Chapter 9

Two cool hands settle over my eyes. I smell lilac body wash, and a second later, a pair of tits whose epic proportions I’m intimately familiar with press into my back.

“Long time no see,” a voice murmurs, close to my ear. “What are you doing later tonight?”

I extricate myself from the octopus that is Lani Wellings and turn around on my bar stool. Henry and Clark and I are in O’Hannihans, watching the dregs of a college basketball game. It’s Saturday night. I offered to Maddie that if she wanted to go out, I’d stay home with Gabe, but she said she wanted to get him settled in and make sure he was okay, unpack a few basics. “Not that I’ll be here long,” she said quickly.

I wanted to tell her she could stay as long as she wanted, but after what happened in my mom’s kitchen this afternoon, I wasn’t sure how good an idea that was. What I should be doing is chasing the kind of no-strings encounter that’s being displayed before me: Lani in a satin bustier and a barely there miniskirt.

“Hey, Lani,” I say, working the eyes-up angle with some difficulty.

“Hey, Jack, what’s up? Anything for me?” She swoops a piece of raven-black hair behind an ear and grins.

Henry and Clark have drifted off somewhere, being too good friends to cock-block me.

Lani is slot number one on my mental speed dial, the most consistently beneficial of all my friends. She and I go way back, nearly as far back as Maddie and me. Lani is the proud possessor of my virginity, actually, though the same isn’t true in reverse. She was two years ahead of me in school and may hold the distinction of having popped the cherries of more high school boys than any other girl to have graduated from Revere Lake High School.

I am momentarily tempted by the onslaught of lilac and curves—not to mention Lani’s amazing mouth, which is slicked berry pink tonight—until I remember that Maddie is sleeping in my house. The icing effect isn’t so much the fact that it would be somewhere between awkward and impossible to bring Lani back there (we could always go to Lani’s place), but the fact that it’s Maddie. Maddie just makes Lani seem too gaudy, too obvious, too easy. But even that’s not the whole story. It’s more that thinking about Maddie makes it so painfully obvious that what Lani and I do is just the sexual equivalent of scratching a mosquito bite. Vaguely satisfying, but only very briefly. And yeah, sometimes you gotta scratch, but—

“Aw, Lani, I gotta take a rain check tonight.”

She pouts. “You seeing someone? It’s been too long, Jack.”

It has been a while, actually. And Lani’s right: usually the only time we go this long without hooking up is when one of us is with someone else.

“No,” I say. “Not seeing anyone.”

Except in my midnight fantasies.

But I don’t say that out loud.

She swipes a finger gently across my cheekbone. “What happened here?”

“Took a board to the face at work.”

She frowned sympathetically. “How’re things otherwise?”

“They’re good. Gabe and Maddie are staying with me for a bit.”

“Really?”

She knows the outlines of the story. Obviously, that Maddie and I hooked up, that things went south, that since then it’s been somewhere between weird and outright awkward between us.

“So that’s where you’ve been,” she says, raising an eyebrow significantly.

“No. Not like that. They just needed a place to crash while they look for a new apartment.”

One of Lani’s most charming traits is her total lack of jealousy. Usually, I tell her pretty much everything about my sex life, and she does the same in reverse—sometimes it’s even part of the game we play with each other—but tonight I’m not in the mood to share.

She shrugs. “Just be careful, Jack. Roommates are tricky. I’ve fucked a few too many roommates, and it never ends up well for the rent getting paid.”

That makes me laugh.

“Okay,” she says, laughing too. “If you’re not going to ease my pain, I’m off to find someone who will.”

“You do that, hon’,” I tell her, and she waves a chipper goodbye and sails across the room.

Henry and Clark drift back.

“A sure thing’s nice,” Henry says wistfully.

“She’s in the market,” I tell him. Getting Henry laid is a perpetual pet project of mine.

“You’re not taking her home?”

I shake my head. “I’ve got Maddie staying with me.”

“You what?” Henry is looking at me like I’m stark raving mad. Which maybe I am.

“She needed a place to stay,” I say defensively. “Her boyfriend—dumped her.”

“And you’re that place?”

“She didn’t really have anyone else she could ask.”

I’d been about to tell Henry and Clark the whole story, about Harris and Mia, but I just don’t think Maddie would want them to know. Not that she did anything wrong, but it’s humiliating, still, right, being in that position? I still get pissed every time I picture her walking in on that. I drain my beer to soak the anger.

“That’s going to seriously fuck up your game,” Clark says, making a gesture to indicate the turning of the vise.

I give him the finger. “At least I’ve got game.”

“Past tense. You had game. Look at those three,” he says, and gestures across the room at a stunning set—a blonde, a redhead, and a brunette, just like a bad joke. “What’s your plan, man? The car? A motel? Or tell her your kid’s mom is at your place but she won’t mind if you two bump uglies for a bit as long as you keep the volume down? Or maybe Maddie will want to join in—”

“Shut up, asshole,” Henry says, and I shoot him a grateful look. Even though Henry doesn’t know the whole story of what went down between me and Maddie, he knows enough to know that Maddie’s not just some girl I screwed and got pregnant. “How long?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “She says she’ll get out as soon as she finds a place.”

“Just as long as this doesn’t fuck up Phoenix,” Clark says. The three of us have plans to head down for the March Madness championship games. Clark has a friend who can lay his hands on tickets, which isn’t the kind of opportunity that comes along every day.

“She’ll be gone by then,” I say, with confidence. “She’s looking at places tomorrow—”

“You watching her kid?”

“What the fuck, Clark? He’s my kid, too.”

Clark shrugs. Henry looks amused.

“It’s not funny,” I tell him.

Henry loses the smile. And stares at me, eyes narrowed, for a minute. “That bruise on your ugly mug have anything to do with her and her ex?”

I look away.

He shakes his head. “You better hope she finds another place to live fast.”

Truer words have never been spoken. Just before I left to come here, Maddie asked if I’d mind keeping an eye and an ear open for Gabe, who was watching Dora the Explorer. She wanted to take a quick shower.

It wasn’t Gabe who was the problem. He sat quietly and watched his show.

I was the problem. I couldn’t stop picturing her in there. Stripping off that clingy pink top and the lacy bra I’d brushed with my lips earlier. I could see her, reflected in the mirror, nipples drawn tight, dark against the heavy globes of her breasts. The slight, soft curve of her belly and the neat triangle of reddish-brown curls between her legs. Her pale, juicy thighs, squeezed together—because in my fantasy she’s thinking about me the same way I’m thinking about her.

She steps into the shower and the water is sluicing over her, trickling between her breasts, between her legs, teasing her tipped-up nipples, and I step in there with her—

And, cut.

Maddie’s a good person, and no matter how things went down between us later, she deserves better than whatever it was I thought I was doing this afternoon in my mom’s kitchen.

And she’s right. We are friends. We got past the ugliness in our past, and the way things are now, it’s more like when we were kids, before things ever got complicated. When I just knew, without it having to be said out loud, that I could count on her, and she could count on me.

She’s definitely right that there aren’t a whole lot of people she can say that about right now. I don’t want to take that away from her. Which sex would definitely do. We know that from past experience.

We can’t just screw around, then go our separate ways if things don’t work out. Between the two of us, we have to make things right for Gabe.

That said, as long as Maddie is in my house, I’m going to die a little every time she changes her clothes, takes a shower, slides into bed…

“Amen to that, brother,” I tell Henry, and order another beer.