Page 91 of For Pleasure Or Worse

“I know Phee is practically a minute away from sending a search party,” Tally said. “I promise it will be worth the wait. Let’s not blow our load too early.”

“When I do I’m filling your mouth.” I grabbed her chin and jammed my thumb in between her lips, feeling her silky tongue lap at the pad of it. She bit my finger and I wrenched it away, wincing.

“They’re going to have questions,” she said. “We weren’t even speaking to one another an hour ago. Clearly something happened.”

“What they’re going to assume is that we solved our issues one way or the other—emphasis on theother—and now we can all enjoy ourselves drama free.” A tiny problem I’d forgotten about reared back to memory, and my face pinched together.

“What is it?” she asked.

My touch danced along her kneecap, and a spot she’d missed shaving prickled my skin. “My brother might have kissed your sister.”

Natalia’s face warped the same way as mine had. Her manicured eyebrows shot to her forehead. “Which?—”

“Mia.”

“On purpose?”

“Out of desperation.” I tilted my head. “For the scavenger hunt.”

“Oh, fucking hell.”

“She may have slapped the shit out of him.”

She was less surprised by this. “And then what?”

“I don’t know.” My shoulders lifted and fell. “I left to find you before the fallout.”

“You didn’t stay to get the tea? You didn’t want to know what was going to happen? Did she seem vengeful, or just perplexed? I mean, the slap was purely consequential, you don’t just kiss people. The two of them have been going at it for two days, though. This is bad.”

“Bad as in, he kissed her, and she slapped him.”

“Bad as in, if he’s not in the hospital by the time we get back, there are more evil spirits at play.”

“You’re perplexingme, Tal. It’s not our problem. Angelo has a habit of getting himself in trouble and this is no different. But this is to say I’m sure our showing back up hand in hand won’t be the most talked about thing in the room.”

She relaxed. The lights and billboards filled the leather interior with a rainbow of colors, and Tally leaned over me to gaze out the window at the advertisements and neon. For the first time in months my body turned like an ignition key and idled. Hummed. I wanted to bottle this moment and keep it on a shelf like rare whiskey. I wanted to age with it, revisit it, show it off, take tiny, secret sips. My wife in my arms in the backseat like this. All the noise was outside and we were watching it pass by, unscathed, like a bubble.

“I’m so happy right now,” she said. “I can’t explain it.”

I pressed a kiss to her hairline. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

Natalia’s eyes sparkled with the bright reflection out the window as she looked up. She pointed toward the sky but I was completely caught up in the button curve of her nose and the natural pout of her lips. Lost somewhere admiring how fucking beautiful she was and how badly I wanted our future children to look just like their mom.

“Look, Matty.”

I reluctantly followed her voice.

Full moon.

Of course.

Everything in my life was a circle, folding back in on itself at all the right times. Following me from one substantial event to the next like a time marker. Reminding me to slow down, perhaps. Urging me to feel everything as deeply as I did because it didn’t make me weak, it made me real.

I held her tighter. “Do you remember when I told you that story about being a kid and howling at the moon because I could pretend I was a wolf, and it just made sense? There was something so childlike and innocent about giving in to an impulse like that, and no one ever questioned it either?”

“That was our first date. You should have known back then I wasn’t going anywhere because instead of sending you home, I dragged you up the stairs to my apartment.”

“Well what I didn’t tell you was that, when I was deployed, I would do it too. I would be scared and alone on a post for the night, wondering if it was going to be the last full moon I ever saw because there was no saying what the next twelve hours would bring, let alone another month. And I’d howl to remind myself that that little kid still lived in my chest, his soul was in there, he was going to be fine, and he was going to make it back home.”

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