“You look like shit,” Alex says to me as she sidles into the bathroom and runs her toothbrush under the tap. I scoot over, giving her space. Alex requires the entire sink to brush her teeth. I usually end up huddling in the corner, lucky to get a single square inch of basin to spit into.
“I didn’t sleep well last night,” I tell her.
That sounds innocent, right?
That doesn’t imply anything, right?
I’m suddenly distrustful of every word that comes out of my mouth, convinced that each one will be dripping with subtext and innuendo and she’ll immediately be able to hear it. Be able to see the disloyalty on my face. Smell it on my body.
Oh fuck, I didn’t shower last night.
Is it possible? Could the scent of Lia still linger on my skin? On my fingertips? In my mouth?
I immediately start scrubbing my teeth harder. So fast and vigorously that when I spit a few moments later, I see blood in the sink. I lunge for the faucet and wash it down with a blast of cold water.
God, this is stressful. How do all those cheaters do this?
No, I scold myself.
You are not a cheater. It was one time. It won’t happen again.
You are not one of those men.
“Why didn’t you sleep well?” Alex garbles through her toothbrush.
I rinse my mouth with water and dry it with a towel. My head is spinning. My heart is hammering. I didn’t think talking to her this morning would be so difficult. I force out a shrug, hoping it looks natural and not like the freakish shoulder spasm that I feel.
Be cool.
Stay calm.
“Don’t know,” I say. “Guess I just have a lot on my mind.”
Like Lia’s round breasts. Lia’s soft, perfect skin.. The warm inside of Lia’s mouth.
STOP!
I glance in the mirror and notice that one eyebrow is twitching. I rub it furiously.
“I know what you mean,” she mumbles, seemingly oblivious to my face spasms. She spits into the sink. “This wedding shit is complicated.”
She rinses, dries her mouth, and then wraps her arms around my waist. Her touch feels foreign. Wrong. Like the awkwardness of a lap dance you didn’t want but that your friends insisted on buying for you.
I force myself to reciprocate. Encircling her slender body and kissing the top of her head as she rests it on my bare chest.
“You know,” she goes on, “I always thought I’d be one of those brides who didn’t care. Who was just like, whatever, do what you want, just make sure there’s good lighting on me.” She laughs.
I laugh, too. It sounds like a fucking stuttering chipmunk.
“But now that I’m in it—like actually planning it—I realize what all those brides make such a big fuss over. You really just want it to be perfect. And after all we’ve been through, I feel like we deserve the perfect wedding. Don’t you?”
“Mmm hmm,” I agree, trying my best to sound earnest.
“We have been through a lot.”
“Mmm hmm.”
“I mean, high school and college, what a roller-coaster, right?” she chuckles into my chest, her breath tickling my skin.
“Right.” I agree, mustering up a chuckle of my own.
She tilts her chin so that she can peer up at me. I don’t want to look into her eyes. I don’t want to see those beautiful blue irises that I’ve fallen in love with over and over again. It’s too intimate. I can’t do it, knowing that I betrayed her only a few hours ago. Knowing that I liked it.
Yes. There it is.
The truth.
The nervous, fluttering energy bouncing around inside me right now is more than just guilt. It’s something else.
Something I can’t identify.
But I know I have to look at her. I can’t avoid her face for the rest of my life.
So I gaze down and our eyes lock. The connection is made. The one that’s kept us together for so many years.
It’s that spell that Alex has over me. It’s housed in her eyes. It radiates from her pupils. A thin wisp of magic that spins and twirls in the air, wrapping itself around me, pulling me in, holding me there, making me forget everything else but her.
I’ve never been able to resist it.
I’ve never wanted to.
Alex is the kind of girl who makes you feel like life is an amusement park ride. A series of thrills that only get bigger and better as time goes on. She has the kind of sexiness that men lust after in magazines. That turns heads in the subway. That inspires other women to diet and go to the gym. And every head she turns, every lusting glance she invites, makes me feel like fucking James Bond.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” she says to me, her mouth inches away from mine.
You can’t kiss her. You can’t kiss her.
Not when your lips were wrapped around her sister’s nipple less than ten hours ago.
I swallow. “What is?”
“The calm,” she clarifies, her voice unusually sweet and demure. “The peace and quiet. I mean, we used to be…” her eyes widen as she makes an explosion sound with her mouth, “like two tornadoes colliding.”
I want to correct her. To tell her that she was the tornado. I was just the innocent house—cemented to the ground—that couldn’t get out of the way.
But I just laugh and nod.
“But now, I don’t know. We’ve both changed so much. We’ve both grown up. It’s like we were meant to be apart for those four years. So we could find ourselves and then find our way back to each other. You know?”
A lump forms in my throat.
I do know.
It’s exactly how I felt when I saw her on the street that day in New York. She was wearing a white sundress that showed off her long, shapely legs and billowed around her as she walked. She glided breezily down the sidewalk like some kind of commercial for women’s razors. Her skin glowed. Her eyes twinkled. Her hair bounced and glistened in the sun.
She looked radiant.
I remember watching how willingly people stepped aside for her. A queen in everything but title. I remember marveling at the how easily her luminosity transferred. From high school hallways to college quads to the mean, gritty streets of New York City. She brightened all of them. And still, four years later, perfect strangers were in awe of her.
Then she saw me, her eyes found mine. And she slowed to a stop.
Everything did.
The sun, the crowd, the planets.
They all sputtered and stalled. Like tiny wind-up toys that had simply run out of rotations.
And when her lips curved into that coy smile—the very one that melted me the first time I saw her—I was done. It was over.
The four years we had put between us shriveled up into nothing.
The spark that had kept us bound together through so many battles shot across that New York sidewalk like a bullet. It entered my chest. It zapped the life right out of me and replaced it with a new one.
A better one.
A life with Alex in it.
“Yes,” I tell her now, in the small shared bathroom of her childhood home. “I know.”
She breathes out a sigh. “I’m so glad to be done with all that high school drama.” Then she stands on her tiptoes and presses her lips lightly against mine.
At first I freeze, afraid of her kiss. Of what her mouth will find.
Remnants of her sister? Traces of something unfamiliar?
But it doesn’t.
And the kiss is so light, so tender, it’s almost as though it’s not Alex at all. But some strange, alien version of her. Alex doesn’t do light. She doesn’t do tender.
Alex does fierce. She does passionate. She does lustful.
I wrap my arms tighter around her waist, pulling her into me. She moans softly and the kiss intensifies.
She pulls away long enough to drag a fingertip down my chest, her demure eyes never leaving mine. Her fingers play at the hem of my pajamas, pulling, circling, teasing.
“Alex,” I warn, glancing toward the closed door that leads into Lia’s room. “Not in here—”
But then her hand slips beneath my waistband and she takes me into her palm, gripping the words right out of me.
My thoughts ping-pong back and forth.
If you stop it, she’ll grow suspicious.
If you don’t stop it, you’re an asshole.
Her warm, confident touch instantly hardens me. Her gentle strokes make it impossible to think. Impossible to breathe. I tip my head back and let out a quiet sigh.
I can’t do this.
I have to pull away.
This is wrong.
No.
No.
NO.
But as she sinks to her knees, drawing my pants down with her, and wraps her mouth around me, I have only one thought left in my brain.
Oh fuck yes.