oh, no, did he threaten to cut your dick off?” I asked.

JB laughed. “Now I feel like he was taking it easy on me.”

“Do you ever think about the sort of restrained, almost literary quality of my made-up family, and just comparing it to my real family, aren’t you ever like, ‘Damn, she’s a genius’?”

“Yeah, didn’t you see my review on Goodreads?”

I laughed. “What the fuck is Goodreads?”

“It’s, like, a book review site, it was a joke.”

I giggled, caught up in a fantasy of other people reading his reviews of our private correspondence, trying to figure out what he was even talking about. “Gosh, people love reviewing things,” I said, imagining with horror a site dedicated to reviews of OnlyFans accounts.

“Even dicks,” JB said.

That was true, I realized, I did rate dicks. But I didn’t want JB to think I was like WangMangler. What if he was nervous and thought I was some big dick judge? “I’m an easy grader,” I said. “I give them all ten out of ten. The art is really all in the comparison to the Pokémon and any relevant puns.”

“Oh?” JB said, still smiling, though I could tell he was uncomfortable. And why shouldn’t he be? I shouldn’t be talking to him about other people’s dicks.

When the wings came, JB set out all the food on the coffee table so I didn’t have to move, and we feasted. The whole time we were eating I was distracted trying to figure out what would happen next. I had not calculated any of this because I’d imagined us at a restaurant. I’d thought my chance to kiss him would be when we walked out to the car after dinner, and if that went well we’d go to his Airbnb instead of my house. Now I didn’t know how exactly a kiss would happen.

“Is something wrong?” JB asked.

“No,” I said, “I’m just, like, plotting how I’m gonna put the moves on you.”

He laughed, covering his mouth with his napkin. “That’s a relief,” he said after he finished chewing. “I’m not good at making plans like that. I figured I would try to kiss you after dinner when we walked to the car.”

“That’s when I had figured I would kiss you!”

“But now I have no idea, really.” JB laughed again.

“Leave it all up to me,” I said. “You won’t even know what’s happening. You’ll be like a baby gazelle taken down by a lioness.”

His eyebrows shot up, and I figured it was now or never, so I leaned over and kissed him, even though I was pretty sure I tasted strongly of buffalo sauce. My lips met his, and he leaned into the kiss, turning to me on the settee. His hands found my rib cage and squeezed. I could feel the strength in his hands and arms, that big chest with its huge ribs, the heat of him. I broke away from the kiss and blinked. The room was spinning slightly. “Whoa,” I said, and he kissed me again.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The next morning, I awoke with the sun streaming down on a massive four-poster bed, my breasts rock hard with milk, as happy as I had ever been in my life. JB was curled around me. I scooted my butt closer to him, remembering the night before. He had carried me in here, me clinging to his front like a koala.

I kept my eyes closed and experimentally rolled my ankle. It didn’t hurt as much as I’d feared. I pushed my foot out from under the covers and opened my eyes, peered down at it. It was swollen and there was a purple bruise on the outside, right below my ankle. It didn’t look all that bad, though. I became aware of a buzzing sound, my phone on the nightstand. I grabbed it in time to see Jinx was calling. It went to voicemail before I could answer. I’d told him I was spending the night. I figured he just wanted to see when I would be home, make sure I was okay, but when I opened my phone, I saw there were six missed calls and my stomach dropped. Bodhi.

I called Jinx back immediately. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry, I was still asleep, is he okay?”

“He’s fine,” Jinx said, but his voice sounded weird.

“What happened?”

“I need you to come home,” Jinx said.

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