A throbbing hangover and fuzzy teeth were waiting for me when I woke up, and then it all came back to me in flashes, like a flipbook of Instax photos held together by an office clip. The pool table, the moonlight hand puzzle, the stairs, the striptease, the plaster, the begging. The growling. The banging. The coming.

Max.

Maxwell Benjamin Doyle. Born August 21. Favorite color: blue. Favorite food: nachos. Favorite beer: Double IPA. Least favorite food: grapefruit. Favorite movie, according to what he told the rest of the world: Blade Runner. Actual favorite movie: Legends of the Fall. Favorite song, when he talked to everybody else: Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Actual favorite song, as only I knew: U2, “With or Without You.” Total softie, 100%.

Also, the fifth man I’d ever slept with. The very best, hands down, no comparison, not even the same league. Unless I’d dreamed it.

I pried my eye open. There he was, the man about whom I thought I’d known everything, in bed with me. Naked. My thighs were still burning like I’d spent all night on the stair stepper.

Definitely not a dream.

Quick on the heels of my heart-melt at seeing him in my bed was the overpowering regret at having made a decision that remapped my entire reality. It wasn’t hangover regret either—I’d been tipsy, but not stupid drunk. Tipsy enough, though, to have no self-control at all. Normally, that manifested in eating a whole pint of Cherry Garcia in bed while I watched Felicity over and over again.

Not this time.

This time, it was Max. Over and over again, Max.

I’d thought that my dread at meeting Jed of the Loafers was like a bad clam? This felt like I’d helped myself to a second helping of a very haphazardly prepared paella. So I clapped my eye shut like a mosquito had just flown into it and tried to hit a mental reset button, like there used to be on the first Nintendo, the button that would fix everything. Reset. Reset! I could not have done this. I could not have slept with Max. There were three billion men on the planet, and I slept with the one who knew I still slept with a stuffed rabbit that I won at a fair when I was five. There were eligible men all over the Eastern Seaboard, and I managed to get entangled with the one who knew almonds gave me hives on my tush, the one who knew I shouldn’t eat sauerkraut unless I planned to be in solitary confinement for a day afterward. One of the very few people in my life that I knew I couldn’t live without.

I could not have done this. I could not.

Except I had.

The sun was rising, and a tiny sliver of light accentuated the ripples of his abs. He slept with his hand behind his head, and the sheets were draped over him like he’d been set up for a love scene in a soap opera. All the naughty bits were covered. Just barely.

Except, of course, for the morning wood. That was covered, sure, but very hard to ignore. It was huge. Absolutely huge. And perfect. And with the outline of his balls just visible. As if my fingers weren’t attached to me, they moved to the sheets, plucked at the fabric, and revealed the dark hair in a sexy patch. The pink, taut skin of the head peeked out. Then those veins, oh those…

I sort of hiccup-gasped, let go of the sheet, and tried as hard as I could to stop myself from moaning out loud. Again, though, bad paella! It all came flooding back to me. Every dirty word, every thrust.

An endless, amazing night of lovemaking. With my best friend.

I yanked my eyes away from the rumpled sheets and moved them to the window. The sunshine stung my retinas, and I watched a bumblebee hover outside, like a plump-winged grape. This wasn’t my first trip to the regret rodeo. I was thirty-four years old. I had about as much sense in choosing men as a roulette wheel. I had seen this movie before.

But one movie I hadn’t seen was… I let my eyes move over to his hard-on again, now actually getting bigger and actually shifting the sheets.

Lord.

Mercifully, Julia Caesar stumbled into the room with about as much grace as a man in a bear costume. I wasn’t usually glad to see her, not unless I was wearing long pants and had a sofa between us, but this was different. She was a living, scowling, hungry distraction. But she looked away when she saw me and stared at my bookshelf with one paw in mid-step. I made soft kissing noises, and she gave me a quick glance. Oh, please. Don’t be absurd.

She wore her signature grimace, the result of a pretty pronounced underbite, which pinned her top lip under her bottom incisors, making her very bulldog-like, and contributing to her general air of feline, apathetic invincibility. Another day with you staring at me and trying to force-feed me low-sodium luncheon meats. Happy Monday to me.

Julia gripped the carpet with her claws, making a snagging, ripping noise as the fibers succumbed to her talons. I made more kisses to try to stop her from waking Max with her claw sharpening. She swaggered over to the windowsill to take her morning sunning position. Outside, a row of unsuspecting sparrows danced around, happily fluttering eventual murder victims.

I turned my attention back to Max and took a deep breath, and it wasn’t particularly…pleasant. A whole night of nachos and onion rings was taking its revenge. Even my figurative bad paella would’ve been more palatable. The whole situation was bad enough, but to think of him waking up, pulling me into his arms, and finding the human equivalent of an onion blossom…

I couldn’t handle it. Too close to home, too embarrassing. I was nowhere near poised enough to handle a mistake like this head on, and certainly not without minty fresh breath. Carefully, and trying not to get too wrapped up in the girth of his forearm, my gosh, I moved Max’s arm off of me and slipped out of bed, tiptoeing into the bathroom. Julia trundled along after me, making the floorboards creak. I turned and stared at her, and she froze, snapping her face toward my dresser. I held my ground, though, and pointed at her slowly. As I did, her big, gold eyes glanced up at me, and I put my finger to my lips to tell her to shush it with the trundles. Like this was some sort of game of chess, she lifted one huge paw and dangled it tantalizingly over the floorboards. I pursed my lips and zeroed in on her weirdly human eyes. Don’t you dare, Caesar.

Her paw came down a millimeter. Or what, Brutus?

Once, I’d seen a nature show with mountain goats about to face off, so I summoned up my inner Rocky Mountain cloven-hoofed fury and I turned my head like that, like I was about to charge her. Much to my utter astonishment—Is this what a successful hostage negotiation feels like?—it worked. She placed her paw softly on the ground and twinkle-toed her way along. In the bathroom, she leapt up on the back of the toilet seat, pretending to hide behind my towels. I drew the door shut behind me, careful to make sure the click of the knob didn’t wake him. I stared at myself in the mirror. There was a very, very clear hickey on my throat, in the exact shape of Max’s mouth. There was even a hint of teeth marks. I planted my face in my hands.

After I’d taken a few breaths to steady myself, I turned on the faucet to a bare trickle, and Julia leapt from the toilet to the countertop. She stared at the water and extended a furry gray paw into it and then snatched it back, offended by the shocking wetness of the water…or something.

As I wiped off the weird black glops of makeup that I always had in the inner corners of my eyes in the morning, I tried to come up with a strategy. What was I going to do to make this less awkward? I couldn’t blame the booze. I was now officially older than Jesus, which meant I was also definitely old enough to know better. I couldn’t blame the bad date, because that hadn’t been such a huge surprise—he’d listed hanging with my bros as one of his hobbies. All the fish in the barrel were most definitely dead. The chicken salad was spoiled.

All I could do was blame the obvious. The temptation of Max Doyle had been too much. And I hadn’t been able to resist. On the list of Huge Life Mistakes, this one was right up there at the top.

But I can’t pretend it didn’t happen, I thought to myself as I splashed my face with some water and put a dollop of toothpaste on my toothbrush, while Julia investigated the water with one paw and then the other, wax on, wax off. As I turned on my toothbrush and put it to my teeth, the bathroom door opened. Max stood there and leaned dreamily on the doorframe. Messy-haired. Buck naked. Hard. Perfect.

Slowly, I made circles around my top molars and blinked at him. He adjusted his balls and smiled at me.

I couldn’t fake business-as-usual. Could I?