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Although I’d been in a painful, self-imposed abstinence ever since I broke up with my last great lifetime marital-bliss partner, and that breakup was at least six months ago, I still believed there was the right someone out there just for me. However, I’d decided I wasn’t in a mental mindset to judge that right now, so for the foreseeable future, I wanted nothing to do with any more hoping for a wedding of my own. Perhaps when I turned thirty, I’d re-address the issue, but for now, I wasn’t ready for any man to share my bed on a regular basis, much less my coffee maker… if I had a coffee maker.
I was more into tea.
Instead, I’d plunged deep into the cold waters of planning this final wedding and kept myself away from any guy who even remotely came on to me. I absolutely did not want another potential long-term relationship. If anything, I was open to shallow and immediate relationships, with absolutely no strings to pull me in, only to clip those strings once I opened my heart. My heart was a bank vault, and the door had been slammed shut with the combination locked inside.
That said, at the moment, I wasn’t quite ready for a string of one-nighters. My last breakup had burned deep, and my heart was only now starting to scab over. Instead, I’d invested in the best, high-end sex toys ever made. I’d become an expert in the art of self-gratification and all its nuances.
Still, holy hell if seeing Cody again didn’t cause my female parts to be so aroused that no battery-operated device would even come close to satisfying me. Not when I knew Cody Days was in my airspace.
Just being hugged by him proved to be a panty-dropping experience. I could only imagine what it would be like to have him hovering over me, naked and aroused.
Nothing battery operated would ever measure up.
How could I possibly have a one-night fling with Cody when we shared such an unfulfilled past? He was my kryptonite, and I had to stay away from him, or I’d fall into that same damn trap of dreaming of my own HEA, and I knew damn well Cody wasn’t in any way ready for that kind of commitment.
I had no idea how I’d get through the next forty-eight hours… did I mention how good Gabe and Dustin looked? My initial crush might be on Cody, but I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t admit I was wet for his bandmates as well.
Down, girl! You have a dinner and a wedding to oversee. No skin-to-skin fun for you.
Even saying those words in my head didn’t seem to make any difference. My body refused to react to logic and instead, immediately went to the down and dirty. And this time, it had nothing to do with anything that was even remotely battery operated.
I’d decided to give myself a little Napa wine tasting vacation once this over-the-top stressful wedding was over and everyone left. I needed some time to regroup, taste some wine, and relax without being tormented by Natalie’s perfect wedding, or by her sex-on-a-stick brother. Now that I’d sold my wedding planning company, and I only had two more months on my condo in LA, I had to decide if I would return to live in LA, which I was so over, move back home to Huston which would swing me right back into wedding planning because of my parents, move to Sweet Whiskey like Tammy suggested, or do something entirely different. The doing something different had me stumped, but I wanted to be open minded about it.
After all, anything could happen if I remained open minded, at least that had always been my motto. Exactly the reason why I’d ended up in LA running my own business. I’d gone to UCLA. Majored in film. Wanted to be a director. When that didn’t work, I pivoted into the one thing I knew how to do… plan a wedding.
Up until a few weeks ago, it had consumed me.
But no more. I was ready to move on, despite what my parents thought. Which made moving back to Houston completely out of the question.
Now that the sale of my company had gone through, I was flush with cash and could go and do just about anything I wanted to do, even start a new company, if I knew what the company should even be. The world was wide open for me… if I wanted the entire world. Which I didn’t. I guess what I wanted was my own little piece of it. Wherever and whatever that might look like had yet to be determined.
If Cody wasn’t in a relationship… or if Gabe and Dustin weren’t in a relationship, I might actually consider that polyamorous dance with the gods. They might be exactly what I needed to break the cold cycle of pleasuring myself and instead give and take pleasure from a man… or three.
Then I could sit back, relax, and live on the glorious memories for the next week or two while I got occasionally shit-faced on delicious wine.
The mental visual caused me to chuckle and make a bold move in my favor.
“Everything looks good, sweets. Exactly as we’d planned,” Natalie told me after going over our seating chart once again, then matching it to the place cards on the table.
“I aim only to please,” I told her, straight faced.
Of course, I wasn’t about to tell her that I’d been thinking of my own pleasure, and not hers at the moment. For the past several months, she’d been my biggest client and my most annoying client. Planning her wedding had been the catalyst for me to sell the whole damn thing to my assistant who couldn’t have been happier to buy the business and call it her own.
I’d done everything and anything Natalie had asked me to do, including turning down other clients to dedicate all my time and energy on her wedding. Flying back and forth from LA to northern California at least ten times in the last few months had been exhausting to say the least. Considering that every time I did, Natalie had so many things going on at once, getting her to focus on any one thing had proven to be next to impossible.
She loved to stack tasks, and while that was fine for her own business, when you were dealing with your wedding planner… not so much.
The day had finally arrived… well, almost… and I was physically and mentally ready for it to be over so I could get on with my life, whatever that meant.
Still, even today, this moment, I did my best to stay focused on Natalie, despite my one little sneaky self-indulgence of inserting myself in the midst of all that rugged maleness.
Once she approved the seating, I switched a few things around so that Cody and his bandmates were now surrounding me at the table. I had planned on sitting at the far end, allowing more of the wedding party and family to sit near the bride and groom, but I switched seats with Aunt Rosie, who Natalie never exactly liked, anyway.
“I noticed that your brother didn’t bring a date to this dinner,” I told her, wanting to know his dating stats. “I thought he was in a relationship.”
She hesitated for a moment, and I immediately knew something was up… something she didn’t want to admit. I found it interesting to note that after all these years, despite us being in our late twenties, Natalie still held onto some of the same personality traits she’d had as a kid, which had caused me a lot of grief over these last few months while planning her wedding, but this kind of petty shit over her brother’s dating status was getting on my nerves. We were all adults now. It was time to let go of this silly “you can’t date my brother” crap. As if that was ever a thing with her. I knew for a fact that she dated several brothers or cousins of our mutual friends. Her dating the first boy I ever loved was cause for our very first major fight, which broke our friendship, but that was all behind us now. He was long gone, and we’d gotten past it.
But what I couldn’t figure out was this obsession she had with my potential hook-up with her brother.
