“Picture yourself as the queen,” Gabe insisted. “I dare you.”

Beck smiled sweetly and started shaking her head, as if she could avoid the image locking on by simply staying in motion. “I’d rather picture you as a worker rat. Stick your teeth out,” she insisted, grinning, reaching up to cup her hand under Gabe’s chin to pull him in for a spontaneously happy kiss.

I tried to hold back my smile as I waited for Gabe to look my way. Once upon a time we made a pact outlawing PDAs, particularly in the company of each other. And while I might have broken it many times over in the course of the past week, I hadn’t yet broken it in front of Gabe, so I was still one up.

But my smug smile fell quietly away as they were both instantly distracted by something behind and above my head. As I tipped my head up and around, I got a sudden, unexpected view of Sean’s face before he swooped down to bestow an impressively thorough PDA of his own.

When I finally tipped my head back down, I was gasping, shaky and unsettled. Looking deliberately away from Gabe and Beck, I noticed there were any number of other pairs of eyes gazing at me with amused interest. Note to self: A PDA with a rock star is like polishing off a huge hot fudge brownie sundae—unbelievably decadent, sweet and satisfying, but capped off with a queasy, what-did-I-just-do sort of feeling. Not for the faint of heart.

“Sean MacInnes.” The words went right over my head as his hand settled around the back of my neck, his fingers skimming through the little wisps of hair there. He reached his hand out first to Beck, then to Gabe. “Good to meet you. Glad you could come along with Nicola. We’re set to do one more song tonight, and then shall we all have a drink? On me.”

Gabe’s “Sounds great,” and Beck’s “Definitely” were garbled in my head.

“Excellent.” Sean’s voice speared through my mental fog, and I turned again to look at him, realizing too late that I might be carelessly tumbling into a PDA ambush. “Back in a sec, luv,” he said, offering only a wink this time. A wink that made every nerve ending stand up and salute.

Thank God the happy couple didn’t try to chat, because I was ill equipped for small talk at the moment.

Back up on stage, Sean stepped up to the microphone. “This is a new song for us, recently written, hardly practiced, so I’ll ask that you bear that in mind.”

As his voice carried through the crowds, softly persuasive and achingly beautiful, it occurred to me that Sean was like a magnet working on my personal compass, throwing me off, sending me in directions I’d never intended to go, with no guide to follow. I could only assume that eventually there’d be a point at which I could go no farther. And there’d be no going back to the way things had been. It was that day that worried me.


After Thursday’s journal overload, Friday morning was refreshingly Fairy Jane Free. I’d stayed up late last night, poring over the entries outlining the Changeling’s experiments and discoveries—her thoughts on Jane Austen and the magic of the journal (inconclusive), and her scientific approach to finding a man (success!). Fascinating reading.

Personally, I wasn’t yet ready to go another round with Fairy Jane, having not yet cracked the code on her last little directive. And beyond that, I didn’t have anything to say, at least nothing I wanted to reveal. I wasn’t too proud of the fact that I’d choked a little my first night out of the gate with Sean, the two of us as a couple. I’d been overwhelmed and hadn’t handled things particularly well. But that was a thing of the past. Today I was once again swept up in the wowza factor of this relationship, and it was infectiously exhilarating.

Even running into Brett in the hallway didn’t faze me. Admittedly I didn’t spout off about Hooky Wednesday, the Weird shirt, the sex, or SXSW, but I almost wished I could. It all sounded so good in my head! We even made plans to go to lunch next week—as friends (at least on my end). I figured I’d just play things by ear. And in the event that those awkward silences had a flirty undercurrent, I’d decide which part of the fairy tale to tell him over our separate checks.

In honor of the changes in my life, I whipped up papaya-coconut cupcakes with mango pastry cream after work, and I must admit, they were very tasty. I felt very tropical parked in the purple papasan, beneath the odd assortment of novelty lights and that perfect ice cream scoop of moon. The Pendleton blanket I was curled beneath was sort of cramping my style, but you have to roll with the punches. That might as well be the motto of Friday night karaoke at Laura and Leslie’s, and yet, I had to admit the calendar’s latest quote had me a bit on edge. It read, “ ‘Surprizes are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.’ Emma.” I couldn’t agree more: I’d never been big on surprises simply because you couldn’t plan on surprises. I did my best to just sit back and relax. Sean had been thrilled to come along with me tonight, and the girls took to him from the get-go—he even managed to snag Leslie’s approval.

“Tell me this,” she demanded of Sean, “are your intentions with regard to Nicola honorable?” With raised eyebrows she warned, “Consider your answer carefully.”

I missed his answer, but judging by the cacophony of laughter and Leslie’s “that’ll do, pig” attitude, it was spot-on. Hardly a surprise.

It seemed my fledging relationship was nearly perfect. And yet ... I had this odd feeling that something was off.

Sean was in his element, effortlessly charming and at the same time strategically self-deprecating. Listening to him work the patio, one could almost imagine that he understood these women’s frustration with men and that he empathized with their decision to switch teams. And then he’d offer up an encouraging wink, a boyish grin, or a playful lift of his brows, and it seemed—to me as a spectator—as if they froze a moment in frantic, ponderous thought, wondering if they’d made the right decision. It was like magic ... or momentary hypnosis ... just how far a dollop of charm could carry him.

It had definitely gone the distance with me. But as devil-may-care as he appeared, I got the impression that Sean hadn’t abandoned that original “now or never” mind-set and its associated urgency. He’d seemed anxious to tell me something earlier, but Leslie had shanghaied him the moment we’d crossed the fence line. I hadn’t had a moment alone with him since. With the whole weekend stretching empty ahead of us, he should have plenty of time. For lots of things.

It was during a pleasant little daydream that Leslie sidled up and perched herself onto the edge of my papasan. For anyone unfamiliar with papasan geometry, it’s a circular chair with spherical depth—no edge and no perch. Leslie started sliding immediately. And speaking as the girl at the bottom, it was a slippery slope indeed.

“He’s got a cute ass,” she informed me, gesturing with her margarita glass. A bit of the rim salt tumbled down to join the cupcake crumbs on my blanket.

Glad to have settled on a topic we could both agree on, I turned eagerly in his direction. My gaze fell first on the profile of his face, etched with shadow and light against a twilight sky. He turned at that moment, as if sensing our eyes on him, and sent a curiously amused smile back in our direction, toasting us with a longneck beer.

Leslie leaned in farther until she was hovering over me, precariously balanced on her hipbone. Avalanche conditions.

I’d psyched myself up for the papasan extrication—one fluid motion, up and out—when Tawny Brown, a rare talent in the backyard karaoke set, stepped up to the microphone.

“Okay, ladies. I know you’ve been waiting. Our token male of the evening, Mr. Sean MacInnes,” she swept her hand around him like he was a showcase on The Price Is Right, “is going to give us a little sample of what a man can do with our equipment.”

Wild and wolfish whistling ensued, and Sean took up the gauntlet, accepting the microphone from Tawny. I took the opportunity to extricate myself from the papasan.

“I’m gonna go warm up by the grill,” I told Leslie before scooting quickly away.

Selecting his song from the machine’s playlist, Sean turned back to his audience, the quirk of his lips hinting at unrepentant cockiness. Not really wishing to have this performance interrupted by a chat on what sort of havoc animal fats could wreak on a person’s system, I didn’t quite make it all the way to the grill, instead choosing a spot midway between the Ls.

When the music started, I didn’t recognize it, and Sean seemed to be reveling in his little mystery. His lips stayed quirked with the secret right up until, with a clear, bright voice, he launched into the jaunty, unfamiliar lyrics, singing of sailors and marines.

Now I was definitely baffled. But as Sean kept singing the lyrics he clearly had memorized, I kept thinking it was going to come to me. And then, just before the refrain, it did. South Pacific.

Leave it to Sean to come up with a song that playfully paired “dandy games” with “dames.” My hand fluttered to my mouth as I let my eyes stray from Sean to gauge the gals’ reactions. Mostly they seemed impressed. Whether with his voice or song choice, I couldn’t say.

And as he finished the last, rapid-fire verse with a flourish, down on one knee with his hands spread wide, the lesbian karaoke crowd went wild. Sean was an undeniable success.

“Not too shabby, mister,” Tawny praised with a good-natured wink, once she’d taken back the microphone. “Now if you could just get our karaoke virgin up here ...”