Page 13 of Wild Flower

BECCA

Iget up from my booth and walk out of Flambé. I can’t sit here a moment longer and eat another bite of that overindulgent chocolate dessert.

My legs are noodles.

My head is too light.

I can barely click the buttons on the elevator, because the last half hour is racing through my head on repeat. I’m a certifiable insane person who just let two men pleasure her in public!

And it was … So. Damn. Good.

There’s no way I’m meeting Finn and Archer later. I can hardly walk—or breathe. Going home with them would be like going to Candyland and eatingeverything. I’ll get sick. I’ll overeat. I’ll positively explode from the heat.

I go home and take a long hot shower instead. The kind where heat pelts your body and you can feel it all the way down to your bones. I don’t know how every over-wrought, horny character in the books I read can takecoldshowers to stave off their raging libidos. I mean, I get it: freezing cold water is uncomfortable. And I suppose if you have a boner the size of Alaska, then dipping it into glacially-cold water will cause it to fall off. But seriously, nobodywantstheir boner to fall off. No human being will actually spend more than fifteen seconds under a machine-gun-shower-spout of ice pellets without getting hypothermia. I call BS on cold showers in books.

Nobody is ever that hot.

Not even me! And I’ve caught the Finn and Archer fever badly.

I turn the dial of my shower up to blaze. Heat should be met with heat as far as I’m concerned. That’s how rare flowers thrive in Hawaii—theyneedthe humidity at a thousand percent. They thrive off the moisture and the damp. Orchids clamp themselves to the sides of trees, living perilously on a vertical stump, and bloom furiously as they cling to the bark for life and sustenance. Orchids crave the dark and hate the sun.

And if I was as brave as an orchid, I might’ve actually waited in the Atlantis’s lobby to meet those two gorgeous men. I can’t even imagine what they …

I don’t want to know.

It would burn me to ash.

This evening is going to make my therapist rich when he realizes the hedonistic cash cow I am.Doctor’s log: The patient seemed like an innocent florist with a kink for botanical tattoos, but it turns out her sexual desires are more deeply rooted in a misplaced need to be aroused in public by multiple lovers. Patient is suffering from a rare ailment known as Archer-Finn Disease. Symptoms include losing all inhibitions, a wild, uncontrollable desire, and public orgasming.

Okay, that’s a little overdramatic. Though not from my mother’s point of view. She’d definitely call my therapist and beg for my brain to be lobotomized by electric shocks. There’s no question in her mind that I’d have a mental disorder for what I’ve done. Which—blame my mother—is not something I ever thought I actually wanted. I’m just as confused by the fact that I enjoyed it … like holy-hot-orgasms-of-the-devilenjoyedit.

Hot water slides down my body, searing my flesh. I like the ragged sensations as water rakes over my cheeks and neck. It cascades between my thighs and washes away all of Archer’s fingerprints on the flesh he enflamed.

Archer and Finn ignited me like eating too many sweets, leaving my throat raw and sore. Sometimes those erotic novels I read get too hot, and I feel like I’ve eaten thirty pounds of Twizzlers and my teeth are going to rot. That’s what meeting Archer and Finn in the lobby would’ve been like: too much of a good thing that it spoils.

My tryst at Flambé was naughty, and filthy, and wild, but I need to go back to my normal life.

Don’t I?

Listen to yourself, Becca! Two men at once?

I dunk my head under the broiling water, knowing my pale skin is already red as a tulip. I spend hours regulating the water for my plants to perfect their moisture levels. If I poured this much heat onto any of them, they’d shrivel and burn, curling into black lumps.

Is that what I’m trying to do? Am I trying to weed out this wicked blossom I didn’t know was growing in my garden?

What if she’s a rare wild flower? What if she’s so exquisite she needs the care of two men to blossom? It’s possible she’s been waiting just under the surface for these two beautiful men to nurture her. And here I am, scorching her skin, trying to root out and pluck her stem.

My whole life I’ve been told to be like my perfect, older sister and live up to my mother’s expectations: be prim and proper and traditional. But tonight I did something naughty and forbidden.

And God—I slip my hands between my legs—was I rewarded!

8

ARCHER

Apale mist hangs over the mountains, puffed like cotton candy in the morning dew. And through the yawning fog, the sun rises, varnishing the jungle in silver. I take a deep breath, holding a tiny espresso cup in my hand as I stand before this house’s massive living room window. It’s a floor-to-ceiling monstrosity of glass that opens to an incredible view of a slumbering Honolulu.

The trick to living in Hawaiiin styleis to house sit.

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