Just the thought of Landon irritated me. He didn’t deserve to be on my mind, just like he didn’t deserve to ruin this trip.
“You good?” he asked. “Shit,” he laughed at himself and walked to my door, where he casually rested a hand on the frame and smiled. “Maybe if I didn’t barge into your personal space next time, huh?”
“No, it’s totally fine,” I said quickly. I followed him to the door and tried to stop acting like such a social virgin. I scrambled to think of a believable lie to explain why I was acting so weird. “I actually just finished this TV series I was super into. So I’m kind of in that… post show depression. Yeah.”
Tommy nodded like he actually knew what I was talking about. “Been there. When Dexter finished, I felt like a part of me died with it. Or maybe it was just the shitty finale?” He chuckled softly at himself. “But, hey. The best thing to get you over it is a rebound.”
I felt my eyes go wide. Did he seriously just proposition me for sex? “I don’t know if—I mean, that’s not—”
“A rebound show,” he said slowly. “I’ve been to weddings like this before. We’re going to have a ton of downtime. What do you say we meet up somewhere and I can introduce you to a new show? There’s just a little informal “welcome” dinner tonight, and then we could hang out after in my room or your room.”
“Uh,” I stammered.
“Actually, your room has a massive TV, wow,” he said, pointing to the wall. “Kind of doesn’t fit the whole ancient history aesthetic, but I’m not complaining. Let’s do your room then. Catch you after the party?” He drummed his fingers on the doorframe and took a step back, pointing expectantly at me.
Feeling overwhelmed and bombarded, all I did was shrug and raise my eyebrows.
Tommy nodded, gave a little wave, and walked off.
As soon as he was around the corner, Audria and Bree both burst out of their rooms.
“Eavesdropping? Seriously?” I asked.
“Uh, I, uh, er, uh,” Audria mimicked. “If that little routine from you led to him asking you to hang out, he’s really desperate. You know that, right?”
“Yeah,” Bree agreed. “No offense, but you weren’t exactly ‘spitting game’ as the kids say.”
I rolled my eyes at her. “You are the kids, Bree. And I wasn’t trying to get him to ask me to hang out. I was trying to get him out of my room.”
“Ah,” Audria said. “So, you wanted to get him out of your room, and your best plan was to agree to invite him back to your room tonight after the welcome dinner. Got it.”
“There was no plan,” I said. And now I’m feeling all confusingly guilty because this feels like going behind Landon’s back somehow. Except I should actually feel the glorious, red, white, and blue glow of righteous justice for doing exactly that. Hell, I could probably go on a wild sex spree and still not pay him back for hiding such a huge lie. “And maybe the two of you should get a life so you can stop butting into mine.”
“As soon as your life stops talking at the top of its lungs outside our rooms, maybe we will,” Audria said.
I gestured to the otherwise empty hallway and gave my sisters my best get a life glare. Thankfully, they took the hint and left me by myself again. Except that only meant I had a few hours before the welcome dinner to sit and torture myself by mentally running through everything that just happened. I’d agreed to pseudo-date an old high school friend. Meanwhile, I was tangled in a kind of sort of dominant submissive relationship with a guy who looked like a Calvin Klein model back home. Oh, and I was regularly having very, very dirty dreams about said guy back home. The fact that I was trying my best to be appropriately mad over what he’d hidden from me was doing depressingly little to stop any of it.
I was also pretty sure Landon would lose his shit if he somehow figured out what was going on. But screw Landon—just, well, not in the way I’d been screwing him in my dreams almost every night. He could get figuratively screwed, right along with his over-confident assumption that I’d submit to him.I had a bad habit of over-indulging when free stuff was involved. For starters, I was the bane of every free sample person’s existence. I’d shamelessly stand there and fill up until they were either out of samples or they called security. So when waitstaff started circulating the welcome party to Dana Whitmoore’s extravagant, super fancy wedding, I helped myself to everything they were offering.
That meant I’d eaten my weight in little squares of cheese, flaky pastries filled with spinach and cream, crunchy wonton’s loaded with crab meat, and my favorite—doughnuts. Yes, among all the fancy, hoity toity options, there was literally a server walking around with a tray of straight-up doughnuts. After a few minutes, they started passing out champagne glasses as well.