Page 9 of Good Boy

Excuse me?

I don’t know whether to be outraged or…well, outraged. He’s bringing a married woman to my little brother’s wedding?

“Are you out of your goddamned mind?”

He considers the question. “I’m kinda drunk but nowhere near out of my goddamned mind. That would require more scotch. Got any?”

“No!” I shriek, my blood pressure notching up into the red zone. It’s one in the morning, and I need to be asleep right now.

So I do what a girl with five siblings learns to do to keep the urge to commit murder at bay. I count quietly to myself until it passes. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…

After quite a few deep, cleansing breaths, I do what’s necessary. “Get in here already.” I step aside, and Blake gallops in the door. “You’re on the couch.”

“Does it fold out?”

“Negative. But you’ll survive.”

He looks dubious, but I don’t have time to care. I hustle to the cupboard that doubles as my linen closet and pull out a set of sheets. It’s summertime in California; he won’t need more than that.

I thrust the pile of linens into his hands. “Sleep well.”

He looks at the sheets in his hands and then back at me. “Don’t leave yet,” he says as I edge toward my bedroom door. “Aren’t you gonna tuck me in?”

“You’re a big boy.”

His grin turns wicked. “I sure am. You probably remember pretty well, because I’m unforgettable. But I could give you a refresher right now.” He drops the sheets onto the sofa and reaches for his fly.

And that’s my cue to get the hell out of there. I stomp into my bedroom and slam the door.

***

I have the odd, stress-filled dreams of a party planner. In one of them, the wedding cake doesn’t show up and my mother decides to bake one at the last minute. We get into an argument about whether seven-grain is the way to go on a wedding cake. (My mother is a famously healthy baker, with mixed results.) In another dream, it rains, and the tent we rented melts into white blobs, like sodden toilet paper.

Then things take a turn for the weird. I dream there’s a grizzly bear in my bed, and I’m okay with it. And then the dream gets sexy. The bear’s body is warm and hard, and his ambitious erection is poking me in the bum, and he fingers my nipples…

I wake up with a jolt, my eyes popping open. There is a grizzly bear in my bed. He’s pressed to my back, his thick, muscular arm around my waist, his hand cupping my right boob.

Holy Mother of God. Blake Riley is spooning me, uninvited.

And I think I like it.

No!

No, I don’t like it.

Right.

After letting out a perfectly silent sigh, I start to formulate a plan. He’s sleeping soundly, which helps. The snoring in my ear is a big clue. So I inch one foot toward the edge of the bed, then slide all at once out of his grasp in a maneuver that would make my yoga teacher proud. We’ll call it the escapes-from-grizzly pose.

When I land on my feet at the side of the bed, he’s still snoring soundly, his unfairly handsome face smoothed out by sleep, unruly brown hair sticking up against my pillow.

I tiptoe into my bathroom and close the door so carefully that there isn’t even a click. Then I just stand there for a second and try to gather my wits. Today is my brother’s wedding, which I planned from the invitations to the guest list to the cake to the coffee after dessert tonight. It must go off flawlessly. My family is just waiting for me to fail.

And I just had a quasi-bestiality dream about the ridiculously attractive man asleep in my bed.

A shower will help, right? I turn on the water, shed my banana PJs, and hop in. I wash my hair and apply my best conditioner, because I don’t want to frizz out in the photos. (I’ve planned those too.) I’m already feeling better when I shut off the water and wrap my towel around my naked body.

Taking care to be absolutely silent, I slowly open my bathroom door…

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