Page 92 of Now That It's You
Meg looked down at her hands. “I can’t say it never crossed my mind. Do you remember that one Thanksgiving?—”
“Yes,” he said, probably a little too quickly, and she looked up again. “I know exactly which Thanksgiving you’re talking about,” he added.
“The doves,” she said, nodding. “You do remember.”
“Of course.” He paused, not sure if he should say it. Once he did, he couldn’t take back the words. “It was the one time I thought maybe there was something between us. Something besides my unrequited crush on the girl who probably just saw me as the deadbeat younger brother.”
“I never saw you as a deadbeat,” she said softly. “And yeah, I felt it, too. Standing there in your parents’ study with you being so sweet to me.” She looked down again. “I always knew it couldn’t happen, so I never let myself think about it, but that one time?—”
She broke off there, and Kyle didn’t say anything, willing her to finish the thought. But Meg just folded her hands in her lap and stared at them like they held the script for what she should say next. When she looked up, her expression was guarded.
“I wondered about it,” she said at last. “That day, I mean. I thought about what it would have been like to be with you instead.”
He nodded, feeling a small flutter of pride at that small admission. But hell, even that felt disloyal to Matt. Just being here now—in Meg’s bed with her bare leg pressed against his—felt disloyal.
“So does that count as my confession?” she asked softly.
Kyle looked back at her. “Not unless it’s what you were thinking when you tugged your ear.”
Meg sighed. “Okay, but you have to promise you won’t laugh.”
“All right.”
“And you won’t be mad or offended.”
Kyle raised an eyebrow, not sure whether to be intrigued or concerned. “You know I can’t promise something like that.”
“Fine. But you have to remember that you have a five-foot replica of your ex-girlfriend’s vagina in your gallery.”
He stared at her. “Um, okay.”
Meg took another breath and stared straight ahead at the wall, her gaze not meeting his. “There’s this website Kendall found a few years ago,” she said, talking fast the way she did when she was nervous. “It’s this thing where you take a mold of a guy’s, uh—pork sword.”
“Pork sword?”
“Right. And you send it in and they make this sex toy out of it. So Kendall found out about it and forwarded the link to Matt, and he surprised me with that as a Christmas gift.”
“Wait, what?” He might not have heard right. “What are you saying?”
Her cheeks turned bright red, and she tugged at a loose thread on her quilt. “I’m saying I have a—um, an—uh?—”
“Dildo?”
“Right. Modeled after your brother’s—um?—”
“Dick?” God, this was the weirdest game of Mad Libs ever.
“Right,” Meg said, and tugged at the thread again.
“Holy shit.” Kyle frowned. “I don’t remember you unwrapping that under the tree in front of the whole family.”
She looked up then, and he saw her eyes filled with equal parts embarrassment and amusement. “It was that Christmas you were living in Montana and didn’t come home,” she said. “And obviously Matt didn’t have me open it in front of family.”
“Okay.” He left it at that, knowing the reason he’d fled to Montana in the first place was the same reason he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the rest of the story.
“Right, so anyway, I still have it.”
“What?” Kyle shot a look at her nightstand drawer. “You’ve got my brother’s dick in a drawer?”
