Page 2 of Thoroughly Pucked

“I’ll tell you later,” I say to my friends, reassuring them. Truth is, I’m dying to know why Aiden’s here dressed like that.Dear god, please say he cheated on me. Stole from me. Fell in mad love with the wedding planner and is running away with her.

They shut the door and it’s just us and my big, inappropriate hope. “So listen,” he begins, and a few bubbles flow through my veins.

For the record,listenis when you know a dude is about to say something dastardly. Why does this fill me with a strange sort of giddy relief?

“I’m listening,” I say, crossing my fingers behind my back.

“You’re a great girl and all,” he says.

There it is. The line that precedes the dump. My heart beats faster.Bring it on.Tell me you’ve been making lattes after dark with the coffee shop owner down the block so I can throw things at you indignantly, like that candle on the coffee table or the songbook.“And you’re seriously hot,” he says.

Wait. He’s supposed to feel guilty as he admits he cheated like a selfish jackass. “You’re complimenting me before you?—”

“—Yes, I am,” he says, so matter-of-factly, and alittle out of character, too, as he steps closer, grips my shoulders, and looks me up and down salaciously. With a long, lingering rumble in his throat, he adds, “We had some good sex, didn’t we?”

I blink. Where is hisI’m banging the baristaconfession? TheI’m eloping with the wedding plannerproclamation?TheI drained your bank accountblurt-out?

“Okay?” I ask, because did we even have good sex? It seemed middling to me, but what do I know? I’m just a girl with a big vibrator collection.

“And last night when I was out at the piano bar in the city with the guys, all I could think about was you. And how I just couldn’t wait for our wedding night. How great the sex would be. How often we’d do it. How much I just, well, let me be blunt,” he says, like he’s been anything but ultra-blunt in the last three minutes, but he takes a deep breath, then finishes his deep thought. “How much I like sex.”

He grabs my bare arm, maybe needing to hold on through his ode to nookie. “But also how little I had of it in high school.Noneis more accurate.” He shakes his head over that awful memory. “Same for college. None there too.” Another sorrowful shake before he recovers from the hell of his, evidently, barren past. “But now? I can have so much sex now that I’m in my late twenties.”

And I’m beginning to see the dots connecting. I wriggle away from the hold Aiden has on my arm so I can get some distance while my erstwhile groom gazes happily out the window. “There’s so much sex to be had.” He tilts his head as he meets my eyes again. There’s a warm kind of seriousness in his expression.He’s buying this bill of goods he’s selling. Really buying it. “I think we’re both better off exploring that great world out there, right?”

This is how he calls it off? With his explorer dick as his new compass? And me as his…first mate? “You’re canceling the wedding so you can have more sex with more women?” I ask with staccato breaths. I need to make sure I’m one hundred percent clear on what he’s saying.

Aiden gestures grandly to me, a show of his magnanimity. “And you can have sex too.” Tapping his sternum, he adds, “Whatever or whoever floats your boat.”

“How generous.”

He must miss my sarcasm since he rocks back and forth on his heels and says earnestly, “Thanks.” He pauses, like he’s gearing up to make a big request. “And maybewecan.”

What? “W-we? What are you talking about?”

He blows out an appreciative breath. “Well, you know how to keep it tight, after all.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to pull myself out of this nightmare.

I’m supposed to be the problem. But I didn’t imagine he’d back out so he couldjustfuck me—AND EVERYONE ELSE—instead.

He’s definitely the problem now.

When I open my eyes, I try to catch my breath as I collect my thoughts. “Let me get this straight. You don’t want to marry me. But you still want to screw me?”

He points finger guns at me.Bang, bang. “Tonight even?” Aiden asks, hopeful as he checks his watch. “Idecided I’m going to move to Miami. Good thing I didn’t move in with you yet, right?”

I have to agree with him there. “Yes,” I bite out.

“I was never cut out for this small-town life anyway, so hear me out. What if…we hook up? I’ve got some neckties from my Catholic school uniform back in the day. You want to be tied to the bedposts, I bet?” He steps closer, gathers some of the tulle near my thigh, fingers it. “I could fuck my former bride tonight. While you’re still in this wedding dress. How hot would that be?”

My shock—and my shameful hope—is replaced by red-hot rage. A plume of anger licks my veins. “You actually think I want to be fuck buddies with you?”

His smile is hopeful, a kid askingplease. “I do.”

That is not theI doI’d expected. I’m swaying. I’m dizzy. How did this moment go from me imagining him dumping me for another woman, stealing my money, or, I don’t know, burning down my house, to him dumping me so he could enter his making-up-for-lost-time era?

He hooks his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans, rocks back on his sneakers. “What do you say?”

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