after a moment, tucking back into his meal. “That’ll have to be good enough for now.”
“Fine,” Bethany responded with a curt nod.
“Fine,” echoed everyone at the table, save Travis.
A few ticks of silence passed.
“Where is Coco?” Vivian said, looking around the room. “Did we bring the dog in from the backyard, Morty?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Georgie, would you mind going out and having a look for Coco? God forbid she ate those toadstools—”
“Sure, Mom.”
Georgie was already up from the table, heading in the direction of the living room. Unable to stop himself from following her progress, Travis nonetheless caught Vivian’s gaze.
She winked at him.
Caught between laughter and keeling over from shock, Travis tossed his napkin on the table. “I’ll go help her.”
Chapter Eighteen
Oh my God.
Georgie floated into the backyard, calling Coco’s name in a croak. Her knees had the consistency of vapor; her heart rapped loudly in her rib cage. If her mother hadn’t sent her outside, she would have burst into flames. Need concentrated itself between her legs, pulsing and tugging and relentless. How was she going to handle the rest of this dinner, Travis sitting so close by, acting like a hero?
“Coco?” she called, tugging her neckline away from her skin and blowing cold air down into her cleavage. Oh, cool. Look at that—her nipples were rocks. “Come here, girl.”
Nothing. No jingling of the dog’s collar.
She walked farther into the backyard, hooking a left and heading down the small slope toward the pool. Walking past the tall oak tree she used to climb in her youth brought back so many memories. The only ones she could conjure at that moment involved Travis. How she’d had the beginnings of a sexual awakening perched in that tree as a preteen, wistfully wishing she had boobs.
The culmination of her feverish daydreams had veered into more adult territory one afternoon when Georgie had been tapped to clean out her parents’ attic. She’d found a box of old VHS tapes, among them a tape labeled FEAR. Since her parents were gone for the day, she’d fired up the ancient VCR in the den, which Morty and Vivian never used anymore but still hadn’t thrown away. Stephen wasn’t the only member of the family who hated change. She’d been pleasantly surprised to find out the movie starred Mark Wahlberg and Reese Witherspoon and decided the tape probably belonged to Bethany—but around the one-hour mark, the scene happened.
The one on the roller coaster when Mark uses his finger on Reese.
Until that moment in her parents’ den, Georgie hadn’t even known the meaning of the word “horny.” And, oh Lord, the guilt. Wahlberg played the worst kind of abusive sociopath in the movie, but Georgie got turned on so badly, she’d replayed the scene nine times. She’d finally closed her eyes, flopped over on her back, and imagined Travis reenacting the scene with her. In his Hurricanes uniform. Hands down her jeans, she’d had the first orgasm of her life on the floor of her parents’ den to a VHS tape, while an internet full of free porn sat mere feet away.
Why couldn’t she ever do things the easy way?
Instead of running far and fast from an unavailable man, she’d decided to show him that being available wasn’t so bad. Between inviting him out for coffee and bringing him to dinner tonight, she’d intended to prove to Travis he didn’t have to spend his life being passed around. But she’d been hoping to hold at least a small part of herself back in the process. To lessen the blow when he eventually walked. Or found someone else. Or realized definitively relationships weren’t his jam, insecurities or not. But hold herself back from the guy who’d almost broken the good china standing up for her?
Not going to be so easy.
Every time she was with Travis, he revealed something else. A piece of the past, a hope for the future, a tender side. Tonight he’d proved he cared. He’d shown up for her. She’d thought herself in love with the swaggering baseball phenom, but she was dangerously close to falling for this newer, more complicated man. Deeper than she ever could have gotten with her youthful ideal of Travis.
Behind her, Georgie heard the sliding glass door open and close. She stopped and turned, her pulse rocketing into another stratosphere when Travis strode down the slope after her. The hunger on his face made Georgie take a step backward. Oh. Apparently she had this seduction thing