Complete Bliss (a Her Billionaires novella #3) (10 page)

“Is she in bad shape?” Laura asked, persistent. The tone of their private conversation must have been such that it set everyone on edge, because suddenly more sets of eyes were on him. Darla sat next to Josie across from him, and Trevor next to her. Joe stood at the end of the booth, while Mike had sat next to Alex. Laura and Dylan were right behind them, in the low booths, her neck twisted.

“Nothing more than simple age. She isn’t immortal. None of us is.”

“That old bat will outlive Jillian,” Dylan said, clear as a bell. Darla snickered and Trevor looked a bit confused, picking up a sweetener packet and worrying it with thickly calloused fingers.

Joe looked like a giant slab of polished iron.

“She might,” Alex agreed. “I think my grandfather will have something to say about that, though. The two of them have plans for how they want to die.”

Josie went a bit pale at Alex’s words and buried her face in her coffee cup.

Laura picked up on that, too, her head ping-ponging between him and Josie. “What? Say it.” She bore down on Josie, who looked like she wanted to turn into a million tiny pieces and disappear on the wind. She kicked but missed his ankle.

“Ow!” Mike yelped, reaching down. “Wrong leg.”

“Sorry. You both feel like you’re part of the table underneath.”

“That’s what she said,” Dylan drawled.

Everyone groaned.

Except Joe.

Joe

Five more minutes
. Joe would give this farce five more minutes and then he’d march right out of here and go to the Thai place he loved down the street, stuff his face with noodles and chicken, and go back to the apartment to play with his bass and master the newest song in the Random Acts of Crazy set.

Not stare at Dr. Perfect Who Hated His Guts, the Secret Billionaires and their hot blonde, and Darla and Josie, yammering at each other like litter mates.

With big old surfer boy Trevor acting like some dopey teen out of a bad ’80s sitcom they laughed at in reruns on Nickelodeon.

“Well,” Josie said, stretching the word out.
Why didn’t she have the same accent as Darla?
Joe wondered. “Ed told us that he and Madge plan to jump out of a plane and—I believe his exact words were—” 

“Fuck like bunnies,” Alex said, miserable as the table exploded with laughter.

“Without parachutes,” Josie concluded. Joe gave a weak smile. Ha ha. How cute. Whatever. Old people smelled like rose-water and grease, and he avoided them as much as possible. Both sets of his grandparents had died when he was a toddler, so Madge was the equivalent of an alien life form to him.

Though naked fucking stunt diving sounded pretty rad. Add in a camera and a Twitch.tv streaming channel and it might be cool.

Darla had dragged them all here to talk with Mike and Dylan, and aside from thinking maybe—just maybe—he could salvage his time by being able to name-drop in a law clerk interview, or talk about scandal on a golf course, this afternoon was a complete time-sucking waste of air and thought.

At least he would get a piece of Jeddy’s Boston cream pie. That was his only solace.

Happy fucking weekend break. These people were about as interesting as reading case law on transportation codes. In German. 

Every single emotion he was capable of feeling had become unwoven, like a thick tapestry that turned into each individual thread, held in place by the memory of once having been intertwined with the others, but now free and unmoored. He carried inside himself a vague sense of once being able to live, day in and day out, within the chosen borders of this relationship with Darla and Trevor, but now…

He was just a pile of thread. A loose pile that added up to nothing solid. 

Not that anyone could know that, though. These fuckers wouldn’t make him talk about his pussified feelings, or—God forbid—get him to talk about how he felt so misunderstood, or make him into some new-agey confessional star like those dumbass television shows his mother adored. No way.

Somewhere in the Century of Selfies, society had gone off the rails, and Darla went right along for the ride, insisting he and Trevor join her in this lunch date, where she expected them to sit across from the human equivalent of a redwood and an Italian boxer dude who was half Rocky, half Joe Manganiello.

Was this how it would go? The three women would sit in one booth and breathlessly talk and joke about the five men in the other booth, segregated by gender like sixth-grade health class?

Not
his idea of how he wanted to spend a precious weekend afternoon. In fact, he’d rather listen to his mother drone on about the latest research in medical genomics and how it related to his heart condition. His fingers involuntarily reached up and stroked the barest line of scar that he could feel through one layer of cotton. Most of the time he forgot about it, only three months old when the open-heart surgery took place.

His mom lived with it on the surface, as if she had been ripped open then, too. Except she’d never formed a scar. It was a sucking chest wound that lived outside her body. But that wasn’t Joe’s fault.

Why was he even thinking about this? His eyebrows twitched, and he felt the frown contract his muscles before he could control it. Darla picked up on the tiny change in his expression and tilted her head, trying to read him like tea leaves in the bottom of a cup.

“You okay?” she asked. He let his eyes close halfway, his only public reaction to the rush of
oh, shit
inside him, because all conversation ground to a halt, seven sets of eyes on him suddenly. 

A whoosh of air behind him and there was that old waitress, delivering an impossibly large tray of food that made his salivary glands kick in.

Make that eight.

“You’re the only thing standing between a plate or ten of coconut shrimp and that table, bud,” Madge said. He moved swiftly, hands in his pockets, feeling like an obstacle. An obstruction. 

An outsider.

The tray landed on the edge of the booth where Darla, Trevor, Josie, Alex, and Mike sat, and he watched as the old lady unloaded that food with such efficiency she might as well be a robot. Too bad his stomach had become a grinding mass of crushed glass and rusty nails, all churning in the flesh equivalent of a cement mixer.  

“I’m fine,” he said pointedly to Darla, answering her earlier question, as the waitress disappeared so fast she might as well have teleported herself across the restaurant. Darla, though, ignored him, her mouth hanging open, one hand waving air into it as she bit into a steaming piece of coconut shrimp that was obviously burning her mouth.

Joe reached for Trevor’s wet glass of ice water and held it out to her. Grateful eyes met his as she gulped it down.

“Danks,” she said. “I dink I burd my tug.”

Dylan’s laughter from the other booth was so loud, so raucous and unfiltered, that it seemed to help Joe’s stomach unclench just enough to feel a moment of amusement, too. “That happens here,” Dylan said, turning to look at Darla, who made a pouty face. “Occupational hazard.”

“Occupational?” His voice surprised him. His smile surprised him more as he and Dylan looked at each other. “You guys professional diners now?”

“Something like that,” Laura said, interrupting the flow while waving a fork that had what appeared to be a cheese-stuffed mushroom on it. “If I could do this for a living, I would.”

But you can
, Joe thought, but didn’t say. Two billionaires and she couldn’t just sit around and eat whatever she wanted, sampling the finest Boston—hell, the
world
—had to offer? Instead of doing that, she chose to run a threesome dating service where Darla and Josie worked? 

Women. More complicated than, well…transportation code case law.

But infinitely more interesting. When he looked at Darla, that grinding cesspool inside his gut loosened just a little. Some day, he’d give her everything she wanted.

Unless it involved sitting at a booth and talking about his feelings with these men.

“How about we reconfigure?” Laura said in a voice that was both sweetness and light, and honed steel. There was no arguing with her, and the men stood, shuffling over to where Dylan sat, Laura picking up her plate and moving next to Josie, across from Darla. The other booth was bigger, U-shaped, and he waited until all the other guys were in place—Mike and Dylan in the middle, Trevor to Dylan’s left, Alex to Mike’s right—before grabbing a chair and turning it backwards, straddling it. 

If he were just a tinge more paranoid he’d check the exits so he’d know where to bolt in the event of a true emotional meltdown.

And then his eyes did it.

Telling Darla he loved her, sexting and coming back for long weekends where the three of them went into the world they created, jamming with the band and coming back on long train rides for performances—those were part of the flow of life.

He didn’t want to scrutinize who they were, what they were, too much, because then you had to pop that dome of perfection, where the three of them lived as if everything they did were right and okay.

As if society didn’t exist.

His stomach betrayed him and growled. Alex pushed a plate of deep-fried cauliflower his way. “Try some. It’s really good when you dip it in the aioli.”

“Thanks.” He did as suggested, and his mouth came to life. Damn. Jeddy’s was a shithole he remembered from college years, and the food had been standard gut-rot back then. Cheese fries and shakes and bad coffee. Looking around as he munched, he took in the torn seats, the shabby, threadbare carpet, the stained ceiling tiles, the scuffed stainless steel edges of the main counter. The place looked like something he wouldn’t set foot in. Too worn and broken for him. Too working class, too—

Authentic.

But you couldn’t deny the nuanced skill of the cook in the kitchen, how the richness of what was offered contrasted with the run-down outer shell.

“This is amazing,” he said as Trevor grunted in assent and shoved what must have been his fourth or fifth coconut shrimp in his mouth.

“I always forget about this place,” Trev mumbled around chipmunk cheeks, then swallowed. Did the man chew?

“We practically live here,” Dylan said pleasantly. “It was Laura’s favorite restaurant when she was pregnant.”

“And after,” Mike added.

“And forever,” she said from across the booth, sighing with satisfaction as the old waitress delivered a tray of what looked like tiny cannoli covered in what smelled like a maple glaze. “Thanks, Madge,” she uttered through a mouthful to the old waitress. 

Madge. He did a double take. The same Madge his mom talked about being here when
she
went to Radcliffe? That old lady must be a vampire. A second tray covered in tiny cannoli appeared like magic on their table. Trevor grabbed two and shoveled them in while the other guys took a more leisurely approach. 

Joe wished his stomach would stop being so uncooperative.

Like you.

He was only doing this for Darla. She’d insisted, so angry at his jealousy. That, plus Laura was her boss. You do what the boss wants, even if you sneer behind her back while you do it. Not that Darla was like that—she really liked Laura. And so did he. 

This entire lunch was the stupidest stunt he had been part of since they went to the island of Eden, though. And that place had been the epitome of stupid. And crazy.

The “I love yous” had been wonderful, and he’d thought he would come home and feel different, but instead he’d just been more forlorn. More torn.

Missed them more.

“We’re supposed to talk about something,” Mike said slowly, wiping his hands on a napkin and setting it neatly under his clean plate.

Joe rested his chin on his hands on the back of the chair and watched. He wasn’t about to say a damn word. Not now. Not in that vast danger zone of being the first to crack. You couldn’t shove a genie back in a bottle, no matter how hard you tried. His heart rubbed against one of the rods of the chair’s back, a gentle pressure that grounded him.

“Sex,” Dylan said as he finished off one of those cannoli. 

“Sex?” Trevor choked on something, the painful sound of air being blocked triggering a weird wheeze that made Joe sit up, ramrod straight. Alex whacked him on the back and went blank, his face neutral, on complete alert in the way only a well-trained doctor could be.

Trevor made a strangled sound and then took in a huge whoop of air, eyes watering so badly Joe could see the tears run down his face as Trev dipped his head and reached for a glass of water—anyone’s water—and drank it greedily, stopping only to breathe in hitched gulps.

“I’m okay,” he rasped, holding up one hand to stem the expressions of concern, then hacking furiously.

“What’s wrong?” Darla called out from the table next to them. 

“We started to talk about sex and it made Trevor gag,” Joe said quietly.

The entire group burst into laughter, making one side of Joe’s mouth tip up in a reluctant grin. His heart hammered in his chest, skipping a beat here and there, otherwise pattering along at a healthy clip, his worry for Trevor fading as everything normalized into what passed for “normal” on this day. 

Sex? They were going to talk about sex? He let out a huge sigh of relief. He thought they were going to talk about
feelings
.

Mike

Poor kids.

That was all Mike could think as he looked around the horseshoe table at Trevor and Joe. No, they weren’t kids, and he remembered being twenty-three and hating being referred to as a kid. But now that he was ten-plus years out of that early adulthood phase, he couldn’t help but view them as just that—kids. 

Was it fair? No. Did he feel bad? Yes. He remembered that first year with Jill and Dylan, the tension between him and the cocky sonofabitch, how they were fluid and graceful, yet teeming with a swarm of emotion that didn’t really settle until their third or fourth year together.

He didn’t often let himself think about Jill these days, and the pang of pain that stabbed his heart was all too real. Jillian may have been her namesake, and he said the J word hundreds of times a day, but Jill was not Jillian.