Read Online Out to Lunch by Stacey Ballis - Free Book Online Page B

that for years you’d have spent all this time doing everyone else’s holiday parties and making their holidays special and important, and now you can just focus on your own.”
    This is very astute, and thoughtful, and makes me feel a little warm. “True enough.” Most people forget that when you are a caterer and event planner, the holidays are awful. Office parties, Christmas fetes, New Year’s galas. The cobbler’s children have no shoes, and Aimee and I always laughed about the fact that we always showed up to Thanksgivings and Christmases exhausted and brain-dead and never actually hosted our own.
    “BRIAN!!! Dude? What are you doing here?” Wayne has returned. He claps Brian on the back with such force that the beer Brian is holding showers me from head to toe.
    “Ooops. Sorry Jenny!” Wayne leans forward, but Brian stops him, takes a napkin from the table, and gently wipes my face.
    “Sorry about that, we lawyers are notoriously unbalanced, the slightest wind will knock us over.” He looks in my eyes in a way that says that he has some opinions of Wayne that aren’t dissimilar to mine.
    “Good lord,” Wayne says. “I’m a disaster, and that isn’t even the first time tonight.” Nor probably the last, I think. “Hey, Jenny made some amazing dessert back at her place, it’s not far, you should come have some with us!”
    Yeah. And perhaps I should book a ticket on the
SS Titanic
. Luckily for me, Brian is way too professional to accept that invite.
    “Sounds great, if you have enough . . .” Brian says. Crapalicious.
    “There’s ALWAYS enough when Jenny’s cooking.” Wayne is effusive. I hate that it makes me sound like I make huge amounts of food, since Brian knows I live alone and can certainly see the current magnitude of my ass.
    “Well, if you’re sure.” Brian looks over at me.
    What can I do? At least he’ll be a good Wayne buffer. “Of course. The more the merrier.”
    “Great! Let’s go!” Wayne shepherds us out of the bar and into the brisk evening air.

6

    T he snoring is different. Volnay is often a little bit snuffly when she sleeps, which, I admit spinsterly, is on the second pillow on my king-sized bed, but it sounds weird, somehow harmonic. I roll over to give her a nudge and my arm stops midway.
    That is not Volnay.
    That is Handsome Lawyer Brian. Rattling with his mouth open and an arm thrown over his head. Volnay, to her credit, is keeping time tunefully, nestled in the crook of that same arm.
    The night floods back so fast, my head spins. Brian coming back to my house with Wayne and me, breaking out a bottle of port, decimating the tarts, making meaningful eye contact every time Wayne said something stupid or geeky. Wayne leaving and Brian refilling our glasses. My liquor-loosened tongue giving voice to every Half-Brain Wayne story I can remember, to keep Brian laughing. Thinking that I had never heard him laugh, and wanted to listen to it on endless loop and make it my ringtone.
    And then the kissing and the hands in my hair and the dizzying rush of blood to tingly girl parts long unattended. The brazen way I took his hand and took him to bed, relieved that there were still condoms in the nightstand; dusty, but not expired. It would have been, by anyone else’s standards, perfectly acceptable sex. Nothing overly acrobatic, no particularly special skills on his part. He has a nice body, not amazing; well-cut suits hide the fact that while his shoulders are broad and hips slim, long hours behind a desk have made him somewhat doughy and undefined. Absolutely average in the package department, nothing weird, nothing notable. A very good kisser, which is always nice.
    But you know the old saying, hunger is the best sauce; and I was a very hungry girl. So while back in the day when I actually had sex on a reasonably regular basis it would have been considered a good start but not fireworks, last night it rocked my world. Twice.
    I look up at the time, which my