Margot
This is what always happens.
Most people have a problem with saying everything that pops into their head. They can’t filter their thoughts. But I have the opposite problem: I filter myself too much. When I’m with someone new, I whittle my thoughts down, discarding every word that seems redundant or uninteresting until there’s nothing left. It’s a habit I’ve carried with me ever since I was a little kid. My mom always said it was a middle child thing, but I think it’s just a me thing. There are four other middle children in my family, none of whom are plagued by the same social ineptitude.
I thought it might be different with Ethan. Conversation with him has always come easy. He has a way of putting me at ease, and I never worry as much about filtering myself when he’s around.
But the man sitting next to me right now isn’t the same Ethan North that I’ve come to know over the past two years. The second he shifted into date mode, he became someone else entirely. The charming smiles that I’m used to are amplified bya volume of ten. Even with that ridiculous mustache adhered to his upper lip, I can’t ignore the way I feel that smile deep in my stomach… and worse, in between my thighs.
I was wrong before: Ethan and Nick are not the same. Nick was handsome and charming, but Ethan takes it to another level. And obviously, I am not equipped to handle it. Not at all.
“Okay, new plan,” Ethan says.
Thank god.
Maybe we can order a pizza and assemble some furniture. That’s where I shine—cramming pizza into my face and reading instructions out loud while Ethan screws the legs onto a coffee table.
But Ethan has other ideas.
“Tell me something I don’t already know about you,” he says.
I ponder this for a few seconds. “I hate clowns.”
Ethan laughs. “Everybody hates clowns. Give me something else. Give me your deepest, darkest secret.”
The look he gives me is suggestive and smoldering, yet somehow playful. This version of Ethan is unfamiliar, dangerously so. I suddenly understand how he’s so good at dating. No woman could resist the way he’s looking at me right now. His gaze pins me in place, as if I’m the only woman in the room. Maybe the only woman in all of existence. The intensity of it slides over my skin, sinking deeper, buzzing through every nerve. It’s heady, intoxicating, making me crave more.
Feeling thoroughly off kilter and perhaps a little too truthful, I blurt out, “I won a pie baking contest once.”
“That’s your deepest, darkest secret?” he asks, raising one very skeptical eyebrow.
One very sexy skeptical eyebrow.
A sexy eyebrow?
Pull yourself together, Margot. It’s literally a small patch of hair on his face.
I take a deep breath. “It was a store-bought pie. Jeremy’s mom pretty much told me I was required to bring one to their county fair, even though I’m not much of a baker. Some patriarchal small-town bullshit. I never expected to win, but I never told anyone the truth either.”
“What kind of pie was it?”
“I don’t even know.”
Ethan laughs and raises the glass to his mouth. Right as the whiskey grazes his lip, his fake mustache slides right off his face and plops down into the expensive amber liquid. He frowns down at the floating strip of fur while I burst into laughter.
“I guess the illusion is shattered,” he jokes, fishing it out of his glass.
I press a palm to my chest, feigning indignation. “I feel so misled.”
“Can’t have that, can we?” he laughs while trying to reattach the wet moustache to his upper lip. “How’s this look?”
“Majestic. Like a walrus that just emerged from the sea.”
Ethan drops his chin and raises one suggestive eyebrow at me. “Are you into that?”
“Not even a little bit.”
“No mustache it is then,” he says, pulling it off and sticking it to a napkin on top of the bar.