Monster mash, p.44
Monster Mash, page 44
I sat up straighter and pushed Tripp’s head away so I could turn and take notes. “Yes, of course. You wanted samples?”
“Actually, if it’s as good as you say, I’d love to feature it on next Sunday’s menu,” he said. “I can do a full spread designed to complement it. You know how I love my themed brunches. Of course, that means I’ll need a sample ASAP. Not that I doubt your claims that it’s the best domestic coffee you’ve ever tasted but…Needs more salt. Sorry. A chef’s work is never done. Anyway, what was I saying?”
“You wanted a sample of Brewtiful’s coffee for Northstar.” I glanced over at Tripp, whose eyes had gone as wide as saucers.
“Oh, yes. How soon can you arrange that?”
I considered all I had to do and how long it would take. Tripp’s bag of coffee beans was empty, which meant we needed to get more. To have enough for Northstar, that meant a flight out to meet Tripp’s suppliers. And if we had to stop to do the annulment paperwork on Tuesday…“Wednesday?”
Adam hissed. “Oh, can’t. I do my ordering on Wednesday, which means it’d have to be before then. Can you do Tuesday afternoon?”
“Tuesday?” Only if we skip the annulment. I glanced over at Tripp, who nodded furiously. “Absolutely,” I agreed.
“Perfect!” Adam exclaimed. “Then I’ll see you and Tripp here at Brimstone Tuesday afternoon at two o’clock. And thank you, Nic, for the opportunity.”
“Thank you,” I said and hung up.
“Oh my God, Nicola!” Tripp threw his arms around me and squeezed, careful not to get my wings. “You got me into Northstar?”
“Not yet, darling,” I said, wriggling free. “First, we need to meet with your supplier and get the beans. You said they were in Florida. I can get us a flight out there tonight at the earliest, but with the meeting falling on Tuesday…”
He pressed his lips together in thought. “We don’t have to get the annulment done on Tuesday, do we? I mean, does it really matter if we do it then or Thursday?”
“Or next week,” I offered hopefully.
He waved a dismissive hand. “Yeah. It doesn’t matter. It’s not like it’s time sensitive or anything.”
“But this deal with Northstar is,” I said, rising. “If he likes your coffee, Northstar will be inviting some big potential investors to a special brunch on Sunday at his restaurant. Coffee connoisseurs, darling. The kind of people who can not only finance Brewtiful’s but take it to the next level.”
“Oh, Nicola!” Tripp exclaimed and hugged me again. He buried his head against my shoulder. “I can’t believe you did this! You’re so good to me! I don’t deserve this.”
I took a half step back and lifted his chin with a finger. “Darling, you deserve the world. You always have. My work hasn’t made you worthy of that. All I’ve done is give you the right tools and connections to reach your full potential. You’ve done the rest.”
“But,” he said, blinking back tears, “I haven’t done anything but come up with an idea. You’re the one helping me make it real. Without you, I—”
I put my finger to his lips, silencing him. “We are making it real. Together.”
His jaw trembled, and he hugged me a third time. “Thank you, Nicola.”
I smiled and hugged him back. “Don’t thank me yet, darling. This was the easy part. Now, the real work begins.”
I pulled my collar up as if I could hide behind it and tucked my head down low. I could see the headlines all over the sports blogs already. Tripp Powers, spotted in Vegas sex shop. What would my mother say?
Nicola didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed to be there. He walked in like he owned the place. Sometimes, I wished I had half his confidence. I used to be a lot more confident before my head injury. Then it was everything anyone wanted to talk about for months. Between my injury, the recovery, and retirement, it felt like I’d had a camera in my face every day for almost a year.
“Hi, there. Anything I can help you find?” came a chipper female voice at my side.
I almost shrieked and jumped out of my skin before I realized she was speaking to Nicola.
He flashed her a wide smile and curled his arm around mine. “No, thank you. I think we’d just like to browse.”
The woman—who was human with pink hair—smiled back. “If you need anything, just shout and I’ll be right there!” she said and grabbed a box from a pile on the floor before walking away.
I let out a relieved breath and eyed a tall display of little neon vibrators, deciding whether to duck behind them. Maybe I could hide there until Nicola found what he wanted. I wasn’t even sure why he’d made me come in to begin with. I didn’t want anything in there. He could buy whatever he wanted, and I’d be just as happy to help him use it.
Oh, God. My face felt like it was on fire.
“Tripp, darling, are you all right? I’ve never seen you so flushed.” He flapped his wings, rising to place a hand on my forehead. “You’re not feverish.”
I pulled away from him. “No, I’m just…” I leaned in to whisper. “How can you be so cool about this? What if someone recognizes you?”
Nicola blinked once and then laughed, flying past me to a giant wall of lube bottles on display. He picked one from near the top and flew back down, putting it in the little plastic basket he had on his arm. “You mean what if someone discovers I like hot, gay sex? How absolutely scandalous. How dare consenting adults enjoy themselves in the privacy of their own homes! What is the world coming to? Someone sound the alarm! The sky is falling! The gays are having fun again!”
“All right, I get it,” I mumbled. “Just…keep your voice down, okay?”
He tilted his head to the side. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. You’re totally okay with being painted in the tabloids as a playboy with a woman on each arm, but being seen in a sex shop is a bridge too far? Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said, rubbing the back of my head and trying not to look around. “It’s just weird, I guess.”
“And why is it weird?” He moved to the first aisle, browsing casually like he was searching for produce and not a dildo.
I scrambled after him. The only thing more embarrassing than being spotted in an adult toy store would be being spotted alone. “I don’t know.”
“Here.” He shoved something at me.
I took it without thinking and then nearly dropped it when I realized it was a giant twelve-inch double-sided dildo. In my panic, I must’ve hit a button or something because suddenly one end of the damn thing started twisting around like that little girl’s head in The Exorcist. “What do I do?” I blurted and started to sweat.
“Well, you didn’t burst into flames or fall over dead, now did you?” He took the toy and hit the hidden button, shutting it off. Nicola eyed me before putting it back and moving down the aisle. He picked up another package and put it back with a sigh. “Listen, Tripp. If you don’t want to do this, then that’s fine. You only need to say so.”
“What?” I scrunched up my face, confused.
He turned away from the display of toys and my heart instantly clenched at the sight of him looking at me with those sad eyes. “Do you want to have sex with me or not?”
I glanced around nervously, afraid someone would hear for some reason. But why? That didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t like I was ashamed of being with Nicola, even if our arrangement was temporary. I was just…
Well, it was hard to put into words. If it was just me and him, that was okay, but what if we suddenly got swarmed by cameras or fans? There’d be uncomfortable questions, people demanding that I qualify whatever this was. Things would change. He might even get irritated with all the attention and decide to cut things off, and that wasn’t what I wanted.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “That’s not it, Nicola. I do. It’s just that when we’re in public together, I’m always worried someone is going to spot us and come over with questions, and I don’t know what to say. It’s why I froze up on the ice yesterday. People started asking about you and me and I just… I don’t know how to answer that.”
His expression softened, and he came over to take my hand. “You don’t owe anyone an explanation for what you do.”
“Yes, I do,” I said, pulling away. “I’m a public figure.”
“But you’re allowed to have a private life, no matter how public you are,” he insisted with fire in his tone. “People need to butt the fuck out of your private business, Tripp.”
“They won’t though.” I grabbed my arm and turned away.
Fractured images danced through my memory, photographs on the front of Sports Weekly of me with my face all bruised and looking like a mummy after my recent surgery. Pictures of me struggling to make it down a hallway in a walker like an old man. Candid photos taken of me sitting around at home surrounded by empty takeout containers and bottles from when I couldn’t cope with the forced retirement.
“No matter what I do, there’ll always be someone who wants to take a picture of it,” I said. “Some paparazzi who want to make a buck by making me look bad.”
“Bullies, you mean.” Nicola snorted. “You have to deal with them as such, darling. You can’t control whatever gets written about you in the tabloids, but you can control how you react to it. It’s only a scandal if you let them treat it like one.”
I spun on Nicola. “So I should just act like it doesn’t bother me that the only pictures most people have seen of me are of me half dead in a hospital bed?” I didn’t mean to raise my voice, but it came out that way.
Heads turned toward us, and I wanted to shrink into a puddle.
Nicola crossed his arms, the basket hanging limply in front of him. “Public Tripp needs to act like it doesn’t, yes. But Private Tripp can brood about it all he wants with his closest friends and those who care about him. That’s the distinction you need to make, darling.” He put a hand on my arm as if I hadn’t just shouted at him. “Who do you have to talk to in private? A friend? Family?”
I shook my head. I used to have my teammates, but ever since my injury, we hadn’t really spoken. I just couldn’t face them. There were my parents, but they didn’t understand, and I tried to keep them out of the public eye as much as possible.
“What about your assistant? Cage?” Nicola asked.
I snorted. “Cage would just tell me to man up and deal with it. Like every celebrity does.”
Nicola narrowed his eyes. “The more I hear about this Cage fellow, the more I dislike him.”
“I don’t really have anybody,” I said quietly.
“Well, you do now,” he said, patting my arm. “You have me.”
I perked up. “Really?” Then my heart sank as I remembered how temporary our arrangement was. “But what about after…you know?”
“Pfft.” He waved a dismissive hand and made his way down the aisle to pull something off the shelf. “Regardless of where we wind up at the end of this journey, I don’t want to just move on and forget you exist. We should remain friends, yes? And what are friends for if not to listen to each other bitch and moan about the pressures of work?”
I blinked. “You want to be friends?”
Nicola chuckled. “We’re friends already, aren’t we?”
Something warm sprouted in my chest like a tiny sun and I smiled. It’d been a long time since I’d had a friend. Too long. As much as I enjoyed exploring sex with Nicola, having him as a friend held even more appeal.
I smiled and nodded. “Yeah, we’re friends.” More than friends.
“Wonderful news, darling. Now, come down here and help me. I can’t decide between the Maverick Man and the Colossus Cock.”
I grinned. I was pretty sure friends didn’t help friends pick out sex toys. That was the kind of thing reserved for best friends. Since Nicola was my only friend, that automatically made him my best friend.
My best friend, my lover, and my husband. All three sounded so good, I almost hoped this would never end. What would he say if I told him I didn’t want to annul the marriage? We still barely knew each other, even if it felt like I’d been waiting for him forever. Maybe that’s what a marriage was, though. Two best friends for life, having their whole lives to get to know each other better than anyone. That wouldn’t be so bad. And if it didn’t work out, there wasn’t exactly a time limit to undo things. If we decided ten years down the road that we were better off as friends, we could change things then.
Could I do that? Ten years of this with Nicola? It was hard to wrap my brain around ten days of it, let alone ten years, but I wanted to try. I wanted to do everything with him.
Including helping him decide between the Maverick Man and the Colossus Cock dildoes, so I followed him down the aisle.
One could be forgiven for thinking it was ironic for mothfolk to fly business class on an airplane. While I did have wings, flying from Las Vegas to Florida was simply out of the question for the modern mothman. My ancestors would have balked at such a sojourn. Besides, the humidity in the south would be murder enough.
Tripp slept through most of the four-and-a-half-hour flight. I didn’t blame him. Plane rides were boring. That gave me time to get caught up on all the emails I’d been dodging from my other clients, and to assure them that I was alive and we’d reconnect in the future. With that done, I turned to something else I’d been putting off: finding out everything I could about this Cage fellow.
Tripp’s assistant was a slippery one to track down. For someone in proximity to such a famous figure, he was strangely absent from most social media. His online digital footprint was far too small to be of use to Tripp, which made me like him even less. Tripp needed someone to help him manage his online image, especially if he wanted to launch Brewtiful’s into the stratosphere.
As we began to descend, Tripp woke from his nap, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He stretched and yawned. “We almost there?”
“Descending now,” I said and lowered the tablet I was working on. “Darling, I think you should fire your assistant.”
Tripp blinked rapidly, slowly processing what I was saying. “Fire Cage? But then, who will help me?”
“He’s not really helping you now. A decent assistant should be managing your social media accounts, encouraging you within reason through your various pursuits. An assistant lifts you up, frees you to follow your heart. As far as I can tell, all Cage does is your shopping and your laundry.” I tapped the tablet. “Your socials are a ghost town and your appointments are a mess.”
“He sends me reminders,” Tripp protested.
“Tripp.” I gave him a serious look and lowered the tablet. “I know you want to be nice, and you are. You’re too nice for your own good. Sometimes, doing what’s right for you means getting your claws out.”
He sighed and rubbed his face. “I know, but…Nicola, he’s been with me forever and he’s a friend of a friend. I can’t fire him.”
“But I can,” I offered, getting a confused look from Tripp. I put a hand on his bicep and squeezed. It was supposed to be a comforting gesture at first, but touching him suddenly reminded me of how much I liked being close to him. “I know you don’t want to be the bad guy here, but you need to do what’s best for you.”
“Who’s going to do all that if I fire Cage, Nic?” he said, shoulders slumping.
“I would.”
He stared at me for a moment. “You would? But what about… I mean, aren’t we still going to…undo this?”
Something clenched in my chest at the thought of never seeing Tripp again. Never getting to touch him again, not waking up beside him again. Never getting to see that sweet smile again. “Is that still what you want?”
He lowered his eyes, thinking hard. “I mean, that’s the sensible thing to do, isn’t it? Who gets married in Vegas after one night and just stays that way, right?”
I took a deep breath before blurting, “We could.”
Tripp stared at me, his expression impossible to read.
I cleared my throat and added, “I mean, if you wanted. We could try it out. See how long it takes before we get sick of each other’s company.”
“I don’t know if I’ll ever get sick of you, Nicola,” he admitted quietly.
The words warmed my heart. “You say that now, but it’s only been a few days. I can be a lot.”
“So can I. That’s why I need an assistant. And while I’d love to have you as mine, I’m not sure that’s a good enough reason for us to stay married, Nicola.”
“Oh, poo on that,” I said, pulling my hand away and waving it dismissively. “Marriage is just another word for a partnership. It’s no different from a corporate merger done on a small scale.”
He frowned. “Isn’t it?”
I sighed. “Well, I suppose it is. Corporate entities are rather cold, aren’t they? You and I are… Well, we’re friends. Lovers. Can’t we be partners too? And if we are, then I dare say those might be all the necessary ingredients for a marriage, Tripp.”
He considered me for a long moment, and my heart started pounding in my chest. What if he disagreed? What if he didn’t want to stay married, and he was just after a fling? I’d just put myself out there, made myself vulnerable. He could still reject me. I had told myself it wouldn’t bother me if he did, but that wasn’t true.
Stars save me. I liked him. Given time, I could grow to love him. Maybe I already did. Maybe that’s what this strange warmth I felt in my bones was, this need to be close to him, to touch him all the time. I’d never felt that with anyone, but it was so natural with Tripp.
When Tripp opened his mouth to answer, though, I silenced him with a finger on his lips. “Don’t answer now, darling. Think it over. Let’s get the funding you need for Brewtiful’s first. Give us a week and answer me after the event at Northstar. Can you wait that long?”
His lips twitched into a small smile. “I feel like I’ve been waiting forever already, but all right. A week is nothing when we could have forever.”
Oh, heavenly stars. This man. He had my heart in a chokehold. How was I ever not supposed to fall for him?
