Page 58 of Vengefully Matched

“No,” Priscilla said, shaking her head contemplatively. “It actually sounds nice.” Her smile was wicked now. “I love a good fireplace romance.”

“I do also worry that I don’t, like, count. That it’s too late.” Agatha blurted it, the words falling out of her mouth unbidden. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment.

“Count according to whom?” Priscilla sounded curious, like she really wanted to know.

“I don’t know, whoever is in charge?” She didn’t want to say the quiet part out loud, which was that she worried she didn’t count enough to herself. She was thirty-seven, and the thing with her roommate had been almost two decades ago. She’d dated many men and no women between, and she hadn’t so much as held hands with a pretty girl in that span of time.

“You are who you are,” said Priscilla. “And your sexual history is not an indication of your sexuality. Are all people who don’t have sex incapable of knowing their own inclinations?”

It was sound logic, and Priscilla was too pretty to disagree with, anyway.

She wished she could take Priscilla home with her, and didn’t realize that she had said so out loud until the other woman smiled at her, eyebrows raised.

“I don’t think you’re in any condition for consent, but I will make sure you get home safely, and I will gladly revisit this conversation the next time we are both sober and so inclined.” Priscilla’s eyes lingered wistfully on her, like she really was sad to turn down the offer, and it was enough that instead of the burning shame of rejection she had anticipated, all she felt was warm possibility.

The rest of the evening was a blur of small plates, more wine, and Priscilla’s unbelievably red lipstick, which had to be tattooing itself onto her heart, among other places. Monster, indeed. It was an apt name. She wanted Priscilla to ravish her. She could shut her eyes and see it, see those lips moving, feel herself hold her own hands down to keep from touching them with the gentle reverence that she would be sure to dream about.

The last thing she remembered was Prissy putting a coat around her shoulders and leading her down the street toward her house. Those sexy, heeled boots clicked against the sidewalk, the crisp, leafy scent of fall filled the air, and the unbelievable sparkle of stars lit the sky, still paling in comparison to the celestial spark in her soul at the knowledge that they walked home together, hand in hand, Priscilla not even seeming to mind Agatha swaying and stumbling from time to time.

CHAPTER 18 Priscilla

Priscilla Hart was not accustomed to waking up on the outside of tightly tucked sheets that did not belong to her. Messy, sex-addled ones, certainly. But outside of them, not at all naked, that was new. She was definitely not accustomed to the soft comforter that wasn’t hers, but most startling of all was the warm, gently snoring body she found herself draped around, over the blanket and the sheet, one soft arm wound around hers, anchoring her into the position of big spoon.

And, unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on how she looked at it—the sheet and the blanket, though crisply tucked on her side, had ridden down the front of Agatha Vanderbilt Voisin.

She tried not to breathe, because if she breathed too hard, she feared her hand would slip up the silky pajama top Agatha wore. If it did, it would move from semi-appropriate upper stomach area to definitely sexual underboob area. Goddess, she wanted to slip.

But as hot as Agatha was, as alarmingly seductive as those little pajamas were, she was not in the habit of groping fake girlfriends without a proper conversation while both parties were starkly sober. Even if Agatha’s proposition last night had sorely tested her resolve to be chivalrous.

Which sucked, quite frankly, because every bit of her was aching to move her hand, all the way up or all the way down, to run her thumbs along Agatha’s impressive tits, or down, down, skating between her thighs.

Fuck, Priscilla was twisted into knots. But wanting was not the same as deserving, and she would never take advantage, so she settled instead for cautiously extricating herself from the surprisingly strong grip of sleeping Agatha, who stirred a little bit, rolling onto her back.

Priscilla tried and failed to ignore the way the strap of her top fell down her left shoulder, the way her breasts threatened to escape it, the way she wanted to lave her tongue across the tight, hard peak of Agatha’s nipples, which she could see straining against the fabric, either from the cool of the morning or a particularly good dream. Maybe both. To be that cool breeze or that dream, Priscilla would have traded almost anything.

Instead, Priscilla got up, left what she hoped was a heartfelt note next to her favorite slender Hydro Flask and some Advil on the nightstand, and quietly slipped out of Agatha’s place, borrowing a sweatshirt to throw over her dress, cutting through the back roads and ducking through the forest until she got to the maze and her protective bubble of silence.

This time she had plenty to think about, but there was one score she needed to settle, one call she needed to make here, in the secluded labyrinth of her own design, in the comforting woods she’d grown up in. It was time for closure.

It was 8 a.m. here, which meant that it was the afternoon there, a perfectly fine time to call.

The phone rang for enough beats that she thought perhaps Evelyn would not pick up. It did seem socially acceptable to decline calls from a former fiancée who had not only abandoned her on the day of their planned wedding but also dodged all communication since.

“Hello?” The chirp of Evelyn’s voice was so surprising that for a moment, she said nothing. She had expected to feel something—a pain, or an echo of love, or intense regret. But what she felt, in reality, was certainty.

She had done the right thing. At the wrong time perhaps, but the right thing.

And this phone call was the right thing too.

“Priscilla, I hope you haven’t placed an international phone call for the sole purpose of breathing heavily into my ear.”

“No,” she croaked. She cleared her throat. “No, sorry. It’s a bit harder to say what I need to than I thought.”

“That’s a start, I suppose.” Evelyn waited, but there were no sounds of impatience, no coughing, no tapping, no annoyed hmm, which she remembered once had driven her absolutely to the brink of madness in how it irritated her.

“I need to say that I am so deeply sorry for leaving you in that way. It should have been a conversation at a different time. I should have talked to you about it far earlier.”

“I was furious with you, you know. For months. I swore if you ever contacted me, I’d give you a piece of my mind.”