I gave myself a mental slap on the wrist.No. Bad Sunny.My job wasn’t to bone Isaac. It was to deliver him the perfect muse, the perfect person for him to draw inspiration from and lean on while he created his first album in years.
Easy, right?
“Okay,” I said. “The auditions for ‘America’s Next Top Muse’ begin tomorrow. Now I must channel my inner Tyra Banks.”
“I’m rooting for you,” he said, hearkening back to the infamous speech Tyra once gave anAmerica’s Next Top Modelcontestant.
“Gasp!” I said. “You’re aTop Modelfan?”
“I’m a recluse, Sunny,” Isaac said. “I’m not devoid of culture.”
That night, I sat in the huge dark-wood four-poster just down the hallway from Isaac. It definitely wasn’t what I would consider his style, but it did fit the broody Vermont mansion vibes. And okay, so maybe I had briefly considered what it might be like to be tied up on this thing. Which was to say, yes, themansion was an upgrade from the motel and Mr.Tumnus had adjusted all too quickly to upper-crust life.
I propped myself up against a pile of pillows and opened the Zoom link. I had a virtual date night almost every week, which I never, ever missed.
“There’s my darling girl!” Ruth said, the moment my face appeared in the box next to her.
I gasped at her smooth silver bob. “Nan! Is that a new wig?”
Nan, or Ruth, as she told me I could call her once I turned eighteen, had been in remission for six years now. Her diagnosis had hit me hard, and because she had spent my entire life protecting me when I needed it the most and then pushing me when I resisted it the most, she trusted me with taking her to chemo when work allowed and she also put me fully in charge of her wig selection. At first, it was for me. I’d always loved a good makeover, and it turned out Ruth, who’d worn only the same berry-colored Burt’s Bees as lipstick and had never heat-styled her hair in her life, had a thing for wigs.
“You like it?” she said, swishing her head from side to side.
“Ten out of ten,” I told her.
She squinted at the screen. “Looks like you’ve moved on from the motel, but it looks a little rich for your budget, hon.”
I turned my laptop around to give her a better look. “This old place?”
“Did you trip and fall into a romance novel?” she asked with a chuckle.
“I’m crashing with a friend. The pipes sort of burst at the motel.” I set the laptop back down in front of me. “And what kind of cat mother would it have made me if I stayed there with my son in the dead of winter?”
She smiled. “Speaking of parents. We’re coming up on—”
“I know,” I told her. The anniversary of my parents’ deaths was coming up, like it did every fucking year. December 27.
“Still not too late to come home for the holidays,” she said.
Wherever Ruth was would always be home, with one exception. Every December she left her Sedona condo and stayed in the guesthouse on our family property that had been her home until she retired. The family estate, however, was definitely no longer my home, even if Nan was there.
I shook my head. “I’ve got work to do here and I don’t want to ruin Christmas for everyone else.”
“Oh, come on now, I’ve never known you not to want to ruin something for your brother.”
“I would happily ruin Charlie’s Christmas,” I clarified. “But I still like my niece, and his poor cyborg wife isn’t so bad either.”
Charlie had looked for a bride like he was responsible for the continuation of a royal line, and after watching him get married and have a kid, I had firmly told myself that I didn’t want that.
Actually, I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew it wasn’t that. Then, over the last two years, all the people in my life had started to settle down. Part of me had thought Bee and I would be boning our way through the Pacific coast well into our seventies. Now I was thirty, and the most committed relationship I’d ever been in was with a cat who would probably eat my corpse if given the chance. (I didn’t necessarily hold it against him, by the way.) In so many ways, I was still twenty-two and always down for a rotating door of partners. Then there were the moments when I might want something more and that was the most terrifying reality I could imagine—a person and their expectations.
(Expectations I would surely never meet. I couldn’t even make the last living member of my immediate family like me!)
“He’s been asking about you lately,” Nan told me. “Your brother.”
“Is that your way of warning me?”
She’d always hated choosing between us, but even Nan had to admit that over the last twelve years, Charlie had turned intoWolf of Wall Streetfan fiction. She frowned. “He wasn’t always this way. You know that.”
