“You’d like her work,” Jack told me. “Quaint, quirky little forest scenes filled with critters. Most of them are sweet, but some are pretty twisted. My favorite card she did is this Christmas one from last year, with an adorable little squirrel dressed in a holiday sweater staring out of a picturesque winter woodland. You’d expect it to say something cute, but instead the words “I swear to God, if you leave me alone for even a second at our family gathering this year, I will poison your fucking eggnog” was spread out around him in flowery script.”
I chuckled and turned back to Ella. “That’s pretty good. I bet you sold those by the boat-load.”
She looked away from me, her cheeks coloring. “I did. Thanks.”
I sobered, fixating on that flush, thinking back to a few minutes ago when she’d made an offhand comment about town busybodies. She’d called me handsome, hadn’t she?
Chapter 3: Ella
Imade Benjamin Kakoa laugh. Several times. Hard.
This bizarre reality kept me up late last night after I got home from Jack’s and was entirely to blame for why I was already awake at – I rolled over to look at my alarm clock. Oh, God, it was five o’clock in the morning. I’d gotten four hours of sleep. Today was going to be rough.
Sam, sensing I was awake, snuggled closer to me. I knew it was him, even in the dark, because while Fred was my shadow during the day, Sam was my cuddlebug at night. I slipped an arm out of the covers, tossed it over him, and closed my eyes, willing myself to fall back asleep.
Sheep. Think of a herd of dumb, fluffy sheep jumping over a white picket fence. I counted one, ten, eighty. The sheep started doing weird little side-kicks to keep my thoughts on them instead of drifting back to -
No! Don’t think of him. Watch these sheep. You’re getting very tired watching these acrobatic sheep, Ella. Very. Tired. Look, that one did a little back flip! Isn’t it adorable? Doesn’t it just make you sooosleeepy?
No. Not even a little. Because I made BenjaminfreakingKakoa laugh. And frown. And roll his eyes. Toward the end of the evening, I even got him to join me in teasing Jack.
It’s weird, meeting a celebrity. You have this whole persona built up in your head of who they are and how they’ll act. Take an ex-football star turned advocate. I’d assumed he’d be stoic, tough, with a dash of toxic masculinity added in to spice it up a bit. That had less to do with Ben’s public image and more to do with the acceptance of violence that surrounded the sport of football, both on and off the field.
Watching him laugh at my murder-squirrel Christmas card kind of blew my mind. And made me feel like a complete asshole for making all those assumptions about him. I hadn’t been that embarrassed in years. The strength of my blush made my face feel like it was on fire. Then he kept laughing, and, well, I was a red-blooded heterosexual woman, and holy shit that man was beautiful when he laughed. Especially since he did it so unselfconsciously. My raging embarrassment had been immediately eclipsed by raging hormones.
My cheeks burned again thinking of him catching me with that look on my face when he finally stopped laughing. You know,thatone. That, “Oh, yes, I will gladly climb you like a tree. Now please?” look that is utterly unmistakable.
Ugh. Why did I have to be sweat-slicked and dressed like a weirdo the night I met the hottest man I’d ever seen?
I rolled onto my back and pressed the heels of my hands into my forehead. Fred jumped up on the bed, the mattress sagging beneath his added weight. His hot breath hit my face a second later.
I reached blindly toward him in the dark and grabbed the fur of his neck to give it a little shake. “Lilac leggings, Fred. And an olive shirt. Withthishair.”
That’ll teach me to never speed-dress again.
Fred let out the low woof-yip that Huskies were famous for.
“No. Wrong response, boy. Forlorn howling is far more appropriate right now.”
He woof-yipped again.
“I have failed in your training.”
He whined.
“Better.”
Sam shifted on my other side, then the mattress rose and I heard his paws padding over the hardwood. Fred pulled free from my hands and followed him out the door. I was awake, which to them meant it was time to go potty.
I gave up on sleep and turned the light on. It took me an excruciatingly long time to get out of bed. My body was like, “No. What are you doing? We were warm in there. Go back to that place,” and actively attempted to sabotage my upward momentum, while my brain was all, “BENJAMIN KAKOA JUST HAPPENED. ARISE, GODDAMN YOU!”
Eventually, I managed to stumble downstairs, where the dogs waited by the front door. I cracked it open just enough for them to slip out. The draft that snuck in was damn near arctic, and the second Sam’s tail whipped past, I pushed it shut.
I complained about the dogs, but they were pretty well-trained. My yard wasn’t fenced in. The fact that I could let them outside and trust them not to take off and also bark when they were ready to come back in spoke volumes.
I staggered to the kitchen and made myself a strong pot of coffee, all the while thinking about Ben. It had taken work to coax him into taunting Jack with me.I wasn’t used to that. It usually only took me a few minutes to get people to relax enough around me that they were cackling with laughter and sharing their deepest, darkest secrets.
Mom said it was because there was something inherently trustworthy about my face. Dad said it was because of my self-deprecation. My brother Jacob’s wife, Sofia, said it was because I had a sociopath’s ability to read people, paired with a pathological need to be liked. She was a clinical psychologist, so obviously I ignored her and went with my parents’ explanations. Because she was just joking.
