19. Finn

Finn

All night at the hotel, I dream of Sammy Braun in my bed.

Undressing me. Undressing himself . Putting his lips everywhere. On his fucking knees—God, that was the worst part. That he was on his knees, his eyes shining up at me, that hunger so apparent in the way he put his lips on me. Devoured me.

Who knew Sammy Braun—so unconfident when talking to a beautiful woman—could pull off an orgasm like that? If Harper knew what she was missing, she wouldn’t even think about playing hard to get. I’ve never been with a man who did oral like that . A man possessed, like he was going to die if he didn’t taste me while I came on his tongue.

Those thoughts plague me all night as I drift in and out of sleep, soaked, pissed off, and somehow still horny after one of the best orgasms of my life. Every time I wake up from a sex dream, I think about the very real possibility that I could have seen him naked—had his cock inside me—and the want doubles up again so violently that I have to take deep breaths to push through it.

When I finally swing my legs over the side of the bed in the morning, I decide I’m not going to let myself wallow in it. I’ll talk to my therapist, decide on a plan of attack, repent to all the girl-boss gods for giving into my primal urges like that, then move on like nothing ever happened.

My legs go weak in the shower when I remember how he hooked his fingers inside me.

I get dressed in my best, most flattering suit, mind running a million miles per minute. Maybe this is exactly what I needed. All those thoughts of him, constantly in my mind, since the moment I got to Burlington—maybe what I really needed was for something to kick them out of my head. To get the itch out of my system.

“I’m sorry.”

I wince when I picture the regret on his face, how, in that moment, I’d suddenly felt like any woman. Sammy Braun felt like fucking, and I was there, and he was sorry that it had happened. The thought rips through my current lust like a gust of freezing, icy wind.

“It won’t happen again.”

He’s right—it shouldn’t have happened at all. And it’s definitely not going to happen again. I’m a professional. Sammy is my client. I made all of that perfectly clear when we were discussing the matter of fake dating.

The door to his room opens the moment I step out into the hallway, and I tense, actually thinking about diving into the cover of my own room before I look up and come face-to-face with a short woman pushing a cart, her hair pulled back in a bun.

“Good morning,” she says cheerily, and when I glance past her, I see that his room is already gutted and cleaned, the sheets from last night balled up and stuffed in this woman’s hamper.

“Good morning,” I say, forcing myself to give her a smile. Then I turn on my heel and head to the lobby, dialing Penny’s number.

***

“Hi,” Sammy says the moment he’s close enough. Like he wants to make sure he speaks first so he doesn’t have to come up with a response. The greeting comes out loud and forced, and I maintain a calm, pleasant expression, not allowing myself to react to the awkward atmosphere.

Of course it’s awkward. The last time I saw him, he was still on his knees in his hotel room, watching me as I quickly ducked out of the room.

Around us, kids are shouting with excitement, squealing and jumping around. Rides roar in the distance, coasters twisting and plummeting over our shoulders, food vendors churning out the sweet and salty scents of a million fried concoctions.

“Your outfit,” he says, looking me up and down when he gets closer. “I like it.”

Without meaning to, I laugh, glancing down at myself. Using almost no strategy at all, Sammy has already diffused the bomb of tension sitting between us, making me laugh within the first ten seconds of us meeting again.

“I’m just wearing jeans and a sweatshirt,” I say, but a smile melts over his face, his eyes skipping up and down my body in a way that makes me warm and shivering all at once.

“Yeah,” he says, reaching out and pinching an inch of the sweater’s fabric between his thumb and pointer finger. “And I like it—you look nice. Cozy.”

“I’m dressed like your fake girlfriend, remember?” I ask, voice choked as I swallow and avert my eyes. This is a casual outfit for me, and I’ve curled my hair so it rests against my shoulders. Usually, I need it up and off my face, pulled back. But I’m trying something new, a pink scrunchie on my wrist for when we go on the rides.

Sammy releases his hold on my sweater and my brain is fizzling out at his proximity, that little gesture. So intimate and close. Like I’m actually his girlfriend. Like the photo we take later for his Instagram will be real.

When I raise my eyes to him again, his are on me steadily, and I get the sense he’s working up the courage to say something about what happened last night.

This man had his tongue on my clit.

Things between us should be awkward. It should feel impossible to talk to him, or even look at him. Instead, that initial moment of tension is gone, and Sammy is back to smiling at me. Part of me wonders if I shouldn’t have run away so quickly two days ago, in New York.

Then I remember: “It won’t happen again.”

I push the thought away and clear my throat, gesturing for him to take out his phone.

“We have to be careful,” I say, watching as he opens the camera app. “I borrowed Penny’s clothes on purpose, and would never normally do my hair like this, but people on the internet can be insane when it comes to sleuthing. I have my location turned off, just in case.”

“Won’t they recognize your face?”

“Soft launch,” I tease, clearing my throat again and gesturing for him to hold his phone up. When he does, I step into his chest, turning my head and pressing my cheek against his chest.

He’s warm. And he smells like fresh pine—surely his deodorant or body wash. I want to drink it in. One of his arms comes around the small of my back, and he draws me closer to him, resting his chin on the top of my head. We stand there like that for a long moment, until my body starts to relax into his. Finally, I push back, blinking up at him.

“Did you get it?”

“What?” he asks, blinking back at me like he’s just woken up from a nap. Then, “Oh. Yeah, I did.”

I ignore the blush spreading over his cheeks and dig into my purse, hands shaking as I produce my phone. This is going to be a long day—I can’t even look at him for more than two seconds without the stars of my orgasm flashing through my eyes again.

Sammy waits patiently while I tap through my phone until I find our tickets—two QR codes for us to gain access to the park.

“Here,” I say, flashing them at him, knowing my voice is overly cheery, but unable to change it. “This is our exercise for the day!”

“I hope it has something to do with corn dogs,” he says, gamely falling in line behind me as we join the crush of people pushing into the park.

Of course it doesn’t—today is still all about forcing him to face his fears. Distantly, feeling his heat at my back, I wonder if it’s about facing mine, too.

Yesterday, Sammy and the Vipers took on the Dallas Stars. Despite the fact that it’s nearing Christmastime, it’s still warm enough here for the amusement park to be open. Some of the Texans are wearing winter coats, which makes even me—a certified California girl—laugh. It’s a cool sixty degrees, which hardly requires bundling up.

“Okay,” I say, grabbing a paper map from a little stall inside the entrance. “How do you want to—”

I stop when I look up, realizing Sammy is already in line at a food stall. I watch him step up to the window, his voice carrying across the little courtyard, which mills with families and little kids, somehow already sticky with sugar, their little eyes wide with excitement as they gaze up at the rides.

My eyes catch on a little girl with two braids running down her back. Her mother is holding her hand, walking with her into the park, and they’re chatting together about what they plan to see first. A mother and daughter. A little team.

Stomach twisting, I turn away just in time to see Sammy coming back to me with what looks like a funnel cake, laden with chocolate syrup and powdered sugar. I should tell him that it’s not part of his finely tuned nutritional plan, to eat something like that. I should tell him that even if it was, nobody would suggest that he have it for breakfast, right at ten in the morning.

But I don’t, instead, ignoring the way Sammy glances at the little girl and her mother, a clear question in his eyes, I reach out and break a piece off, popping it into my mouth so I don’t have to talk.

It’s been a long time since I had something so deliciously non-nutritious. Not a single redeeming quality to a funnel cake—it’s all just sugar and fried nonsense—but it melts in my mouth. Sweet and hot and delicious.

“Come on,” I say, already reaching for another bite as I swallow the first one. Sammy beams at me. “We’re headed to the Tower of Power first.”

***

“Just take it.”

“But—”

“It’s an order, Braun.”

Something flashes behind Sammy’s eyes, but he relents, reaching out and taking the last Dramamine from my bag. I don’t tell him that I already took some this morning, in preparation for the day—let him think he owes me something.

Somehow, Sammy has bravely tackled every single ride I’ve forced him onto, up until this last one. When we got off, he struggled to walk in a straight line, his face mildly green.

“All that spinning,” he’d said, the word spinning cracking a bit, and it made me laugh. When I laughed, he laughed, then he put his hand over his mouth, like it might make him gag.

“Come on,” I say now, after he swallows down the medicine. “We’ll take a break.”

We both use the bathroom, and when I come out, I see Sammy’s snagged a little table outside a lemonade stand. On the other side of the path, there’s a giant pig and the smell of smoked meats drifting toward us.

“Are you okay with sitting here?” I ask, glancing at the pig worriedly. “That smell doesn’t bother you?”

“Already feeling better,” Sammy assures me. “In fact, there’s a sign for ‘meat on a stick’ over there. Doesn’t even say what kind of meat. I’m kind of into it.”

“Jesus,” I laugh, rolling my eyes as I slide onto the bench. He holds out a lemonade to me and I accept, taking a tiny sip. It may be early December, but this drink almost sends you right to June.

“So,” Sammy says, a moment later, after we’ve paused to do some people watching. My eyes keep catching on the children walking by, and I’m glad for Sammy talking. I don’t want to be too obvious. “You know about me growing up in Wisconsin. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Well, what’s your family like? Are you going back home for the holidays?”

I don’t mean to, but I snort immediately, the idea of going home for the holidays so backwards to me that it makes my chest hurt.

Sammy’s eyes widen and I shake my head.

“What—”

“No, no,” I say, raising my hands. “I don’t talk about personal stuff with my clients.”

Sammy stares at me for a moment, his jaw working, and I wonder if he might bring up what happened between us. How personal it was. My stomach tightens, and a strange part of me actually wants him to say something about it, to put it in the light.

“We’re fake dating,” he says instead, raising an eyebrow at me. “So I need to know about your family. What if Harper asks?”

“What if Harper asks about my family?” I laugh. “Are neither of you very good at flirting?”

“I’m just saying…” Sammy leans forward, and the scent of his cologne wafts over to me, bold and heady. I turn my head and take a deep breath, trying to clear out my sinuses with the meat smells from the pig, but the cologne is stuck there. Imprinted.

“We have to sell it, right?” he says.

We certainly sold it in New York. Until you apologized, and I ran away.

“Believe it or not, we might have the whole family situation in common, a bit,” I say, slowly, sucking in a deep breath. “Mine is also pretty complicated.”

“I’m listening.”

“No, really—it sounds like something out of a movie.”

“Listening more intently.”

I laugh, then roll my eyes, then suck in a deep breath, astounded that I’m actually about to tell this man about my entire fucked up family situation.

“Okay,” I finally relent, ignoring the prick of tears that pushes against my eyes when I think about it. Years of therapy and avoiding the topic means it’s so far back in my head it doesn’t normally affect me. So when it does resurface, it’s almost like a dark reminder that this really is the story of my past.

“So, the first thing you should know is that I was—kind of—adopted. This lovely couple in New York. Not the city—they lived out in the country, had this huge house. I loved that house. It was the kind you’d see British kids go to spend the summer. Huge, with trellises of climbing ivy and grounds , just so much land you could walk through. My dad—my adopted dad—he had horses.”

“Okay,” Sammy says, with so much tender curiosity on his face that I have to look away.

“So—the problem is that my adoptive parents got me when I was really little. I was the first foster kid they were assigned, and they decided they wanted to keep me. But apparently there were some complications in my case and the legal stuff was messy. They told me over and over again that they wanted me, that they were doing everything they could. We had a date set for my official adoption. My adoptive mother ordered a cake and everything. But they never actually, formally completed the process. I was ten when everything went to shit.”

Sammy is quiet, and it feels strange, to be remembering my childhood, thinking about all this, and telling him the story while people scream and the smell of cotton candy drifts around our table.

I go on anyway.

“Basically, my birth father—he finds out that I exist. My birth mother died shortly after having me. She was an addict. Because the adoption hadn’t been legalized yet, he was able to claim me. Take me back.”

A little noise comes out of Sammy’s throat, and I realize I’m crying, a single tear on my cheek. Quickly, I wipe it away. This is so far in my past that it shouldn’t matter.

“I moved in with him and his wife, and seven other kids. We lived in a trailer park. It was…not great. Finally, when I was sixteen, I had two jobs, and I sought emancipation. Thought that if I did that, I could return to the right family. But when I showed up on their doorstep—a little malnourished and worse for the wear—my adoptive mother opened the door holding a little toddler. They thought they couldn’t have their own kids. I guess they could.”

“Finn,” Sammy says, voice low. He’s leaning in close over the table, and his hand lands on mine. I should pull away. “This is…so much worse than anything I thought you were going to say.”

“It’s fine now,” I hurry to say, but he clearly doesn’t buy it. “It definitely sucked at the time. I’ve always felt a little like…like I don’t belong anywhere, you know? After sixteen, I went straight to college, worked to put myself through, then stumbled into an internship with the university baseball team. Realized that’s what I wanted to do when I got older. Worked for it. Got it.” I stop myself from saying, “At the expense of having my own family.”

By the time I turned twenty-seven and realized I was ready to have a child of my own, to use my money and resources to give them the life they deserved, it was too late. I needed fertility treatments for a shot at it happening.

“Okay,” Sammy says, his voice thick. He stands abruptly and holds his hand out to me, forcing a smile. I wonder if he can tell I need a distraction. “Come on. I know what you need—we’re getting meat on a stick.”