“Tell me about your first kiss.” His arms are around my waist, my back to his stomach, both of us spent after going at it for another round—this time in my bed. He playfully fingers the lace waistband of my panties as we talk.
“It was eighth grade, the Valentine’s dance. Girls asked boys, and I asked Jimmy Riggs. ‘Apologize’ by Timbaland was playing and we were slow dancing in that way only middle schoolers do. He just went for it. It was quick, no tongue, right when the teachers weren’t looking. We stopped and looked at each other in a daze. Then after the dance when we were waiting for my mom to pick us up, he did it again, but this time he left his lips there for a minute and started to open his mouth and I was freaked out my mom would see so I stopped it. What about yours?”
“Sixth grade. Chrissie something-or-other, an eighth-grader, behind the dumpsters at Skateland.”
“Sixth grade and eighth grade? She sounds like a cradle-robber.”
He chuckles. “She was hot for my brother. He was a freshman in high school and she was using me to get to him. When I found out she wanted him and not me, I punched him. He punched back, and then we got into an all-out brawl that my mom had to break up. Keep in mind he was almost four years older than me, but I still did some damage.”
I giggle. “So much drama. You two still fight over girls?”
“I don’t know if fight is the right term. But yeah.”
I’d love to meet him. The thought randomly crosses my mind, but it’s way too early to talk about meeting families.
“What about your sister?” he asks. “Do you two compete?”
“Never over boys.” I turn onto my back so I can see him. “Rachel’s three years younger. She sometimes had crushes on the guys I’d date, but we have different types.”
“What’s your type?”
“Hot guys with dark hair and green eyes named Brian.”
He tightens his arm around me. “Good answer. What about your sister?”
“She’s been with this guy, Ben, for like three years. They’re gonna get married someday. She’s more outgoing and spunky and he’s sort of an introvert, so I guess her type is quieter guys.”
“Opposites attract,” he muses.
“Sometimes. I dated a guy who was my total opposite once and it didn’t work. You have to have some things in common.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” I lift a shoulder. “Core values?”
“What do you value?”
“Family. Friends.”
“Don’t most people value those things?” He runs a finger down my cheek as I nod. “What characteristics do you value?”
“Honesty. Humor. Intelligence. You?”
“Work ethic, leadership, and confidence, among others.”
I mentally note that they’re all work-related, which makes sense for someone who runs his own business. I was hoping to get more of a personal insight into him through this conversation, though. “For yourself or for others?” I ask.
“Both.” He focuses his eyes across the room as he talks. “I surround myself with people who hold those traits as values. It’s what’s made my business so successful so quickly.”
“Yet you’re dating a woman who takes summers off.”
He laughs. “That doesn’t mean you don’t have a strong work ethic. My cousin is a teacher. I see what you go through. You deserve summers off.”
“Thanks,” I mumble, never sure how to respond when people compliment my profession rather than me personally. I close my eyes. It feels so good here in his arms, so warm, and my body is so exhausted from our night together, from three orgasms in the span of a few hours. I drift off to sleep.
Fingertips slowly ascending my thigh, so slow and full of anticipation I think I might die of need. Lips clashing, tongues battering, hearts pounding. We’re so close that I feel the beat of his heart against my breast hammering as hard as mine. But why? Is this different for him the way it is for me? Raw, unfiltered passion. Hands groping, gripping, grappling. The taste of beer on his tongue, cold and bitter, mixed with peppermint, and the chill of the cool liquid splashing into my belly button before he laps it up with his tongue. Fingers twisting in my hair, pulling as I come, come, come. He comes next, thick, hot ropes erupting from him and onto his fist, onto the naked flesh of my pubic bone. Then it all starts over again, the seduction, the foreplay, and finally the main event. Again I come, come, come. This time I come so hard that I come undone.
I wake with a jolt.
“You okay?” a voice whispers in the dark.
“Yeah,” I whisper back. It’s a lie.
I’m not okay.
I’m not even close to okay.
Brian holds me, pulls me more tightly against him as he worries about me—my needs, why I woke with a jolt in the middle of the night, if it was because of a bad dream.
It wasn’t a bad dream. Far from it.
It was a dream that pressed a needy ache in my core and dampened my panties. A dream of a night that did happen, a replay of the events—that one night I still wish wasn’t limited to just one night. One night that satisfied every need I’ve ever had—until it was time to leave. One night that meant more to me than it did to him.
Guilt blooms in my chest as the reality hits me.
It was a dream of another man.
* * *
Brian and I see each other nearly every night when he isn’t working. He texts me throughout the days, little messages here and there to let me know he’s thinking about me. On the nights when he doesn’t have dinner meetings, we go to dinner, sometimes along with Jill and Becker and other times alone. On the nights he has to work, he comes by afterward and almost always stays until morning.
Each day that passes pushes my one-night stand further into the past. The memory should be starting to fade by now, as memories do, but it hasn’t. I’m still consumed by what happened.
I avoid Vail. If a song comes on the radio, I shut it off. If I happen to see his name in my Twitter feed, I scroll right by without allowing my eyes to focus in on the words.
After an entire month has passed, I unfollow him and the band on Twitter. I unlike the Vail Facebook page. I delete him from my Instagram. I ask Jill not to show me articles of him, not to share any news related to him with me. It’s easier this way. Deleting Mark from my social media has helped tremendously. It’s made it so there isn’t a constant reminder of him feeding the obsessive beast in my mind, and it’s allowed me to start relegating him to the past while I focus on my blossoming feelings for Brian. I’m halfway between lust and love, and I’m pretty sure love is starting to win.
On one particular Wednesday morning after we’ve been seeing each other for almost a month, Brian groans as the alarm wakes him too early. He stays with me most nights and gets up at the crack of dawn so he has enough time to go home and take a shower before work. It seems silly. He could probably sleep another hour if we went to his place, and I could just get up and go home whenever I was ready since my summer schedule is so flexible.
I finally ask through the morning haze of sleep, “Wouldn’t it be easier to stay at your place?”
It’s a question I’ve been itching to ask. After a month, he still hasn’t invited me to his place. At first, I worried that it was because he was hiding another woman, but with the amount of time we’ve been spending together when he isn’t working, it seems highly unlikely.
He brushes me off with a non-answer as he sits on the edge of my bed and pulls on his shoes. “I’ve got too many roommates at the moment.”
I sit up and pull the sheet up to cover my naked chest. “Why?”
He tugs the sheet from my fingers and allows himself an unobstructed view of my naked chest. “I don’t have my own place. I’m still house hunting. Between nights here and work all day, I haven’t had much time to look at places.”
He reaches for my breast, and my line of thinking is completely shattered under his touch.
It isn’t until much later that I realize I asked the wrong question.
I asked him why he has so many roommates. I didn’t ask him who his roommates are.