“So what you’re saying is, your family is perfect and always makes the holidays fun. You’re right. Your life really does suck,” I mock the woman next to me with a simpering grin.
She purses her lips in irritation, and when my first thought is how fucking adorable she looks, I know I need to get laid. Fucking soon. Eighteen months without a woman in my bed is far too long. After I calmed my ass down from having beer thrown all over my crotch, I got a good look at the culprit, then did a double-take and immediately regretted being such an asshole. With her long, dark red hair, porcelain skin, green eyes and feisty attitude, I almost had to crank one out in the bathroom when I changed into jeans and a t-shirt. I’m not the type of person to sit down and shoot the shit with a stranger, hot woman or not, but I felt obliged to do something to make up for the crappy way I’d reacted to our little accident. Sitting here with Noel, I stare at her full red lips while she talks, trying not to make it obvious that my eyes keep straying to her outstanding cleavage. I realize this might be the best decision I’ve ever made.
“Perfect is a stretch,” Noel replies, waiving the bartender away when she asks if we need another drink. “Annoying, meddling, loud, inappropriate…those are more accurate words to describe them. They mean well, I guess. But nothing I do ever seems good enough.”
I swallow the last of my beer and push the empty glass away without answering. The things I know about families and how they behave are mostly learned from what I’ve seen on TV shows and movies. I have no advice to give Noel about family, crazy or otherwise, but I know men, so at least I can help in that department. Plus, talking drowns out the annoying fucking Christmas songs being piped through the airport bar sound system. If I have to hear “Dominic the Donkey” one more damn time, I’m going to stab someone.
“It’s not your fault your boyfriend jumped the gun and proposed.” I shrug.
“Tried to propose,” she corrects me. “He only got ‘Will you’ out before I screamed in horror and asked him what the hell he was doing. Then I ran out of our apartment and never went back.”
Even though I’ve just met her and we’ve only been chatting for half an hour or so, I can picture the entire scene in my head, including the panicked look on Noel’s face when her dumbass boyfriend tried to pop the question.
“Still, not your fault. I mean, you said you told him on several occasions that marriage freaked you out, and you weren’t sure if it was ever something you wanted to do,” I reiterate what she’s already told me. “Dude should’ve had a clue that wasn’t the best decision to make.”
“My mother won’t see it that way,” Noel sighs, swiveling on her barstool to face me. Her knee brushes against my thigh and just that small bit of contact makes my dick hard, I really need to get laid, but now my head and my dick are conflicted. Sex with just any woman won’t do. When Noel and I part ways, I have a strange feeling I’ll never be able to get her out of my mind. I want her under me, on top of me, moaning my name, and scratching her nails down my back. But that’s not all. And this is the confusing part. I could listen to her sexy, raspy voice for days, her smile is contagious and I find the corner of my mouth curling up automatically each time she laughs, and her smell…sweet mother of Christ. Each time she leans toward me, I inhale a deep breath like a fucking creeper, just to hold that cinnamon and vanilla scent in for as long as possible. She smells like Christmas, which should annoy the fuck out of me, but it doesn’t. I have no idea what the hell is happening. I’ve known this woman for all of thirty minutes and she’s already gotten under my skin.
Thankfully, she continues talking and gives me a second to get my dick and my brain under control before I do something stupid like ask her to forget her holiday plans and come home with me instead.
“Somehow, it will be my fault. My family will turn it around on me, and why shouldn’t they? I made Logan out to be such an amazing guy over the last twelve months, and I mean, he was amazing, just clueless,” she explains with a sigh, tearing her cocktail napkin into a pile of tiny pieces. “Just like every other relationship I’ve shit all over, this one won’t be any different, even if I was the one who ended it. They’ve never understood my abhorrence to marriage. They’ll figure out a way to twist it around because I wasn’t attentive enough, wasn’t romantic enough, wasn’t sexy enough…”
She whispers that last part, breaking our eye contact.
Leaning forward on my stool until I’m only inches away from Noel’s face, I stare at her until her eyes meet mine again. “I’m pretty sure there could never be an instance where you weren’t sexy enough.”