Chapter 20

CHAPTER TWENTY

ANTHONY

Conversation with my mother

Mother, did you send a wedding invitation to Wilson and Nina?

Yes, didn’t we discuss it?

No

Should I put them down for the chicken or the fish?

I got whiplash, once, when my father chased a yellow light and caught a truck. I just got it again, this time because Rosie James basically proposed to me and then turned around and invited my ex-fiancée and former friend to spend the afternoon with us so she could avoid being alone with me. And I can’t even ask her a damn thing about it because they’re in the car with us, Wilson nattering on about his favorite type of cheese as if anyone in this car, or the great state of North Carolina, gives a flying fuck.

It feels like I was floating on air, but someone decided to yank me back down and remind me gravity exists.

Texting with my mother didn’t exactly help.

Sighing, I return my phone to my pocket and rub my temples. I can still feel Rosie on my lips, my hands. Her sweet strawberry taste is in my mouth, probably because of that gum she chews. The need to be alone with her so we can figure out what’s happening is overwhelming.

“Now, provolone,” Wilson is saying, his voice like a blow to the brain. “Provolone is an underrated cheese. The flavor is understated—”

“Oh, for the love of God, Wilson,” Nina snaps. “No one wants to know what you learned in your cheeses of the world class.”

“You said it sounded interesting,” Wilson says, his voice wounded.

“It is,” Rosie insists, glancing at him in the rearview mirror. “Everyone loves cheese. You know…provolone’s my favorite cheese. It goes with everything.”

I give her a sidelong glance, taking in her angelic face—the perfectly innocent look in her big blue eyes.

Does she mean it, or is she just messing with Nina? If she is, she’s doing it with a straight face…

My mood plummets a little further just before Rosie takes a hard left turn—much too hard—into the parking lot of a shopping plaza with several different store fronts. It’s a scuzzy-looking place, with a store that advertises second-hand hot tubs and another that appears to sell nothing but jerky.

“I don’t see a paint and wine place,” Nina says sharply, giving Rosie a wide-eyed look as if she thinks she’s about to be mugged and left stranded at a strip mall.

“Because we’re not going to one,” Rosie tells us with a flourish. She unbuckles and turns in her seat so she’s facing all of us, although she doesn’t meet my eyes. She hasn’t for a while now.

Panic digs in.

She must regret telling them we’re engaged.

Or, worse, she got what she wanted and now she doesn’t want anything to do with me.

That thought starts to mushroom, the way bad thoughts like to, as Rosie waves her hand out the windshield. There’s a brightly lit sign saying: Balls of Fire: Indoor Paintball Course . “We’re going to have some fun.”

“Paintball?” Nina says with an affronted gasp. “I’m wearing Versace .”

“Oh, not to worry.” Rosie smiles back at her. “They give you jumpsuits to cover your clothes. I looked it up online because I was worried about getting paint on my sequins. They’re from Target.”

“ Communal jumpsuits?”

I shake my head, a headache closing in on me. “What’s the big deal? You used to go bowling with your friends all the time. You had a club .”

But that was before she knew I was rich.

Everything changed after that.

She quit her bowling club. She also stopped answering her friends’ calls—dropping them as easily as if they were a magazine subscription she’d stopped wanting.

“You did?” Wilson asks in disbelief. “Why do you never—”

“I outgrew bowling,” Nina says. “And paintball. Paintball is something only teenagers play.” She gives Rosie a pointed look. “I suppose that wasn’t so long ago for—”

“She’s twenty-eight,” I snap.

“With very good skin,” Rosie says, placing her palm on my thigh as if she knows I want to leave and is trying to pin me in place. “Don’t worry, Nina. We’ll get you there too.”

“Twenty-eight is still very young,” Nina says. “A more mature woman—”

“You’re less than two years older than her.”

“Which is why I don’t want to play a teenager game, Anthony .”

“You know who knows how to have fun?” Rosie asks, looking back even though she leaves her hand on my leg, her fingers moving slightly. Maybe she means the gesture to be comforting, but it’s driving me crazy. It’s like each nerve ending she’s touching is sending messages straight to my dick. “ Teenagers . When was the last time you let yourself have fun the way teenagers do? We forget how to, when we get older. Today, we’re going to remember. That’s going to be our Christmas present to ourselves.”

“I’d prefer jewelry.”

“Jewelry can be lost or go out of style, but memories leave the kind of imprint that lasts forever,” Rosie says brightly.

I’m sure she only half believes what she’s saying—at least as far as paintball is concerned—but she’s animated in a way that makes everything she says brim with possibility. It makes me want to press her up against a wall. To suck in some of her light. And it also shakes my trust in her, because it’s so hard to tell what’s real, and I have trouble trusting anything I want this much…

“She has a point there, Nina,” Wilson says with a laugh. “I want to do this, babe. Let’s make some memories. We can be on the same team.”

“The two couples against each other,” Rosie says with a wide grin. “The winner buys lunch.”

“Well, it seems I’ve been outvoted,” Nina says primly, giving way, or at least giving the appearance of it. I’m guessing she’s given up on this battle only because she thinks she might still win the war. Although what she sees as the prize is a guess I don’t care to make.

“Fantastic,” I say, getting out of the car. I have half a mind to stalk off, maybe check out the jerky store and find out what all the fuss is about desiccated meat. But I don’t. It’s as if I’m tethered to Rosie.

Everyone piles out and as we make our way toward the brightly lit indoor paintball course, Rosie slides her arm through mine. I’m still pissed at her, at the situation, at the world , but I let her.

Nina and Wilson follow us at a distance, arguing in intense, carrying whispers.

“Is this where you planned on bringing me?” I ask Rosie in a softer undertone. “Or is it a special treat for Nina?”

“Both,” she says, before adding in a conspiratorial voice, “I know you didn’t want them to come, but don’t you think it’s a little coincidental that they’re here today? It could be one of them, running that website. Nina’s made it pretty clear she doesn’t want you to get married to someone else. We have to make sure they’re not behind this.”

“By torturing them with paint until they confess? I admire your commitment to the bit, but I’m not convinced it’ll work.”

She steps onto the curb in front of the storefront. The window is covered in stickers that look like exploding balls of paint. An exhausted exhalation gusts out of me. I’m in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with Nina.

“When you push people out of their comfort zone, interesting things can happen,” Rosie says, giving me an arch expression, as if she knows exactly what’s going on in my head.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” I observe. “Is being alone with me out of your comfort zone right now?”

She takes my hand, her eyes peering into mine. “You underestimate my ability to avoid people. If I were trying to avoid you, you’d know. Now, let’s buy tickets for everyone so they can’t make their excuses.”

I doubt it’s the whole story, but I’m still relieved.

Deeply relieved.

I hold her gaze and nod, lifting her hand for a kiss across her knuckles.

Then we go in and get tickets for an hour of hell from the zitty teenager at the desk. The only nod to the approaching holidays is a pint-sized tinsel tree sitting on his desk, next to a dreidel that looks like it’s seen better decades.

A few minutes later, Nina and Wilson come in, and we all bear the indignity of putting on the smelly, scratchy coveralls. Then come the safety goggles and the paintball guns with their shoulder slings, paintballs, paint grenades, and…

“Are you ready for war?” Rosie asks with a grin.

It takes less than five minutes for Rosie to nab Nina with a purple paintball—a colorful burst over her heart. We’d already set rules: a hit to the heart is an automatic out.

Nina screams at the top of her lungs as if she’s been murdered, and Wilson shouts, “I’ll avenge you, bunny,” and hurls a paint grenade in our direction.

His aim is off, but I feel some of the pink spray land in my hair. Adrenaline coursing through me, I grab Rosie and dive behind a huge inflatable triangle covered in advertisements for some sugar-water drink, landing with my body covering hers, our paintball guns hanging from the shoulder straps.

Nina calls out Wilson’s name, but he waves to her. “Get off the field, sweetheart! Go get some hot chocolate at the concessions stand. My treat.”

From the stricken look on Nina’s face, he might as well have just told her to go fuck herself. Actually, this may well be Wilson’s way of saying exactly that.

Rosie starts laughing, her whole body shaking with it. Grinning, I press a finger to her lips, and she looks me in the eye and then parts her pretty lips and sucks in my finger, her mouth warm. The suction shoots straight to my dick.

A groan rips from my chest as I free my hand and grip the back of her ponytail, pink paint staining my fingers from the grenade spray. I kiss her, her lips opening for me as her body arcs into mine, her hands gripping the front of the disgusting jumpsuit to tug me to her. She still tastes like strawberry gum, and I decide she tastes like summer too—the first ripe strawberry, the sun on my face, the feeling of the ocean lapping at my feet. When I have my mouth on her, I feel this endless winter I’ve been in lifting. Even though we’re here in the middle of a shitty indoor paintball course that smells like unwashed feet, I would stay forever if it meant I could go on kissing her, feeling her body under mine. If it meant we didn’t have to ask each other the kind of questions that might end this…

But I hear Wilson’s clumsy footsteps getting closer, and Rosie pulls away, panting a little, her eyes bright with mischief. We both reposition our paintball guns, and she darts across the course as fast as a gazelle to a large rectangular foam structure that’s half-heartedly decorated to look like a high-rise building. Wilson’s footsteps shift, and I see him going after her, but I’ll be damned if I let him take her down. No one should take her down, ever.

So I shoot a round at his back. Red paint pocks his left arm—

He turns around to face me so rapidly he nearly trips over one of the mats on the floor. Two hits to any one limb is an out but not one. I line up again, but he darts behind a yellow sphere with a flattened bottom.

He takes a shot at me, and it hits the foam triangle in front of me. I glance beyond him and see Rosie gesturing to me from behind her building.

Come here.

So I dart to the right, behind a non-distinct square of foam that smells of mothballs and is covered in paint splashes, and earn a paintball to one leg. It’s green, and the point of contact feels like a hornet sting.

Wilson makes a crowing sound of victory, but we both know we’re in the same position—one hit to the limb. Still in it.

In it to win it, because suddenly that seems very important.

While he’s busy crowing about his victory, I make another mad dash forward and to the right, sliding behind a triangle decorated to look like a wedge of cheese.

Wilson gets off another paintball in my direction, but it splats harmlessly off the cheese. Then suddenly he’s howling, clutching his left thigh, pocked with a blue spot.

I don’t think. I use the distraction to dart toward the rectangle building. I’m on edge when my former friend gets off another shot at me, the paint ball whizzing past me and exploding on the floor like a dropped egg, and then Rosie’s grabbing the collar of my jumpsuit and dragging me behind the foam building with her. Her hand still gripping the suit, she pulls me down to her for another kiss, her lips sucking mine. The combination of adrenaline and need is pounding through me so powerfully I don’t know if I can keep my feet. I definitely can’t think, which is good, because it means I can’t overthink.

Our eye guards clink together, but I can’t stop. I suck in her bottom lip and back her into the foam building, anchored to the ground with God knows what, although I’m guessing it contains asbestos. Her body melds to mine as if we were two pieces fitted to each other. Being close to her feels right in an uncanny way that makes my skin prickle. I still don’t know if we could possibly be the answer to each other’s problems, but I know that I want this. I want her for myself.

She pulls her head back too soon. Her eyes glint at me from behind the protective glasses, and my world is so engulfed by her, I only dimly register Wilson approaching us.

“Bring him down for me, Mr. Darcy,” she whispers.

Feeling a surge of purpose, I nod and rub at a fleck of pink paint off her cheek. “You were right,” I admit, feeling charitable, like I’d give her anything she asked for, even the admission that I was wrong. “I feel like a teenager again.”

“And it’s fun, isn’t it?” she asks, obviously pleased.

“It’s always fun with you.”

There’s a look in her eyes I can’t read, but I hear Wilson creeping closer, so I brush a kiss on her lips and glance around the side of the foam building.

He’s out in the open, rushing toward the wedge of cheese, but I aim for one of his legs and launch the paintball.

Five seconds later, a shriek fills the air, and Wilson falls to the ground, both of his hands covering his balls.