"Holy shit!" I tried to muffle my laugh, whispering because I knew she was right behind us.
Sacha shot me a look out of the corner of his eye before picking up his cup of water to sip from. "Don’t say anything," he groaned.
"Sassy, that lady totally wanted to scramble your eggs."
I heard him choke and cough before pinching the bridge of his nose with a gasp. "Jesus Christ, Gaby," he hissed as he tried to get himself under control. I made it look like I was cracking eggs in midair and then stirring them. He reached out to push my hands down with a groan.
"You think I’m joking, but I'm gonna barter your nuts for some snacks later when I get hungry. We still have two hours left on this flight." We were stopping in San Francisco to connect with our second flight to Sydney, and then one more to Perth. Thankfully, the first layover was only an hour long.
Sacha's shoulders started shaking as he laughed, his hand slapping an imaginary Band-Aid over his mouth. "I'll share my snacks with you. Just don't trade my virtue for food."
That had me throwing my head back. "Your virtue? Ha!"
"Gaby Barreto, are you trying to tell me that you think I've tarnished my reputation?" He was trying so hard not to smile, but this guy probably smiled in his sleep—it was an impossible feat.
Putting my hand on top of his wrist, I made an incredulous face. "Do you remember the Pickle Dick incident? I'm pretty sure you," I leaned closer to him because the lady on my other side was awake, "said you liked p-u-s-s-y. I'm sure your virginity's been long gone, kid."
The apples of his cheeks turned pink as he smiled. "Yeah, I did say that," he chuckled. "And I haven’t been a virgin for a while, but I have four sisters and too many fans that like me but don’t even know me. You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you how many people I’ve been with.”
I didn't really want to ask when exactly he lost his virginity or what his tally was because it made me feel incredibly strange deep in my chest. Superhuman jealousy flared within my organs, which was stupid. "That’s nice," I told him because it was. Most men nowadays slept with women whose names they couldn’t remember the next day. My friends and loved ones included.
"You, Princess?" he asked with a raised eyebrow, something flickering in his light colored eyes.
I narrowed mine in return. "Me what?"
"Is your virtue intact?"
I laughed. I swear, it wasn’t like I wanted to laugh at that specific question because I knew it made me look like a total whore—which I wasn't, for the record—but still. He laughed too, right before I forced myself to sober up my expression and get as serious as possible. "Yes."
His eyes went wide and it looked like his jaw became unhinged. "No shit?"
"No, jackass." I leaned forward to dig my elbow into the meat of his muscular thigh. Sacha was slim but he had a pretty serious build. "I haven't been around the block. I've only had one serious boyfriend—," there was no point in mentioning Brandon’s name and especially not my high school boyfriend's name, "and if you can't feel it, then it didn't happen right?"
Sacha snorted with a smile; huge, bright, so magnificent it made me think of the moon. "That's right, but I don’t know what kind of guys you’ve been hanging out with if you can’t feel it…”
I scrunched my nose, lifting a shoulder.
That magnetic smile morphed into something wicked before he leaned toward me. "You should definitely feel something.”
I swallowed.
A slice of a shiver shot up my spine and I fought the flare of gooey feeling in my throat. "Yeah, probably,” I practically panted.
He smiled at me, and I smiled back, my organs all out of whack.
Sacha reached up, licked his thumb and then dabbed at the corner of my mouth. “There. You had a little dry saliva going on there.”
Yeah, I sat there like a completely dummy. My mouth was more than likely gaping. If anyone else had done that to me, I would have whacked his or her hand away. That was a fact that didn’t escape me. Neither did the fact that I considered what he’d done to be sweet. Too sweet.
But one thing was certain when I started to think him wiping my drool off was intimate…
I needed a vibrator. Pronto.
"None of youfound it in your hearts to tell me it was fucking winter here?" I hissed at the three monsters standing there comfortably with hoodies on.
They stared at me with wide eyes as I bounced around the sidewalk with my arms crossed over my chest. It was fifty-ish degrees in Perth, and I'd been expecting it to be, oh, maybe eighty or eighty-five. Instead we were stuck outside baggage claim waiting for the promoter of the Australian tour to come pick us up, and I was freezing my imaginary balls off. I was from Texas. We had two seasons: fifty weeks of summer and two weeks of something between a semi-brutal winter and a crappy spring. If it were less than seventy degrees, you would never see me without a jacket on.
My lower back was bothering me after that last ridiculously long flight, and I never wanted to sit again. Well at least for a few hours. With only my cropped sweatpants and an old Ghost Orchid T-shirt on, I wasn't prepared for the wind. Apparently, everyone else had known what was in store. They were all in zip-ups or pullovers except me.
