Page 67 of The Auction
A smile danced around my lips. “Maybe. I’ll have to see what’s in my closet.”
At that he laughed outright. The groceries for the most part put away, he came up behind me and wrapped his arm around my middle. He hauled me up against him and planted his lips against my neck, right where it met the curve of my shoulder.
“You’ll wear your dress for me. I can’t fucking wait to see you in it.”
Then he gave me a slap on the ass before he left the kitchen to do whatever and I had this feeling in my chest I couldn’t shake.
Worse, I didn’t want to shake it.
SEVENTEEN
JULIETTE
“Let’s go, Jules!”
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” I shouted, through my closed bedroom door.
He’d been calling up to me every five minutes. Saying we were going to be late for our reservation. Saying we were going to miss our reservation. Saying they were going to give away our reservation.
I was so damn sorry I’d said anything about going somewhere nice, I could almost pull my hair out. That was if I wasn’t working as hard as I fucking could to straighten it in a way that made it look more like April’s and less like…well mine.
There was no hope for it.
I’d borrowed the damn straightener from April last week, thinking that maybe I just needed hardware to change my impossibly straight, impossibly zero motion hair. Maybe lean into the straight and long thing with more straight and long.
I should have known by April’s skepticism that this probably wasn’t going to work.
A hundred YouTube videos later and I still just looked like me.
Turning the damn thing off and unplugging it so I wouldn’t cause a fire, I stared at myself in the mirror again. My soft brown hair fell evenly on either side of my shoulders, but would not pass for the model’s I’d tried to mirror. Flipping my head over, I brushed it out as best I could.
Then flipped it back. It immediately defaulted to straight and even.
“Jules!”
Okay, even I could admit I was running out of time. Taking a deep breath, I stepped into my dress, which I had carefully ironed. It needed it, because I’d tried it on like a dozen times in the past two weeks just to make sure it looked like I remembered it.
This part didn’t take too long because I still loved the way it looked. I pushed my feet into the ballet slippers, dabbed a bit more of April’s pink cream blush on my cheeks and took a deep breath.
“This, Juliette Clarke, is the best you’re ever going to look,” I told the mirror.
What if he doesn’t like it?
Then I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t supposed to care even a little bit ifheliked it. This moment was for me. Taking a deep breath, I opened my bedroom door and stomped down the steps just to remind him that I was annoyed at being rushed.
He was waiting for me at the bottom of the steps with a thoroughly annoyed look on his face, until he glanced up at me.
He didn’t smile. He didn’t nod his head or anything. He just…stopped breathing for a second.
I wasn’t totally sure what that meant.
“You look so pretty,” he finally said. “Real pretty, Jules.”
“Thank you.”
Then he pulled something out from behind his back.
“What is that?” I asked, stepping closer to him.
