Page 21 of Cupcake
Nine
Iwas late for a veryimportant date. Okay, not a date, but I was still late. The team was going to have my ass in a sling if I even thought about stopping to talk to anyone. I didn’t care.
“Haylee,” I called, jogging up to the woman meandering down the sidewalk. When I got closer, I realized she wasn’t meandering. She was listing.
“I’m not going to poke your loaf, Brady,” she answered without turning around.
Poke my loaf?
“For once, you’ve left me speechless, cupcake.”
“All evidence to the contrary,” she slurred, her tongue sounding too big for her mouth. Was she sick?
I grasped her shoulder and held her in place. “Are you okay, Haylee?”
Her eyes rolled around in her head when she tried to focus on me, and I bit back laughter. She wasn’t sick. She was drunk.
“Have you been tippling, cupcake?”
The punch to my gut took me by surprise. “I told you not to call me cupcake! And you claim that you know how to listen.” She started stomping up the street, but the booze in her system made it more of a stumble than a stomp.
I put my arm around her shoulder and propped her up against me. “Do you have plans for the night?” I asked while I directed her toward the lakeshore.
“Big plans,” she said, holding up a bag that I hadn’t noticed tucked against her side. It was brown paper and most definitely held alcohol. “I’m going to drink this whole bottle of strawberry wine by myself. You can’t have any.”
With a brow in the air, I had to ask. “How many bottles have you already had?”
“I think one,” she answered. “No, I shared that one with Amber. Wait, that was vodka.”
“You’ve already had half a bottle of vodka?”
“It was a small bottle,” she said giggling. “There were also those two bearded goats and the vodka cupcakes I made. I’m kind of a lightweight, regardless of what my hips say.”
My eyes traveled to her tantalizing hips in her tight jean shorts, and I immediately regretted it. I could feel myself growing hard, and since I was wearing a wetsuit under my clothes, a hard-on wasn’t something that could stick around.
“I would tell you what your hips say to me, but I’m pretty sure you’d slap me. I do have a surprise for you, and when we’re done, we can share that bottle of wine. You shouldn’t drink it alone. You might not make it home.”
“Keep yoursurprisein your pants, Brady,” she said, using air quotes with one hand while grasping the bottle tightly to her chest, “and I’m not sharing my wine.”
Stopping in front of the shore of Lake Pendle, I tugged the bottle of wine from her grasp. It wasn’t a struggle, but she almost tipped over trying to hold onto it. “The surprise isn’t in my pants, though, you’d probably like that if you gave it half a chance.”
“Probably,” she said, that giggle filling the air again. A part of me wished I was recording her right now so I could prove to sober Haylee that drunk Haylee thought my manhood was worth taking half a chance on.
“Sit here,” I said, directing her to an empty patch of sand amidst all the other onlookers. “The surprise will be out there,” I explained, pointing to the water. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
“Give me back my wine,” she slurred, her arms wrapped around her knees.
“I will...when I come back in an hour. I want to make sure you’re still here when I get back. This,” I said, holding up the bottle, “will ensure that you are.”
The huffing sound she made was loud enough for everyone on the beach to hear. “I can’t believe you’re holding my wine hostage.”
