Sweet Filthy Boy

“Did we all get married?” I ask, meaning I expect he’ll tell me, Nope, it’s just a game. We won these expensive gold rings playing blackjack!

But he nods, looking far less disturbed by this turn of events than I am. “Yep. But don’t worry, we’ll fix it.” He looks back at the table and gives Ansel a meaningful stare.

“Fix it?” I repeat, and oh my God, is this what a stroke feels like?

Turning back to me, Finn lifts a hand, rests it on my shoulder, and looks at me with dramatic condolences. When I look behind him to Ansel, I can see his . . . my husband’s? . . . eyes are lit with amusement.

“Do you know what a Brony is?”

I blink back to Finn, not entirely sure I’ve heard him correctly. “A—what?”

“A Brony,” he repeats. “It’s a guy who is into My Little Pony.”

“Yeah, okay.” What the . . . ?

He leans in, bending his knees so he’s at face level with me. “I ask you this not because the man you married last night in a drunken haze is a Brony, but because he thinks the whole idea of Bronies is fantastic.”

“I’m not sure I’m following,” I whisper. Am I still drunk? Is he? What the hell kind of world have I walked into this morning?

“He also once took an actual bath in Jell-O because someone dared him to and he was curious,” Finn tells me. “He loves to open wine bottles with only a shoe and a wall. And when we ran out of cash in Albuquerque and the restaurant wouldn’t accept credit cards, he paid for our dinner by dancing next door at this run-down little strip club.”

“I need coffee before I can understand a single thing you’re telling me,” I say.

Finn ignores this. “He made about seven hundred dollars that night, but that’s not my point.”

“Okay?” I glance back at Ansel again. There’s no way he can hear what we’re saying, but he clearly knows these guys well enough that he doesn’t need to. He’s outright laughing.

“My point is to keep all that in mind when you speak to him. My point is Ansel falls a little bit in love with everything he sees.” When he says this, my chest tightens inexplicably. “It’s what I love about the guy, but his whole life is basically . . .” He looks up at Oliver for guidance.

Oliver pulls a toothpick from his mouth. “Sayren deepty?” he says before sliding the toothpick back in.

“Serendipity.” Finn pats my shoulder as if we’ve wrapped things up here—as if this conversation made any kind of goddamn sense—and steps around me. Oliver nods once, solemnly. Neon lights flash in the reflection of his glasses and I have to blink away, wondering if throwing up again might be preferable to the conversation I’m sure is about to transpire. What are they even talking about? I can barely remember how to walk, let alone figure out how to deal with the thought that I might be legally married to a guy who loves everything about life, including Bronies.

With a nervous flip in my stomach I slip between two tables and walk over to the booth where Ansel is smiling up at me. In however many minutes we’ve been apart—or however many I’ve been unconscious—I’d forgotten the effect of him up close. Nerve endings seem to rise to the surface of my skin, anticipating his hands.

“Good morning,” he says. His voice is hoarse and slow. He has dark circles beneath his eyes and his skin looks a little pale. Given that he’s clearly been up longer than I have, looking at him doesn’t make me especially confident I’ll feel better in a couple of hours.

“Good morning.” I hover at the edge of the table, not sure I’m ready to sit down. “What was Finn talking about?”

He waves his hand, already dismissing it. “I saw you coming and ordered you some orange juice and what you Americans like to call coffee.”

“Thanks.” When I sit, I suck in a breath at the throbbing ache between my legs, and the reality of our night of wild—and maybe a little rough—sex is like a third person at the table. I wince, a full-body wince, and Ansel notices. It sets off a comical chain reaction: he blushes and his eyes drop to the marks he’s left all over my neck and chest. I try to cover my throat with shaking hands, wishing I’d brought a scarf to the desert, in the summer—which is ridiculous—and he bursts out laughing. I drop my head onto my crossed arms on the table and groan. I’m never drinking again.

“About the bite marks . . .” he begins.

“About that.”

“You kept asking me to bite you.”

“I did?”

“You were very specific,” he says with a grin. “And being the gentleman that I am, I happily obliged.”

“Oh.”

“Apparently we had a wild night.”

I lift my head, thanking the waitress when she puts a carafe of coffee in front of me. “The details are slowly returning.”

And they are, finally: the way we crashed into the hotel room, laughing and falling onto the travertine floor just inside the entryway. He rolled me over to playfully check for scrapes, kissing along my neck, my back, the backs of my thighs. He undressed me with fingers and teeth and words kissed into my skin. Far less artfully I undressed him, impatient and practically ripping the shirt from his body.

When I look up and meet his eyes, he rubs the back of his neck, smiling apologetically at me. “If what I feel today is any indication, we, ah . . . took a long time.”