by Elise Faber
Sera sank back against the couch cushions, letting the banter surround her, knowing what her friends were doing. Giving her time. Allowing her a moment to get her brain around her thoughts so she could . . .
What?
Get it all out?
She didn’t even know why she’d agreed to marry Tate in the first place. Or maybe she did, because her mother’s voice was still echoing through her brain.
“What is it about moms and their ability to hurt you in your most vulnerable spot?”
Abby had been about to respond to something Heather had said, but when Sera spoke, she clamped her jaw closed and turned to stare at Sera. “Does this have to do with the mysterious Tate? Or maybe the fact that you’re getting married and none of us knew that you’ve even been dating someone?”
“I—” She sighed. “Yes.”
“Wait,” CeCe said. “Isn’t Tate the Tire Guy?”
“Who’s the Tire Guy?” Kelsey asked.
“Tate the Tire Guy?” Abby gasped. “Tate the Tech Guru and Tire Guy? That Tate?”
Bec put up her hand. “There’s way too much alliteration happening here.”
“Yes,” Rachel said. “Let her talk.”
Sera smiled at her friend. Rachel got it. They both loved their group of friends, but sometimes they were . . . a lot.
“Where does your mother come in?” Heather asked.
Sera sighed. “It’s complicated.”
“We have booze,” Abby said, holding up the bottle of rum.
“More complicated than an accidental marriage?” Heather asked innocently, and the reference to her own complicated start to one Clay Steele had Sera relaxing.
“Yeah,” she said.
“How about an accidental pregnancy?” Abby chimed in.
Sera lifted a brow. “I mean, technically what happened with you and Jordan was cause and effect. Sperm meets egg.”
Abby wrinkled her nose. “It’s weird hearing you say sperm.”
Hurt sliced through her, and she shot to her feet, rum sloshing over the edge of her glass. “See? This is what I mean. Why can’t I say sperm or make dick jokes or curse?” She pushed around the coffee table. “Is it because I’m pretty or I did pageants and modeling? ‘Cause that’s really fucking stupid! I mean, I love you guys, but I swear, I feel like sometimes you shove me into the Sera can only be a sweet and innocent, perfect little woman box even more fiercely than my own parents do.”
She lifted her cup to her lips and drained it then all but thrust it at Kelsey, who didn’t miss a beat. She refilled it and handed it back.
“I can be a nice person and still like to laugh at dick jokes. And you know what? Sometimes I can also be an asshole. Did you know that? Huh?”
Since that was pretty much the biggest outburst she’d had in years, the output of all that frustration made her knees weak.
Or maybe that was the alcohol talking.
She sank onto the edge of the coffee table.
“You’re a nice person, Sera,” Heather said.
“Well, I don’t want to be,” she grumbled, taking another sip. “Not always, anyway.”
“How long have you felt this way?”
The soft question came from Abby. Sera glanced over her shoulder and let the truth show in her eyes.
Because she’d felt like this—pushed into a corner, having to hide parts of herself—for a long time.
Abby’s eyes went liquid with tears. “Oh, Sera.”
A wave of guilt poured over her, and she dropped her gaze to her hands. Oh, she still had alcohol there. Maybe that’d make her feel better. But as she lifted it to her lips, Bec snagged it.
“Slow down there, tiger,” she ordered. “And that’s not me trying to control you,” she added. “Okay, maybe it is, but it comes from the same place as when you wrestled the bottle of wine out of my hands the last time Luke and I had a fight and not a you-can’t-like-dick-jokes place.”
Sera sighed. “I love you, guys.” A beat. “But I need alcohol to get through this conversation.”
“Because you’ve been hiding yourself from us?” Abby asked. “Because the rest of us have been putting every part of ourselves out there, warts and all, and you’ve been hiding behind a Little Miss Perfect mask?”
Sera went from feeling guilty for hurting Abby to red-hot angry.
“That’s bullshit, and you know it,” she said, whipping around to glare at her oldest friend. “You know everything about me. And I—”
“Except the fact that you’ve been unhappy in our friendship for ages.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You can’t be yourself,” Abby snapped, setting her glass on the table with a plunk. “So how can you be happy?”
“Okay, wait,” Bec said. “You two need to slow down.”
“No.” Sera glared. “You don’t get it, and how could you? I’m not trying to attack you or say that you haven’t been a good friend or—” She sighed. “The truth is that I haven’t had a fucking clue of who I really am for my whole life. I’ve lived for everyone else. My parents. You guys. My job. I never stopped to ask who I was inside. I let everyone around me mold me into who I am. And it wasn’t until I saw you guys find your person that I realized I couldn’t do it anymore. I had to find me.” Her eyes burned, but she blinked back tears. “So, I’ve made changes at work, changed my clothes, my hair. And . . . I’ve been trying to say what I really think more.”
“And we’ve been shutting you down.” Abby’s expression was crushed, and Sera knew she finally got it.
“I’m not trying to hurt you.” She sniffed. “I’m just trying to . . . oh God this sounds really fucking stupid because I’m just trying to be a fucking grown-up.”
Abby moved so she was perched next to Sera on the edge of the table. “Oh shit,” she said. “I am a total asshole, making this more about me than you. I’m so sorry. I won’t shut you down. I’ll make sure I—”
“How about you just shut up and hug me?” Sera said.
Warm arms wrapped around Sera. “That, I can do. I love you.”
“I, for one,” Bec said, plunking down onto Sera’s other side. “Approve of more use of the word fuck.” She gave her a brief squeeze, which was a lot for her lawyer friend, because Bec wasn’t a hugger. “I’m sorry, too,” she murmured.
“Me, too,” Heather said, kneeling before her and touching her knee.
Rachel cupped her cheek. “I like this Sera a whole lot.”
“I’d sit on there with you guys,” CeCe said. “But my ass is so big I’d break the damn thing”—they all laughed—“So just know that I hope this Sera stays around. She’s a lot of fun.”
Sera bit her bottom lip. “Also, known as drama.”
Bec nudged her. “That’s fun, too.”
She laughed.
“One thing.” Bec’s eyes narrowed. “Now that you know yourself, no more hiding, yeah?”
“That would be so much simpler if I just had all the answers,” she said, exasperated at herself. “Half the time, I don’t know why I do what I do. I’ll be thinking something then say the opposite, like agreeing to be a man’s fiancé even though I promised myself I would never get involved with him. Why did I agree to do that?”
“Oh, to have all the answers,” Bec said lightly, her eyes questioning.
Sera squeezed her hand, letting her know that she wasn’t opposed to equal opportunity teasing. “Shut up, you,” she returned, just as lightly. Then she sighed. “He spent six months jerking me around with real estate appointments and rejecting houses and standing me up, and I spent six months drooling after him without one spark of interest from him. Then he shows up in my office and proposes.” They gasp. “But not because he’s madly in love with me or anything, but because he needs me as his fiancé to secure financing for a new project—”
“I’m going to kill him,” Bec growled.
“Then I hit him with my car.”
Silence. But granted, this time it was well-earned.
“That is more complicated than a drunken Vegas wedding,” Heather murmured.
Sera smacked her. “No, it was an accident. He bent and I went and—” She waved a hand. “Never mind. The point is, he offered me a really choice listing in exchange for faking it for a few weeks—”
“Asshole,” Kelsey muttered. “He thinks he can just buy you? Why are all men such bastards?”
They all froze.
“Sorry,” Kelsey said, wincing. “Apparently, that’s a trigger for me.”
Abby pointed a finger at her. “We’ll unpack that at the next Rum Club.”
CeCe shook her head. “Give up now, Abs. It’ll forever be Wine Club.”
“Never.”
“Ladies,” Heather said.
Several heads hung. “Sorry.”
“Go on, Sera.”
She snagged her glass from Bec, took a small sip. See? She could pace herself. “Well, obviously, I agreed. The Monroe Estate is a huge listing, and plus he gave me carte blanche to pick out a new house for him as well—”
“I like it,” Bec said. “You’re not a cheap date.”
Sera giggled. “Focus,” she told her friends. “Because the listings and houses are a definite perk, but it’s all the rest of it that . . .”
“Uh-oh,” CeCe said.
“He wants to start a company called FundHer,” Sera said and explained about the app and the investors and the donations. She talked about the dinner and the freaking gross piece of trash that was Roche. She told them how Tate had called off the deal after seeing Roche being such a creep, how he’d been furious and ready to take a page out of the Hulk’s handbook.
“I mean,” Kelsey began. “I was clearly ready to condemn this dude, but honestly? He sounds kind of amazing.”
Sera smiled. “He is kind of amazing. Well, more than kind of. He’s sweet and kind and occasionally awkward, but he kisses like a dream and—”
“Wait,” Abby said. “I thought you said he wasn’t interested in you.”
She shrugged. “He went a little caveman after Roche. We slipped into the bathroom to talk and after he called off the deal, I told him that I was going to go through with it, that the app was good and it shouldn’t suffer.”
“No, it shouldn’t,” Heather said. “But Roche probably isn’t the best backer.”
“Duh. That’s why I was going to introduce him to you guys.” She put a hand up when Heather opened her mouth to reply. “Not to hit you up to invest, though obviously, I think it’s pretty much the perfect project for RoboTech, but to help Tate get some recommendations on good people to ask.”
“I’m all in on this,” Heather said. “Granted everything checks out, of course. I’ve wanted to work with Conner since his social media app blew through the roof. Then you add in women and underserved communities, and you know you’re giving me an infusion of my happy juice.”
Sera smiled at her friend. “Thank you.”
“Pish.” She rolled her eyes.
“Okay,” Abby said. “Can we get back to the kissing part? Because kissing like a dream is a pretty—”
“Sera description,” Bec teased, and Sera felt her cheeks go pink.
“Shut up, you.”
“Tell me, did he do that twisty thing with his tongue that Luke does?” Bec brought her fingers to her lips for a chef kiss. “Muah. Remember how I described it in detail last—”
“La. La. La,” Rachel sang, much to everyone’s obvious relief.
“I don’t know what Luke does with his tongue, thank God. However, I do know that whatever Tate was doing was really fucking incredible.” She paused, half-expecting them to make a big deal about the curse word then went on when she realized her friends were awesome. Because they’d heard her, because they were going to respect her wish to curse and make dick jokes.
Her inner twelve-year-old snorted.
Of course, they were.
She sniffed. “I love you guys.”
Abby waved a hand. “Less loving. More kiss talk. Did he pin you against the wall and go all—”
“Don’t say Thor,” Heather muttered, reasonably since her brother, Abby’s husband Jordan, resembled the Norse god. “Don’t say Thor.”
“Thor,” Abby finished.
Heather retched.
Sera blushed.
And the girls were off.
Cheering over Tate getting all manly, teasing each other about their spouses and fantasies, and Kelsey’s apparent love of a certain hunky actor who was starring in the latest summer blockbuster.
“But none of this,” CeCe eventually said, doing her part in reining them all in, “explains how you got from calling off the whole thing to actually getting married.”
Sera wrinkled her nose. “My mother.”
“Oh, Lord,” Abby said.
“Appropriate reaction,” Sera stated, pointing her finger in her friend’s direction. “Because she was at dinner and said I needed to lock Tate in before he left me like all the others.”
A collective inhale.
“I don’t mean to overstep here, but your mother sounds like an asshole.”
She turned to Kelsey and nodded. “Yeah, that’s a good description. My mother hasn’t had my back since. . . well, never, I guess.”
“She was a Stage Mom,” Abby said. “On steroids.”
Sera nodded, acknowledging that statement as fact. “Delgado women are on this planet to look beautiful.” She shrugged at Rachel and Kelsey’s expression. “My childhood in a single statement.”
“And yet you’re not an asshole,” Kelsey said.
“I like her,” Bec stage-whispered.
Rachel tugged Kelsey’s ponytail. “She’s pretty cool. Not too much of a drag to have around.”
“Not to discount Kelsey’s awesomeness,” Abby said, clapping her hands together and pretending to glance up at Sera adoringly. “But can we continue on with story time? Please? Pretty please?”
“I’ll fill them in,” Bec said, lips twitching. “He kissed her, and she got stupid. Next thing she knew, she’d agreed to a wedding.”
It was Rachel’s turn to stage-whisper. “She speaks from experience.”
“True that.”
“I did get stupid,” Sera agreed. “But not because of the kiss. Or not just the kiss. I got stupid because he said he liked me.”
Heather’s brows drew together. “Why is that bad?”
“Because he followed that up with the lovely notion that nothing between us will be romantic or sexual, but instead it will be all about sticking it to the man. Or rather, the mother.” She stood up from the table, unable to stand the wooden edge digging into her thighs any longer. Either that, or she was drunk and frustrated.
Or both.
Fine. Both.
Whatever.
She plunked onto the couch, moaning as she let her head drop back against the cushions.
“That’s gross,” CeCe said, shifting so she propped Sera’s legs against her rounded belly.
“The fact that I got three proposals all equally unromantic, or the fact that I want it to be sexual with Tate? No. That’s not the whole truth. I want it to be more with him. I want him to be The One.” There. She’d admitted it. To herself and the room at large. She wanted Tate, and if she hadn’t already agreed to marry him, Sera would have wanted to date him.
Not for business. Not to prove something to someone.
But because she liked him and he liked her.
Simple.
Except there was nothing simple about this. There was the app and the house listings, the fake relationship and her mother. Good God, her mother. Everything was tied up in deception and—
“This isn’t how you’ve imagined it.”
Sera blinked, not in surprise, but because Abby’s statement was insightful and true, and hearing her inner thoughts expressed aloud made her eyes burn. She had spent so much of her life imagining her husband, her wedding, their happy future together with kids and kittens and pu
ppies . . . and then it actually hadn’t happened.
She’d given up on all of it.
But Tate had brought it all back.
She hardly knew him, but she still liked him more than any other man she’d been around in the last few years. Or maybe ever. He was different from all the other men, too.
And without any promise of a real future or even a kind of, maybe, sort of tangible happily ever after, she was going to marry him.
For all the wrong reasons.
But worst of all was the fact that he’d made her hope again. She’d said goodbye to her dream, and he’d presented it back to her on a silver platter.
“I know a thing about noble men,” Rachel said quietly. “I know he probably does want to rescue you, to make things easier for you. But I also think that if he’s the man you describe, he’s not just doing this for noble reasons. He wants you, Sera. Even if he’s not willing to admit that to himself.”
“I agree,” Kelsey said. “A man doesn’t caveman kiss a woman against a wall unless he has some connection to her.”
“But what if it’s just sexual?” she asked.
“Then he wouldn’t have backed off,” CeCe said. “He’s got a moral code. That’s a good thing. He stepped back because he doesn’t want to move things along too quickly.”
“We’re ignoring the upcoming nuptials for this argument,” Heather said with a smirk.
CeCe threw a pillow at her. “You know what I mean.”
Heather nodded. “I do. I also think this is the most grounded and mature I’ve ever heard you when talking about a guy. It’s usually white stallions and being locked away in towers—”
“I’m not that bad,” Sera said.
“True.” Another nod. “But I do think this thing with Tate is worth exploring. If only because you’re different now, and he seems to be in tune with that.”
Sera bit her lip. “Really? I mean the whole basis is getting back at my mother. What if at the end of it we break up anyway?”
“Well then,” Bec said with a shrug. “You chalk it up to developing maturity and enjoying some really hot sex.”
“We haven’t had sex.”
Bec cackled. “You will be, my darling Seraphina. Very soon, you will be.”
“Okay, fine,” she said with a wry smile. “You’re probably right.”
