Dani’s whole face lit up, thank goodness. “Yankee Swap,” she said, her cheeks and eyes crinkling into an even bigger grin. “You know, like a grab bag thing. We’ve been playing for decades, and it gets super-heated.”
“Fights break out?”
“More like the silent treatment, which lasts until New Year’s.” She moved along to the next booth, where a man was selling homemade wrapping paper. “We’re supposed to keep the price at around $30, but someone—my dad—always tries to make his gift the best by throwing in extra money or lottery tickets.”
“Ah,” I said, “he likes to see people competing for his present.”
“We don’t open the gifts until after the game, but yeah. By now, everyone knows that my dad brings the best ones, so we all try to figure out which is his. He’s very secretive about that.”
I was totally getting into this story. I could picture her family, situated around a Christmas tree, battling it out for her father’s gift. “If your dad brings the best present, someone has to bring the worst.”
She laughed at that. “My brother. Hands down. We always have to remind him to spend $30 on his gift. Once he brought a toilet bank.”
I cupped a hand around my ear. “I’m sorry. Toilet bank?”
“Literally a plastic bank shaped like a toilet. You put some coins in the bowl and flush them down.” She mimed doing just that.
I chuckled. “Sounds amazing.”
“Not if you’re the one who winds up with it.” Her eyes burned with fury as she recalled this still raw story. “I had my dad’s gift in my hand.” She raised her hands, clutching an imaginary object. “And my own mother, who had the final pick of the game, came along and took Dad’s present from me”—she mimed someone wrenching an object from someone else’s hands—“and gave me Bobby’s.”
“The toilet bank,” I said, laughing.
She glowered at me. “It’s not funny.”
“It is, though. How old were you?”
“Old enough to recognize injustice.”
“Do you still have it?”
She examined a roll of wrapping paper decorated with hand-painted silver bells. “The next year, I brought the bank to Christmas Eve as my present—with some twenties attached. For a few years, we kept regifting it, but I’m not sure who has it now. I haven’t seen it for a while.” She took a breath. “Sorry, that was a long, drawn-out story.”
“I loved it,” I said, honestly. “And now I’m obsessed with this bank. Can we find out who has it now? Is it hiding up in the corner of someone’s attic? Does a Christmas ghost live inside it?”
“It was probably thrown out long ago.” She checked her watch. Maybe I was reading too much into that action, but she’d just shared with me one of the most foundational stories of her childhood, and I’d given her nothing. No wonder she was looking at the time.
I cleared my throat. “So…we were talking about that scene with Markys losing his virginity?”
Her eyes snapped to mine. “Yes?” Now I had her full attention.
“It was not my idea.” I wasn’t quite at the point where I was ready to discuss my parents or the infamous Comic Con video, but I could let her in on this one thing, especially since she’d brought it up. “When my agent was about to send the first manuscript out on submission, he suggested that I spice things up a bit.”
She raised her brows. “That scene goes well beyond spicing things up ‘a bit.’”
I laughed. “Well, I have a tendency to get a little spiteful when people ask me to make changes I don’t want to make.”
“This was a spite sex scene.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Kevin—my agent—asked for a little love making, and I went for full, use-every-position-in-the-book debauchery.”
“So, those positions…”
“Totally made up,” I said. “Well, for the most part. I’m pretty sure some of them are physically impossible.”
She giggled.
I covered my face with my hands. “You thought that scene was based on personal experience.”
“No!” She laughed some more.
“Yes, you did!”
The two of us fell into step as we headed toward the door.
“I mean…” she said. “Of course I did. Who makes that up out of nothing?”
“Authors!” I said. “That’s what authors do. We make shit up out of nothing.”
“I guess I’m complimenting you,” she said. “The scene read like you really knew what you were talking about.”
I stopped in my tracks.
She doubled back, concerned. “What?”
“I think you just blew my mind.” I started walking again.
“How so?”
“This is probably why so many women—and let’s be honest, some men—would stand for hours in line to meet me at signings,” I said. “Because they thought that scene was based on personal experience. They thought that, if they slept with me, they’d get to reenact it.” I was starting to see my fan base in a whole new way.
“So, you’d never do any of the stuff you wrote about in that scene?” Dani asked.
“Well.” I smiled at her, something stirring deep inside me. “Never say never.”
Chapter Eight
Dani
When Matt pulled his car into my parents’ driveway and put it in park, I felt like a kid in high school all of a sudden, like I was being dropped off by some hot guy from my social studies class, whom I wasn’t sure liked me yet.
“Thank you for the ride,” I said, unbuckling my seat belt.
He gazed up at my parents’ house. There was a light on in my mom and dad’s bedroom window, which faced us. They were all home—my parents, the kids, and Una—probably watching TV or playing games together. “Hey,” Matt said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” I let go of the door handle.
In the darkness, his eyes were a deep, serious indigo. “The other day in the kitchen…what were you going to ask me?”
“Oh.” I sank back in my seat. I’d been trying to forget about that ever since. It had been silly, rash, so unlike me to even think about asking him to hook up. But here we were in his car, in the darkness, after a lovely afternoon of joking and flirting and sitting back-to-back while breathing in sync. Maybe I hadn’t been off-base to think that could happen. Maybe saying it out loud would be worth the risk. “I was…” I giggled. “I was going to suggest that maybe we have sex. With each other,” I added, for clarity’s sake.