Practice makes perfect, p.13
Practice Makes Perfect, page 13
She squeaks and her eyes clamp shut. “No! I’m upset that you keep feeding me that line over and over.”
I frown. “It’s not a line.”
“Yes, it is. We were in the middle of practicing, and you lured me right into your perfect trap of seduction with your question and then made up the story about the tree and then hooked me with the line about being sexy, and it was just too much. And then I felt silly because I was the one who asked for all of this, but then I got so caught up in it I forgot it was a demonstration again, and—”
I press my hand to her mouth. “None of that was a lie. None. I swear to you—I wasn’t even setting a trap of seduction or whatever you said. The story about the tree was true and something I’ve never told another soul. And the part where I think you’re wildly sexy is true too.” And then I notice tears welling in her eyes again, and now I’m completely lost. I shift my hand from her mouth to clasp the side of her jaw and rub my thumb under her eye—wiping away a tear. “Annie, why does that make you cry?”
She closes her eyes and shakes her head desperately like she’s hoping it will shake her emotions away. “Because…because no one has ever said that about me before.” Those blue eyes open again, and a burst of potent feelings hits me in the chest. “They say it about my sisters—but never me. I’m always praised for being so nice and kind and tender. I’m the girl next door with the sweet face. I’m never viewed as a woman, Will. Instead, I’m just the one men butter up so that I’ll introduce them to Emily and Madison. Even John said…” she trails off.
“What did John say?” I ask feeling every muscle in my body go rigid.
“When I overheard him on the phone telling his friend how boring I was, he also said I was only prettyish.” She smiles sadly.
“I’ll murder him.”
“Will!” Annie reprimands me with a surprised laugh.
“I’m serious, Annie. That guy doesn’t deserve to go on living after making you feel so shitty. Especially after he wore the ugliest baby-blue polo I’ve ever seen on a date.” She laughs, and I shift my hand around to the back of her neck—not willing to let her go yet. “And he’s just plain wrong. First, he was wrong about you being boring. You don’t even need dating lessons, Annie, you were so perfect on our date. Even when you think you’re doing something wrong, you’re so damn adorable I wanted to pull you into my lap and do things with you in the middle of that diner that would have put me in jail for public indecency. Second, he was so wrong about you being only prettyish. God, Annie, you’re drop-dead gorgeous. So beautiful it’s hard to look at you and continue persuading myself that kissing you would be a mistake because of our agreement. And third, your ass.”
She gasps. “What about it?”
“Your ass is a work of art. Two absolutely perfect slopes of soft curvy sensuality that absolutely kill me, Annie. Your ass kills me. And I need you to know that if we weren’t doing this just-friends thing—I would have already…” I let the sentence dangle as my eyes rake over her, implying everything I’ve dreamed of doing with Annie but not saying it out loud because I think I’ve already said too much as it is. And the thing that scares me the most is how desperate I am for her to know all of this and believe it. I’m so good at playing games. At strategically moving pieces around so I can be seductive without ever really having to be real. Without truly risking any feelings. But just now I was more honest and ineloquent than I’ve ever been in my life.
I’m not playing games with Annie—I’m spilling my heart out.
When our gazes lock again, her tears are gone. Instead, her cheeks are rosy and she’s pressing her smile into her knuckles.
I gently angle her face up to look at me. “Do you believe me?”
She nods silently. And then her eyes drop to my lips. “But you were wrong about something.”
“What’s that?”
“It wouldn’t be a mistake to kiss me.”
My heart rams into my ribs. “It wouldn’t?”
“No. In fact, I think we should kiss because I could use the practice.”
“Annie, practicing dating is one thing but—”
“I want to change our original terms too.” She shifts on her feet, and her eyes continue to flit back and forth between my eyes and my mouth. “This whole thing started off with me wanting to get good at dating, but…the more time I spend with you, the more I feel something coming to life inside me. Something I can’t quite pinpoint but I don’t want to lose either. You make me feel different, and I like it. I feel free with you—adventurous and curious.”
She pauses and I don’t dare say anything. I need to hear where this is going without inserting any ideas of my own.
“So I was wondering if you’d be the someone to help me practice taking risks with, doing new things, and…maybe finding who I am now?”
“Be your all-encompassing practice someone?” I ask, letting my thumb drag against her bottom lip.
“If it’s not too much to ask,” she says in a quiet whisper.
“And tonight…you want to practice kissing?”
Her chest fills with a heavy breath and she nods. “I haven’t done it in a few years. I need to shake out the cobwebs. See if I’m any good at it.”
This news is astounding to me.
Even as I’m wrapping my arm around her and splaying my hand against her lower back to pull her up close to me, I ask, “No one has kissed you in years, Annie? How is that possible?” I’ve wanted to kiss her every second since I met her.
I feel her tremble against me. “Maybe there’s something wrong with me. No one ever tries. Even my college boyfriend broke up with me after three weeks without ever really touching me. I think my reputation makes people think I don’t like this stuff.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you.” I push back the hair that’s falling around her face and do what I’ve been dying to do for days—sink my fingers into the mass of blonde hair behind her head. I bend down and whisper against the corner of her mouth, “Nothing.”
“I might be bad at this,” she warns with her eyes wide open, watching me as I tease the corners of her mouth.
“I’m prepared.” And then just as I’m about to finally close the gap, an idea hits me and I pull away. She looks disappointed, like she thinks I’m changing my mind. No damn way. “In light of what happened at the restaurant, I think we should have a clear cue for when we’re in practice mode. So there’s no confusion.”
She looks relieved. “Good idea. Like…time in and time out?”
I hum. “Perfect.”
The tension between us is crackling, and I can tell she wants me to rush this and kiss her already, but the truth is, I love drawing it out. I love taking my time and torturing us both. And if Annie hasn’t been kissed in years, I want to make this one really count.
I sink my face down to her throat and lay one soft kiss at the base. Her breath catches and I move to kiss under her jaw, opening my mouth to feel her warm skin against my tongue. She shivers, and I smile, moving up to kiss the corner of her jaw and then her mouth. The moment her warm, plush lips press into mine, my world tilts. Any finesse or control I feel dissolves, and suddenly I am at her mercy.
Her body sways toward mine, and even though I’m not taking it further than a press of our lips, it feels outrageously good. I slide my hand a little deeper into the back of her hair and force myself to keep this light despite a frantic need building below the surface.
I only intended for it to be quick. A luxurious kiss on the mouth to make her body heat. But damn. Her lips respond to mine as she rises up to wrap her hands around my neck and my blood thrums under my skin. My fingers curl into her hair and the back of her sweatshirt until I’m unconsciously pulling her flush against me. She’s so damn soft, and as I slant the kiss, I can’t help but taste her mouth just once, letting my tongue glide lightly across her bottom lip.
Annie sighs a moan and parts her lips and that’s when I drop my hands under her thighs and hoist her up. She wraps her legs around my waist and our kiss quickly turns from chaste to devouring. I’m carrying her to the storage room, head swirling like I’ve had four shots of tequila and savoring every sigh, every flick of her tongue, every intentional press of her mouth. And as I adjust to walk through the doorframe, my shoulder knocks against it and shocks me back to reality. What the hell am I doing? I can’t take Annie in there. This was only supposed to be a kiss. I want so much more than a kiss from her, though, and that’s why I break the kiss and slowly lower her to the ground. She doesn’t protest, seeming to agree with my thoughts.
“Time out,” I say, when I release her and pace away a few steps, rubbing the back of my neck, trying to settle my body and clear my head.
Get a grip, Will. It was just a kiss. Just practice.
“Was that okay?” Annie asks, self-consciously, and the very question is as absurd to me as the fact that she feels any reason to doubt her skill.
With my hand still hooked around my neck, I look over at her knowing she can plainly see on my face how absolutely wrecked I am by that kiss. I give her one scoffing laugh. “Yeah. It was great.”
Annie turns away a fraction and smiles to herself, and then does something so open, so honest it tears my cynical, terrified heart in half. She rests the tips of her fingers against her smiling mouth.
Before she has time to notice, I pull out my phone and snap a picture of her standing there in the warm overhead lights of her shop.
“Out of curiosity,” I ask later as she’s locking up and I’m walking her to her truck. “What is your favorite flower?”
She drops her gaze to her white Converses and smiles. “Magnolias.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Annie
I park my truck right next to my siblings’ trucks in the town’s communal parking lot. It’s a rainbow of burnt orange (Noah’s rusty old truck), powder-blue and white (mine), red and black (Emily’s), and olive-green (Madison’s). It’s an unwritten rule in this town that if you share our zip code, you must drive a truck. Doesn’t matter if it’s new or an old dinosaur, you’ve just gotta have one.
As I walk toward The Pie Shop, where I’m meeting my siblings for our weekly Saturday night hearts tournament, everything feels so familiar and comforting. The hot summer night licking at my skin, the darkened town square empty of busybodies, and avoiding the same large sidewalk crack that’s been there for a decade.
It’s all the same, but somehow I’m the part that feels a little different. I feel a ghost of Will’s kisses on my mouth, and there’s a promise, a hum, a prickle of something new in the air around me. It’s making the world seem sharper. Sort of like the first day of your senior year of high school. You can sense the change around the corner, but it’s not in your grasp quite yet. Somehow it makes me appreciate the wave of comfort I feel while stepping under the blue-and-white-striped awning of The Pie Shop. How is it possible to crave change and relish familiarity at the same time?
My brother, however, despises change. Everything about The Pie Shop, which he inherited from my grandma, is exactly the same as it always has been since my great-grandparents started it in the sixties. When you step inside, a little bell, softer in sound than the one at my flower shop, jingles above the door. There’s a high top table in front of the single large front window, where Phil and Todd sit every Monday morning at eight thirty to share a slice of fudge pie before they open their hardware store. An antique pie case divides the front half of the shop from the back, and there’s a wooden countertop connecting the case to the wall. My favorite part is still the small section of the counter that lifts up so you can walk through to the back. Until the age of sixteen, I never lifted the counter—I always limboed under it while my grandma warned me that one day my back was going to break doing it. I’d give anything to hear her say that now (and to have the ability to limbo like a sixteen-year-old).
There are only two things I can think of that Noah has changed about the shop since he took it over. One, the register, because even the starchiest of modernizing resisters doesn’t want to perform math on a piece of paper. Two, he added a large decal of a pie on the shop window. And by “he added” it, I mean that he let me place it on the window after I’d had too many beers and online-shopped my drunken heart out. But listen, I gave the Etsy shop their first sale, and I’ll never regret it.
Anyway, Noah doesn’t like change. So the day he told me he was having wifi installed in his house and at The Pie Shop so he could keep in touch with Amelia while she was on tour, I knew he was in love. And now when you look at his quaint country house, you see a big intimidating gate at the front of the driveway and a sign announcing the sensors all around the seven acres of his property line. And then there is the guard shack they’re building, which is worth mentioning because it’s bigger than the peanut shell me and my sisters live in together. All of this is direct evidence that my brother has absolutely devoted his life to Amelia Rose. Those two are in it to win it, and it makes my squishy, romantic heart wild with the double Js. Joy and jealousy.
I open the door to The Pie Shop and am immediately met with my brother’s voice. “No,” he barks, and at first I think he’s talking to me before I see his green gaze narrowed on Madison. “Absolutely not.”
“Oh, come on!” she says, nudging his knee with her foot under the little folding card table we set up on Saturday nights. “Don’t be such a party pooper.”
“What’s going on?” I ask, joining them at the table.
Emily grins. “Maddie is trying to get Noah to have the whole wedding party do a choreographed dance down the aisle.”
“Not gonna happen,” he says sternly, crossing his arms.
“I already told Amelia, and she said she wanted to do it.”
Noah grunts. “Over my dead body. No way in hell am I going to prance down the aisle to some poppy-gumdrop song. Besides, I know you’re lying. Amelia would never suggest it because she’d know it would give me ulcers just thinking about it.”
“Ha! Pay up!” Emily shouts, extending her hands to Maddie. Em grins at Noah. “Maddie bet me twenty bucks she could persuade you to say yes to a dance mob.” She cuts her gaze to Maddie. “And by the way, fabricating Amelia’s support was definitely cheating.”
I should have known. Those two are always betting over something.
Noah folds his arms. “I’m getting married—not giving up my dignity.”
“What’s Amelia doing tonight?” I ask, taking the seat next to Noah and hoping he doesn’t read the underlying context of my question: Is she out somewhere that requires her to take Will?
“She’s in the studio working on her album.”
Despite our best attempts to convince Amelia that she’s welcome to join our sibling hearts night, she has refused to come. She wants us to have our time together—just the four of us. The woman is too thoughtful for her own good.
“Great. And how are things going with wedding prep?” I ask, raising my beer to my lips.
“Fine. The wedding planner seems to have everything covered. Amelia and I have been staying out of it as much as possible.”
I nod slowly. “Great! Good. That’s good. And…everything else? No security issues?”
Noah shakes his head and begins dealing our hands. “Nope. Everything’s good.”
“That’s good….” I pause, telling myself not to say it but losing my own internal battle. “So her bodyguard…what’s his name again? I can never remember. He’s good too? Settling in okay?” It’s been a few days since our kiss in the flower shop, and as odd as it is to admit, I miss him. He’s been busy with Amelia and then I’ve been busy in the evenings working on arrangements for the wedding and trying to get the design just right. He left a note taped to my shop door that I found this morning, though. It said, “Let’s practice something fun tonight.”
No time or place to meet. Just those few words. I’ve been left tingling with anticipation all day.
Unfortunately, everyone notices my pointed question and eyes me speculatively. They look like a sibling gang—all setting down their beers and about to crack their knuckles before they shake me for information.
“Okay, what the hell, Annie?” asks Noah.
I sigh with relief because Noah just unknowingly saved the day.
“Oooh!” Maddie proclaims loudly, pointing a finger at Noah. “That’s number twenty for him! Pay up, bucko.”
“No. That was only nineteen. I have one more until I have to pay.” (Noah says this every month after he’s the first one to burn through his allotted twenty swear words.)
“Let’s take it to the notebook. Annie?” Emily prompts, sitting forward and resting her forearms on the table like she’s about to be witness to an incredible show.
Even though this notebook has begun to wear on me, I reach in my purse and pull it out, grateful for the change of subject. I thumb through the pages and land on this month’s tally chart. Everyone holds their breath while I add them up. Making sure not to tip them off, I keep my face solemn and clear my throat before snapping the notebook shut and setting it on the table. They’re dying of anticipation, each tilted forward and eager to hear Noah’s sentence. It kind of makes me want to drag it out. Really make them ache for it.
But when I finally open my mouth to reveal the answer, a shadow of someone walking across the street catches my eye. A man. Tall, lean build, tattoos down one arm.
My heart hiccups.
He pauses across the street, makes eye contact with me through the shop window, and then hitches his head. It’s time!
“I’m suddenly not feeling well,” I say, jumping up from my chair and clutching my stomach.
“Oh no,” Emily says, eyes searching me head to toe for any unseen ailment. “Do you think you’re sick?”
