Page 35 of The New Year's Party
Chapter 17
Bunny
“Hiiiiii!!!!” Bunny effused as she stepped inside, casting her coat in the vague direction of Nathan Phelps and opening her arms to show off her dress, a turquoise halter that showed a generous amount of side-boob. It was a hundred and fifty dollars, but right now, watching Nathan take her in, it was worth every penny. She put her hands to her cheeks and stomped her high heels, very aware of how the motion made her boobs jiggle. With any luck, Nathaniel S. Phelps was regretting that he no longer got to touch them. “Oh, myGod, you haven’t changed a bit!”
This wasn’t true, but she was feeling generous.
“I accept your kind lie,” quipped Nathan, moving to the entryway closet and adding her coat to the pressed chaos of winter gear within. When he said this, Bunny remembered with a warm flood how he used to see right through her, always. The problem was, she hadn’t been able to see through him.
“I’ll need your keys. Sobriety check required to get them back,” he said.
She handed them over, suddenly noticing the ridiculous hat on his head.
“What is that on your head, by the way?”
“I’ll give you one guess,” he teased.
She laughed.Ah. A dick. Clever.
What was it about her ex-fiancé, anyway? It’s not like he was devastatingly handsome like Bennett... and he had a little paunch to him, he always had... It was just a way about him. A confidence, a swagger. A cleverness, a presence in his body. It all just felt so sexual, somehow. Whereas Elliott the Ex, for example, though technicallymuchbetter-looking despite the minuscule dimensions of his noggin, now struck Bunny as a paper doll. No meat, nothing to really grab, nothing toentice.
“Well, I wasn’t kidding, you reallydolook great,” she said as Nathan closed the closet. She leaned in for an air-kiss. Their cheeks brushed. “And your house looks great too, wow! And it smells soooo good... I’ve missed your cooking soooo much... Weren’t you supposed to open a restaurant? Where did I hear that...? I thought by now you’d have a Michelin star or something...” It was verbal diarrhea, but like with her credit card charges, she couldn’t seem to stop herself. There was a certain exhilaration in digging yourself deeper. She coaxed her extensions over her shoulders and hoped her coat hadn’t ruined the carefully done waves.
“The condition of the house is Allie’s fault,” Nathan said as a petite, curvy girl came skipping over and snuggled up to his side. “Credit where credit is due.” She was so short, her head fit right at the crook of Nathan’s underarm, and Nathan wasn’t exactly super tall. “I didn’t know how sexy a woman could look vacuuming.” He kissed the top of Allie’s head.
“You’re sobad,” Allie protested with a smile. She had a cutesy voice and was wearing a cutesy party hat covered in cutesy red-and-pink heart stickers. Bunny instantly hated her. “That’s incredibly sexist, Phelpsy.”
“What would you prefer me to say?” He raised a brow. “That you looked plain and unremarkable while you vacuumed?”
They bantered back and forth a little more while Bunny ran a quick analysis of their interaction. Allie was squished into a very short black dress. Plunging V with a mound of cleavagepushing out, and if she bent over... They’d met at a bar, Bunny just knew it, she could practicallysmellit on them. That cheapness, that—
“Sorry, Phelps is making me rude!” Allie said, pushing on Phelps’s chest to stop their spicy back-and-forth. “It’s nice to meet you, Rebecca.”
“Oh, call me Bunny like everyone else,” said Bunny. “And tell me, Nathan! How did you two meet?” She touched Nathan’s arm. “Pleasetell me it wasn’t at the high school, because you can’t be a day over seventeen, sweetheart!”
Allie smiled. “I’m twenty-four, actually. We met at a bar.”
Bingo.
“A pool hall in South Bend,” corrected Nathan. “She’s a kindergarten teacher.”
Really?
“Awww, that’s such a great skill, how cute! Managing all those little kids! Good for you, girl!” gushed Bunny.
Okay, she’d had enough of all the mutual admiration. Time to move farther into the house.
“Let me in, I have to sit down—these heels are killing me,” she said. She could kick them off—she had registered that Allie was barefoot and Nathan in socks—but the heels, sky-high and a striking cobalt blue suede—made her ass look too good to give them up yet.
“Make yourself comfortable, everyone is in the dining room,” said Nathan as he headed deeper into the house with Allie close behind.Like his lap dog,thought Bunny. Like his yippy, dippy little lap dog. “We’re making hats this year.” He reached up and twanged the pipe cleaner dick as he retreated.
Yes, the notorious craft. There was always a craft. There had been masks one year... something with a message in a bottle another year... What had happened to those messages? There was a prompt:Share a secret wish you hope will come true.They’d stuffed their secrets into wine bottles, which they decoratedwith stickers and sequins. Then they were supposed to open them five years later to see if their wishes came true. Had they all opened them at one of the parties Bunny hadn’t attended? Would they have opened Bunny’s, in her absence? Laughed? She seemed to remember writing something embarrassingly sincere...
All the hubbub was in the dining room, but after Nathan and Allie were out of sight, she didn’t rush there, despite how hard her arches were protesting her shoes. Instead, she took her time looking over Nathan’s living room walls, which were graced by a giant farmhouse-style clock and various groupings of family pictures. His ex-wife must have put them up, because no straight man would buy frames withFAMILYorLOVEcarved in scrolling letters at the top.
She leaned in. The frames held half a dozen pictures each, mostly of the boys... but, ah—there was a family picture with Nathan and Kylie, the boys standing in front of them in adorable bow ties, and a tall awkward-looking girl slightly to the side. The girl must be Kylie’s teenage daughter from her first husband... Huh. Either it was pretty ballsy to keep a picture of you and your ex-wife on the wall, or it was pathetic.
It was interesting, getting this unexpected view into Nathan’s life. She hadn’t seen him in this house before. After parking just a few minutes ago, she had taken a moment in the driver’s seat to really take it in. The inflatable Santa in the yard was drooping. The yard itself was a mud-fest. The house, underneath the festive lights, was a dingy, depressing box. Thank heavens, because if somehow, while she was living in a slummy one-bedroom in Nashville while she went toe-to-toe with Elliott the Ex in court, Nathan was living in some kind of gorgeous house with a picture-perfect life, she might have imploded. Or exploded. This was good, that his life hadn’t amounted to much, because then he could look at Bunny and wonder if he would’ve had it better with her. And hewouldhave.
