Page 30 of Changed Plan

We pass a cluster of people doing yoga and lots of power-walkers getting their steps in.

“You never got that massage,” I say as we approach the spa.

He shrugs. “Maybe next time I get stuck here.”

“I give a decent backrub. If you’re nice to me, maybe I’ll show you when we get back to the room.”

“Are you campaigning to go back to the room right this minute, because that’s what I’m hearing.”

I laugh. “Did you not hear the part where I said you had to be nice to me to earn it?”

“Haven’t I been nice to you since we met?”

“Yeah,” I admit. “You have.”

It’s true. He was nice when I was surly about spilling coffee on him. He was nice when I left him in the coffee shop and when I almost didn’t let him share my table at dinner and when I practically plowed into him in front of the spa . . . and in his hotel room.

He’s probably way too nice for someone as skeptical by nature as I am. There was a time I would’ve amplified that thought in my mind until it became a hard and fast reason to avoid him.

Hell, for my entire adult life, I would’ve done that. Until yesterday.

Zane Jacoby is the kryptonite to my well-honed defenses. But at the same time, he makes me feel stronger. It makes no sense. None of this makes any damn sense. Nobody finds their soulmate while stranded in a fucking airport.

Then again, not everyone gets to fuck in the airport. But great sex doesn’t mean you’re soulmates. We just made the best of a bad situation.

I need to stop analyzing it and enjoy what’s left of it.

“This reminds me of hanging out at the mall when I was in the eighth grade.”

“Oh yeah?” he asks with that sexy grin on his face. “What store did you have sex in?”

“The theater. Duh.”

He laughs. “Thank goodness for those dark movie theaters.”

“I wasn’t actually having sex in the eighth grade.” I don’t know why I feel the need to state that. “Maybe a little experimenting.”

“I think we all experimented in a dark theater at some point.”

“The absolute grossest place possible.”

“That might be an overstatement.”

“Okay, fine,” I concede. “The grossest place in the mall, though.”

“I don’t know. I think being groped in the Christian bookstore could’ve been worse.”

“Your mall had a Christian bookstore?”

“Right next to Victoria’s Secret. To this day, the sight of a bible brings back the memory of bald mannequins wearing push-up bras.”

“I do not remember a Christian bookstore in the mall.”

“Maybe it was a Florida thing.”

“Theme parks, alligators, and Christian bookstores,” I joke.

“Don’t forget the bikinis, drive-thru liquor stores, and adult video shops.”

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