by London James
Why do I torture myself with thoughts like this? My body is thinking with my dick way too often for my comfort.
“Okay, I’m back, sorry.” She comes out of her bedroom. Jesus, she wasn’t wearing a bra before, but now she is. “I took way too long in the shower and lost track of time.”
“Don’t worry about it.” I run my hand through my hair.
“And sorry it’s literally two thousand degrees in here. C’mere, Chunky boy.” She leans over to pick up Chunk, giving me a view down her shirt. I look away immediately and start thinking about calculus to keep my dick under control. “Let me get the fan.”
She moves Chunk out of the way and fills his spot with a tower fan. The relief is instantaneous. Chunk wanders back in front of it and flops on his side, letting the air hit his belly.
“That’s better.” She sits down beside me, laptop in hand. “Thanks again for your help. I’m guessing you’ve never put together flower arrangements, right?”
“When would I have done that, Briony?” I ask, laughing.
“You surprise me sometimes.” She shrugs. “Here’s what we’re trying to recreate, more or less, for the tables.”
She pulls up a photo of a flower arrangement. I don’t know shit about flowers, but I can tell it’s something thoughtfully put together and deceptively simple. It's beautiful.
“Okay, so…” She gets up and gathers a bunch of flowers in long boxes, the ends wrapped in damp paper towels. “Here’s the order you put the flowers in the vase—basically, small to large. The greenery, then the small flowers, then the big bulbs. Don’t worry about making it look fancy, because I’ll do that once you’re done. Sound good?”
“Thanks for putting it into my language,” I say, picking up a big leaf I vaguely recognize. “These plants have names, don’t they?”
She grins, one of her dimples appearing next to her mouth. “Yeah, but does it matter to you?”
“At this moment? Not really.”
“Well, there you go.” She stands up, putting her ass right at my eye level. Maybe I’ve gone to hell, and this is my torture. “What flower-arranging jams would you like to listen to?”
“What does a person listen to while arranging flowers?”
“Hm.” She gives me a mischievous glance over her shoulder as she puts her phone into the speaker I noticed on her shelf. “We could make it a throwback kind of day.”
“Please no Lady Gaga or whoever,” I beg. She had just gotten big when I was in college, and my neighbors spent so much time blasting her music that I can hardly stand her even to this day. And when they weren’t blasting her music, someone in the quad was.
“You’re pretty much asking for Gaga, then.”
“Please, no. Is this going to be like our carpools in high school?” I ask. Whoever got shotgun picked the music, which meant that Briony and I spent a lot of time fighting for the front seat. Since I was bigger and stronger than her, I used to hip check her out of the way and scramble inside, even if she’d called it first.
In retrospect, I treated her like one of the guys half the time, which probably confused her the rest of the time when I playfully flirted with her. No wonder things had blown up between us.
“Yes, except we have more than whatever I burned onto my CDs.” She puts her hands on her hips. “Eminem, for a classic ‘Ben and Ash post-wrestling practice’ throwback?”
“Oh, god.” I run my hand over my face. There was a long period when Ben and I listened to excessive amounts of Eminem. We listened to it because it drove both our parents and Briony absolutely crazy. She hated how loudly we blasted it, and our parents thought we were going to become violent psychopaths because of him. And, as teenage suburban white guys, it’s the law to listen to him at some point, more or less. “What about Aerosmith?”
“Did you seriously just suggest Aerosmith?” she asks, her eyebrow going up.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Old-people music.”
“It’s not old-people music.” I get up and go behind her to see what she’s doing. “I think the word you’re thinking of is classic.”
“Fine, it’s classic old-people music.” She rolls her eyes, still smiling so hard that her dimples showed. “Let’s go with some pop.”
She scrolls through Spotify and picks an album. A horn plays a long beat and shifts into something pop-y. “Carly Rae Jepsen. Then you can pick the next thing.”
“Fine.” I’m close enough to her to see the freckles on the tops of her shoulders. If we were going to hook up, I’d probably put my hands around her small waist and kiss along her neck, pulling her into my arms. I like how she’s smaller than me, but not too short. She has just enough meat on her to sink my fingers into a little bit. I force myself to take a step back from her, so I won’t break down and do it.
We get to work. I place the proper flowers in the small white vases while she works on two large arrangements in floor vases, trimming the ends of plants and putting them in stem by stem, stepping back and looking at her work with her head cocked to the side. Sometimes she mumbles something to herself and undoes whatever she just did. I find myself falling into a groove with the flowers, the poppy music brightening the atmosphere.
“Are you dancing?” she asks, her head suddenly inches behind me. I jump. “Do you love this?”
“Hold up; love is a strong word,” I protest. “It’s catchy. I can’t help it. And bobbing my head isn't dancing.”
“Uh-huh.” Her smile is contagious. “Sure.”
“Even if I did like it, who cares?” I point out. “It's music. Everyone likes music.”
“Old Ash wouldn't have been caught dead listening to this girly pop.”
“Thankfully I've grown quite a bit since I was twenty.” I snort. “What were you expecting me to be like, B?”
She pauses, looking up at the ceiling in thought. “I don't know. I need to stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Comparing current you, to past you. If someone tried to compare me now to me in college, I would throw a fit.”
“Eh, it's a natural impulse. People develop, but their base nature is still there. Like, I would be shocked if you were sullen and not enthusiastic, but I'm not shocked that you're starting your own business.”
“You think past me was the kind of person to start a business?” she asks, clearly flattered.
“Yeah. Once you're into something, you run.” I lean back in my seat. “And you're not the type to jump into things without thinking a little first.”
Except for our hookup, but that’s beside the point.
“I guess you're right. About our natures.”
She goes silent, and the only sounds are the music and her clipping off the bottoms of flowers. “Can I ask you something?”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
“Am I crazy for wanting to start a company? What am I really getting into?” Her eyes are serious and thoughtful; her smile gone for once.
“Everyone who starts a business is a little crazy.” I smile wistfully, remembering the early days of my own. “There’s a lot of sacrifice and a lot of deep shit you have to face inside yourself. So yes, you’re crazy, but so am I. You have to get comfortable with risk.”
“Hm.” She mulls that over.
“If you ever need anything, I’m here,” I say before realizing how it sounds. “Y’know, for your business. And in a friend way.”
Her smile comes creeping back onto her face. “Really?”
“Of course. I haven’t been through it all, but I know a lot of people who can help.”
She makes a little sound of displeasure in the back of her throat. “We’re having trouble raising additional capital. A lot of investors are like, ‘Flowers? Who cares?’ even though I think our presentations are solid. Maybe it’s the people we’re approaching.”
“They can be fickle. I know some people who might be interested, though.” I dig through my mental contacts list. Someone has to be the right
fit. “No guarantees, though.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, her eyes bright. “You seriously don’t have to put me in touch with anyone if it’s a hassle.”
“Business tip number one—if someone offers to connect you to someone, always take the info. Don’t be a humble hero,” I say, pulling out my phone. I make a note to call a few folks on Monday. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”
“Thank you, Ash,” she says quietly. “It really means a lot to me.”
The way she says it makes my neck heat up like the words came from the most shielded parts of herself. Seeing that in her sends my heart fluttering into my throat. I clear it and swallow. This is the kind of things friends do for each other. Just because she looks at me like I’ve just given her the gift of life doesn’t mean anything beyond simple gratitude, even if the atmosphere in the room has shifted to something I can’t quite name.
The song changes to something equally catchy, and she starts to dance, back to her normal groove. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
“Are you still anti-dancing?” she chuckles, shaking her hips to the beat. It’s doing things to me that I want to shove into the back of my mind.
“Yep. I know my weaknesses.” I have a sense of rhythm, but my body doesn’t move like that.
“Suit yourself. There's nothing more fun than dancing around while doing things around the house.” She keeps dancing, and I force myself to focus on what I’m doing. If I don’t, I know I’ll be staring at her perfectly shaped ass and thinking of how she would look with it in the air as I plowed her.
I need air, or I’ll do something extremely stupid.
“Want me to take this trash out?” I point to the bag of discarded leaves and cardboard at her feet.
“Oh sure, thanks. You have to walk down to the garbage room since the chute is messed up,” she says over her shoulder. “You can’t miss it.”
I grab the bag and walk down the stairs, finding the garbage room easily. It’s a tiny place, with some rickety-looking wiring on the opposite wall of the compactor. It looks like bad news, like mice nibbled through some of them, leaving them exposed.
“Hey, you should talk to your super about that wiring down there,” I comment when I return. “It looks like a fire hazard.”
“Our super might as well be a ghost. He says he’ll fix something, but it never gets done. We’ve mentioned the wiring to him lately, but he hasn’t done jack shit.”
She says this like it’s no big deal. I own my brownstone—I have to handle hiring repair people on my own, so this ineffective super problem is a little startling. Do people really not care about their jobs that much?
“Call him again. Seriously,” I insist.
“Fine, fine.” She steps back from the vase she’s arranging and looks at it. “What do you think?”
“It looks amazing.” I give her shoulder a friendly squeeze.
She looks up at me over her shoulder, her face bright. She is so goddamn beautiful that my breath catches in my throat for a second. When was the last time I felt like this? Enchanted by how pretty someone is, rather than only by lust?
This is bad, isn’t it?
Chapter Nine
Briony
The flowers arrived at the hotel space without all of the vases shattering, thank god. After getting everything up the freight elevator to the rooftop, the hotel’s team starts working to put all of the arrangements that Ash and I put together yesterday onto the little tables sprinkled across the roof. I adjust the flowers in their vases as I wander through the space, taking in how everything looks from a step back.
I did a pretty good job—not to toot my own horn or anything. The space itself does help a lot, though. Just like at the party where Ben proposed to Daisy, the roof has a gorgeous view of the city. They’ve reserved the roof for the evening, so I can see how the flowers will look in golden light. The afternoon sun feels nice, sure, but the gigantic pool in the middle is calling my name. It’s yet another hot day. The thought of diving into the water then sitting on the side of the pool with a drink makes me want to speed time up.
“Briony, these look so amazing,” Daisy squeals as she steps out from the elevator fifteen minutes into the set-up. “The photos you sent didn’t do them justice.”
I smile, taking a look at the two big vases along the path to the party area. I’ve gone with a lot of tropical plants I haven’t used before, but I pulled it off. The bright orange of the flowers mixed with the rich green of the leaves is inviting and frames the entryway nicely, coming up to my shoulder.
“I’m so glad you love them.” I give her a hug.
“How long did it take you to do all of these?” she asks, pointing at all of the smaller arrangements on the standing tables.
“Not too long. Ash came over and helped,” I explain. Just saying his name almost makes me blush. God, having him over was probably a mistake. Now I can’t stop thinking about how he looked in my space, his big, manly form on my tiny little couch delicately trying to put together the arrangements, gently bobbing his head to whatever music played.
I want him in there all the time.
“Wow, that’s nice of him.” She puts her sunglasses on top of her head, unaware of my internal embarrassment. “Want to go get changed and put your stuff down?”
I look down at my jean shorts and t-shirt, which I’m wearing because I hate wearing a swimsuit for anything but lounging or hanging out in the water. I have to get changed at some point, even though the thought makes me nervous for a lot of reasons, most of which involve Ash.
“Sure.”
Daisy has a hotel room for the evening, just to have a place to keep all of our stuff without worry. She has her makeup and sunscreens on the vanity table, which she pushes aside so I can have room for my stuff. I’m not going to put on a full face of makeup only for it to get messed up in the pool, so I only have my sunscreen and hair ties to put on. I grab my swimsuit and go into the bathroom to change.
Before I strip, I hold up the swimsuit I just got and look at it. It’s ‘quite daring’ as Zara put it, her vaguely British accent making it sound somehow scandalous.
I bought it because I like it, obviously, but I would be lying if I said I hadn’t been thinking of how Ash would react when he sees me in it. I might be a total fuck-up when it comes to dating, but I’m not a complete idiot when it comes to men—I could tell he’d been lusting after me when he came over yesterday, and I hadn’t even been trying to impress him. My teeny running shorts and thin t-shirt were to keep me from passing out from heat exhaustion, but he didn’t seem to care about the outfit’s functionality. I felt his eyes on my body more than once, and every time, I got a little thrill that I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s the same look of anticipation that guys have given me when they know we’re going to end up in bed eventually. And when he looked me in the eye? I could practically see him undressing me in his head.
I wonder how he’ll handle me when I’m actually trying to look hot. Or how I’ll react to him seeing me mostly naked. Being around him and talking to him almost every day via text is breaking down my willpower to not fling myself at him. It doesn’t help that we’re actual friends now either—we text most days or chat, shooting the shit or sending cool articles to each other. My subconscious is trying to shove my very reasonable reservations about having casual hookups to the side, but it’s starting to look like a futile fight. If I hadn’t invested in a fancy sex toy for myself, I would have cracked like an egg already.
My swimsuit is a red one-piece, which is cut very, very low on my back and in a deep V in the front that makes me look like a pin-up model. The leg holes are cut pretty high, which make my legs look longer, and my butt looks like a ripe peach. It shows just enough cleavage to be enticing without getting too out of hand. By some miracle, it keeps my boobs from popping out if I make a sudden move, which makes it worth the price. It’s not a tiny bikini, but sometimes what isn’t showing is what makes the d
ifference, especially for my body.
“Wow, hot mama,” Daisy whistles when I step out of the bathroom. She’s putting her hair up into an elaborate, braided updo. “You trying to kill someone out there?”
I laugh and pull on the loose men’s button-down that I use as a swim cover-up. I leave it open. “Not intentionally.”
“Well, a lot of our guy friends are single if you’re looking,” she winks, examining her handiwork on her hair. “Can you help me with my sunscreen?”
We slather ourselves in sunscreen and go back up to the roof, where Ben and Ash are talking with the bartender and his team. I’ve seen Ash in a t-shirt before, obviously, but knowing that he’ll shed that shirt sometime in the afternoon makes warmth pool in my lower belly. He gives me a good once-over that makes me squirm, even though my cover-up doesn’t show just how revealing my swimsuit is.
“Hey, what’s up?” Daisy kisses Ben on the lips and Ash on the cheek.
“Just getting the specialty drinks set up. Want to taste?” Ben asks, grabbing two different glasses. One has a simple hibiscus flower in what looks like a margarita, but the other one is a rich green color.
“Let me guess—the green one represents you?” Daisy takes the green drink and sips, her eyes going wide. “Wow, what is this?”
“It’s bitter melon, gin, and lime, with a bit of simple syrup,” Ash explains.
I take the glass from Daisy and sip, feeling Ash’s expectant gaze on me. It’s just the right balance of bitter and sweet and goes down smooth. It’s the perfect kind of drink to sip slowly over a summer afternoon.
“This is amazing,” I say, taking another long sip. “You killed it, Ash.”
Ash shrugs like it isn’t a big deal. But I know that he’s probably very pleased with himself since he struggled with the concept. I search his face for signs of pride and feel a little bummed that I can’t find any. For such an accomplished person, he acts like nothing he’s ever done is good enough.
