Page 140 of The Difference Between

I hum my laugh, my eyes reorienting with the tools and furnaces around us. “It’s the only reason I’m here.”

“Good thing I have a lot.” He slides my dress down my other arm, leaving me completely naked less my underwear and boots, and his hands and mouth wander me. “Means the rest will be easy.”

The rest means figuring out how to manage the difference between our lives—the baby I’m having and the job I may or may not get back to. Maybe it should worry me, but right now, it doesn’t. He knows why I’m here; I know who he is. If we can handle that, maybe we can figure it out, even without a plan.

And it makes me want him even more.

His mouth returns to mine, slow and unhurried but with enough heat it lets me know we’re finishing what we started—I hope it involves his tongue and that glass.

My fingers fumble with the button of his jeans. Through the denim, he’s hard and ready and yes please. I pull back from his mouth just far enough to ask, “You ready to fuck me on this table?”

“I was ready as soon as I saw that dress,” he says with a pinch of my nipple and press of his erection into my pubic bone.

At the look in his eyes, my mouth waters—Gavin’s about to wreck me in the best way—and the tune of an ocarina cuts through the air.

An ocarina?

What?

I push Gavin away and turn to the source.

Banyan stands in the doorway with a stupid smile on his crooked face, and I scream.

“I knew it,” he says, snapping his fingers. “Fire and heat belong together.” He drops the ocarina to his chest. “Didn’t I say this?”

My jaw drops. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Banyan’s gaze drops to my exposed torso as I fumble to cover myself with a piece of my dress.

“Sounded like you were having fun.” His brows raise. “Bet you’ll be in a better mood now.” To the open doorway he shouts, “Feel that, ladies?” His gaze drops to the paperweight next to me then he grins. “It doesn’t surprise me it took a piece of glass to get you there.”

Gavin chuckles and I glare at him.

“What?” He pecks me with a kiss, unbothered as he fastens his belt and adjusts his pants and the good time I won’t be impaled with. Leave it to a hippie to ruin my life. “You saying that wasn’t fun?”

“Horrific, actually.” To Banyan: “You’re fired.”

Banyan bats a hand through the air like that’s nonsense—it mostly is—as Gavin tosses me a T-shirt to put over my ripped dress.

Banyan meets my scowl with an unperturbed smile. “I ever tell you about the time I lived in a single-roomed shared house with twelve women?”

Forty

“Aglassgasm?” Remy’s eyes are bigger than the mug cupped in her hands. “Holy hell.”

“Glassgasm?” I repeat. “Where do you come up with this stuff?”

Remy sets her mug on Mom’s kitchen table. “One of my favorite authors does it. Every FMC gets a -gasm.”

“Here we go,” Rue says under her breath.

Remy perseveres. “First there was a thigh.” Her brows raise like can you imagine? “Then a flower.” She ticks the -gasms off with her fingers as she continues. “The showerhead, that was a doozy. Then the⁠—”

“Okay!” I cut her off. “That author probably never had an orgasm in her life.”

Remy scoffs. “I’m offended on Kevin’s behalf.”

“Who the hell is Ke—” I blow out a sharp breath and hold up a hand to stop myself. And her. “You know what? Never mind. Yes. There was a glassgasm.” I give her a pointed look across the kitchen table. “Happy now?”