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“Nope, I was up all night, shoveling a deep hole in my backyard to bury a fantasy.” They both look at me, expecting me to continue, so I do. “Hot Neighbor.”
“Bury him, but not Gym Bro. You two looked hot together.”
“Hot Neighbor has a dog.”
Fawna sighs, “Hot Neighbor has a dog.”
Francesca curls her fingers, telling me to continue.
“I watched him let his dog shit in my backyard and not clean it up.”
They both suck in a breath.
“Exactly.”
“So, Gym Bro for the win.” Fawna smiles.
I roll my eyes. “Sure.”
* * *
It’s the first day in months I’ve gotten out of bed in time to walk to work, so of course I’d be on my way home when the sky opens up and buckets of ice-cold water pour down onto my head.
It’s fine. Totally fine, I tell myself as I quicken my pace. I’m going to freeze and catch a cold then spend the rest of the weekend miserable when all I wanna do is go home and take a nice, long bath in my claw-foot tub, full of bubbles, while reading as many chapters as I can from my new Mila Maximus romance novel before the bubbles are gone and the water grows cold. Then I’ll slide into some sweats and a hoodie and park my ass in front of the TV to catch up on Whispers in the Shadows: The Hunt for the Midnight Stalker while consuming enough carbs from whatever the hell takeout I ordered to put me in a food coma.
Walking down the driveway, splashing through unavoidable puddles, teeth chattering, I remind myself, Almost there.
When I round the corner to the back porch, I stop dead in my tracks when I see Hot Neighbor holding an umbrella over his pup as it cops a squat on my lawn.
“Are you freaking serious right now?”
When his head whips around and our eyes meet, my jaw drops as realization hits. Hot Neighbor is also freaking Gym Bro. And right now, his shit-ass grin is growing into an extremely sexy smile.
I manage to close my mouth and pull it together as I point at him, then the dog, then back at him. I scowl as I walk up the steps to my back porch and yell, “This time, clean it up!”
Stomping up the porch stairs, I scold myself. How the hell did I miss that! Distance, angle, never close enough, always in the house or running to the car … real observant, Cecilia, real fucking observant.
I throw open the door to my mudroom, punch in the code—a couple of times because … well, because now my hands are shaking. I finally get it, walk in, and slam it behind me.
Once inside, I lean against the door and try to calm myself down, quickly realizing there is no such thing as calm when you’re soaked to the damn bone, your teeth are actually chattering, and your nerves are frayed.
I quickly make work of shimming out of my coat, kicking off my waterlogged sneakers, and stripping down.
I’m so out of it that I contemplate leaving the pile on the floor. But the floor—which Chloe, my brother-in-law, Danny, and I stripped, sanded, stained, and sealed—is too damn pretty to chance any sort of damage.
In my bra and panties, I scoop up my clothes and stomp—yes, stomp—to the stairs, up them, and into the laundry room. Once I deposit them in the sink, I start wringing them out. “Like I’d like to wring his damn neck,” I sputter.
Then I jump straight in the air as the most annoying voice in the world starts screaming, “Bestie! Bestie! Bestie! Hello, bestie! It’s the baddest bitch you know! Come on. Answer your damn phone!”
“Make it stop,” I whine as I begin digging in the pocket of my jacket to find the damn thing, and then I remember I can answer on my watch.
I hit Accept. “That is the most annoying fucking ringtone I’ve ever heard.”
“You were supposed to call or text as soon as you got home.” Francesca laughs.
“We were worried you drowned,” Fawna adds.
I glance in the washer and see it’s too full of clothes that I forgot to dry and need to be rewashed to add all these soaked clothes.
