Page 52 of Beautiful Crazy

“Oh, my God.” Immediately, I feel her try to shuffle away from me, but I grip her tighter to me and kiss the top of her head, chuckling.

“I’m kidding, Em. I’m kidding. I just want to be close to my best friend. It was a rough day. That okay?”

She doesn’t say anything for a second and then I hear, “Yeah. It’s okay. I’m sorry it was a rough day. Do you want to talk about it?”

“Nope. Just want to sleep right here, with you.” I’m fading fast.

“Emmett?”

Dear Jesus.

“Yeah?”

“I think I did something wrong to that chicken. It was hot as hell fire.”

Rubbing my thumb back and forth gently across her stomach I simply answer, “It’s okay, Babe. We’re both still alive.”

My ass just barely survived.

She backs up a tiny bit and the movement of her ass against my dick makes my eyes pop open, but her body finally nests in to where she’s most comfortable and she sighs one last time. “Night Emmett.”

“Night, Babe.”

Chapter 11

Emily

The big Fox family wedding is this weekend and I’m nothing but a frenzied mess of nerves. I have projects galore for work that have to be finished along with wedding responsibilities, and I’m beginning to wonder if I can actually get it all accomplished. On top of wedding weekend, I have this Singles Night to go to tomorrow and I still haven’t asked Emmett to be my plus one.

I had every intention of asking him and then we hit a bit of a snag in our relationship and now, I feel like coming out and saying, “Hey, you wanna be my wingman at this singles event?” after I had already hurt his feelings is totally insensitive. Why do relationships have to be so tricky anyway? Why couldn’t our conversation have gone a little more like this:

“I like you a whole hell of a lot.”

“I like you a whole hell of a lot too.”

“I really want to kiss you.”

“I really want to be kissed.”

“You kiss good.”

“You do too.”

“Want to bang?”

“Okay.”

Ugh. Alas, the world of being all up in our feelings is like walking through a vat of honey. Might be sweet. Might feel good. But things can get very sticky.

And as for the icing on top of today’s suck cake, there are all kinds of glitches with YouTube this morning keeping me from being able to upload Hadley’s latest DIY episode and the Facebook ad I created for my author client keeps coming back with an unknown error that clearly, I don’t know how to fix because they don’t know how to tell me what the hell is wrong with it.

“Ugh, get a fucking grip, internet!”

Lola springs up to my desk and steps in front of my keyboard so she can boop my face with her nose, her way of telling me it’s okay. Either that or she’s telling me to calm the fuck down. It’s crazy how pets seem to understand when their humans are feeling stressed or scared or sick. Lola has always been where she needs to be, even when I was visiting her as a volunteer at the shelter. Relaxing a bit, I take a breath and smile at my floofy kitty, rubbing her chin and scratching behind her ears, something she loves.

“Sorry Lola. I guess today I’m the dramatic one. I just need something to go right today.”

My phone dings with a text that I see is from Nancy Rexing, one of my bosses of sorts, so I swipe to read what she has to say.

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