The Slow Burn (Moonlight and Motor Oil #2) - Kristen Ashley Page 0,66

blink at an extra buck.”

“Well, that’s cool,” I muttered.

“Hey, Toby,” she said after she sifted through the designs.

“Yo, Macy,” Toby responded.

“Hey, little man,” she said to Brooklyn.

“Bah, lee, go, sissis, Mama, Dodo,” Brooklyn replied, spilling all our family secrets.

“Is that right?” Macy asked, not speaking Brooklyn.

“Doo,” Brooklyn answered.

Macy shot him a smile and looked at me. “You know, someone asked if the artist who did these did packs of notecards. I said I’d ask. If you threw some sets together, I could put them out. See how they did.”

“I’ll get on that next week,” I told her.

“Wonderful. You going to the Fair?” she asked.

I nodded.

She looked from Toby to me, Toby to me again, and finally Toby with his hands on the handle of Brooklyn’s stroller to Brooks to me.

Then she smiled big.

“Cool. Have fun,” she bid.

“Thanks, Macy. Hope you have a busy day.”

“Me too. Usually the Christmas Fair gets me through to March. I have high hopes,” she replied, lifting up a hand in a “fingers crossed” gesture.

I gave her a smile, Tobe threw his arm around my shoulders, I slid mine around his waist, and with him having one hand and me having one on the stroller, we headed out.

It was a tight squeeze through the door, but we managed it.

“It’s pretty sweet your cards sold out,” Toby noted as we headed down the sidewalk toward the square.

“Yeah, whatever,” I muttered, trying not to think about that and instead thinking that I hoped that vendor that had the chocolate, cashew, caramel clusters that Deanna told me about was there again this year, because the way she described those, I was gonna treat myself for the first time in months.

I was also thinking that after the Fair, we were going to Toby’s to get his Xbox then home and making Christmas cookies then dinner. And after Brooks was down, we were bingeing on Christmas movies (he’d picked one: A Nightmare Before Christmas, and I’d picked one: Die Hard—we so totally had this together stuff tight).

I hadn’t turned Izzy’s TV on since I canceled the cable, and I was a little surprised how absurdly excited I was to munch homemade Christmas cookies in front of the TV with Toby.

We still hadn’t had our official “first date.” That was happening Thursday night at The Star.

But I’d decided to consider tonight our official first date because it sounded awesome.

“What does ‘yeah, whatever’ mean?”

I looked up to Toby at his question.

“Nothing.”

“It wasn’t nothing.”

“It was nothing, Toby.”

He glanced at me then turned forward and muttered, “Shit, you’re getting close to the rag.”

My body jerked, and I would have stopped us if Toby wasn’t taller, bigger and stronger than me and thus leading our charge.

“I cannot believe you just said that,” I bit.

He again looked down at me. “Are you getting close to the rag?”

I was.

Still!

“How do you even know that?” I asked.

“Babe, hello,” he called. “I’ve been into you since I first saw you. In other words, I noticed everything about you. Normally, you’re pretty laidback, but you get mildly pissy for no reason once a month. Two days, far’s I can tell. I didn’t know if it was when it was happening, or it was before it happened. Since I fucked you last night, and you hadn’t started, I now know it’s before it happens.”

It really was infuriating I couldn’t be annoyed at Toby when he was being outrageously annoying, because he was simultaneously being sweet.

“No one but men call it ‘the rag,’” I educated him, though that was probably a lie. I was just being snippy because I was about to go on the rag.

“Did you know what I was talkin’ about?”

“Yes,” I took my hand off Brooklyn’s stroller for a second to jab a finger in his face and order, “Don’t,” I put my hand back, “say it again. It’s crass.”

He grinned down at me. “Margot’s wearing off on you.”

Probably.

But again . . . whatever.

“Well, it’s not about me about to start my period,” I declared.

“So it was something,” he stated.

It was something.

“She sells a lot of my cards,” I told him.

“Macy does good trade,” he told me.

“Yeah, but she still sells a ton of my cards, Tobe. And they’re just cards. They’re pretty, but they’re just cards. So she sells so much because she tells folks I made them and people feel sorry for me.”

He stopped, and since he was taller, bigger and leading our charge, Brooks and I stopped too.

“It’s okay,” I said hurriedly when I noted his expression