Friends With All the Benefits

24 Ellie

S neaking around with Ethan was much harder than we thought it would be. Nat was a mess and needed a lot of support. At least she still went to work, which did wonders for her sanity. Ethan and I included her in our daily routine. We ate dinner together. We watched TV together. We even dusted off old board games in the evenings to keep Nat’s mind occupied.

I could tell Ethan was frustrated that we no longer had the time or the opportunity to have sex, but he never made an issue of it. In fact, he did all he could to make Nat welcome and comfortable, and for that, I was immensely grateful. I knew he hadn’t been happy about how Nat treated me, but he still managed to be kind to her.

I took a day off work to take Nat to see a lawyer about the transfer of her old apartment’s title deed into Andy’s name. The lawyer confirmed that the transfer was indeed legal. Nat had signed off on the transfer and paid for it to be lodged. There was no way to argue it had been coercion because it hadn’t been. Nat was inconsolable after that.

“You need to tell your parents,” I told Nat after she had a few days to calm down. She had been putting off telling her parents about the apartment, but it was inevitable that they’d find out eventually.

“I don’t know how to,” Nat wailed. “They’ll be so disappointed in me. How could I be so stupid? So na?ve? I wish I was more like you, Ellie. You always do the right thing.”

“No, I don’t. I stuffed up with you, remember? I could have gone about things better.” I still harboured guilt over the clipboard and how I went about addressing Andy with Nat. If I had been more understanding, more supportive, maybe I could have stopped all this from happening.

“No, you didn’t. It was all my stupid, stubborn, selfish fault. And you were right in the end.”

“That doesn’t matter. Look, it’s done. It was an expensive lesson, but you still learnt something from it. You’re still young. You can start over. I’ll help you.”

“I guess you’re right. At least I still have my savings.”

Something occurred to me. “Did you share your bank login details with Andy?”

Nat’s face paled, confirming my suspicions.

“Go check your bank account now.”

Nat immediately pulled out her phone and did as I instructed. “All my money is still there.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “You’ll still need to change your banking password and the passwords of anything you may have shared with him. Actually, change all your passwords to be safe, especially if you reuse them.”

Nat’s little cry of panic told me I had hit the nail on the head. She stared at me like a deer in the headlights, suddenly overwhelmed by everything she should have done the moment Andy had kicked her out. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Go grab your laptop. We’ll start with your bank account, then go from there.”

I walked Nat through changing her bank account details, then her email account, and her online shopping accounts. Ethan walked into the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea and ended up suggesting a few more services we overlooked. We found out that Andy had charged several deliveries to Nat’s Uber Eats account, and she had freaked out when we found out.

“How could he? He’s still using me after he’s discarded me. If you didn’t tell me to change my details, Ellie, he would have kept on doing so.”

“Didn’t you get the notifications on your phone?” Ethan wanted to know. “It should have tipped you off when he first did it.”

Nat had a guilty look on her face. “I’ve been ignoring all the notifications on my phone. It was too stressful.”

Ethan and I exchanged a look, but we didn’t say anything else.

By the end of that evening, we had helped her work through a comprehensive list of all her online accounts and made them Andy-proof. We even helped Nat cancel all the utility bills in her name. Suck on no internet, no electricity, gas or water, Andy.

Finally, Nat was exhausted and decided to call it a night. She went to use the bathroom, leaving Ethan and me staring at each other in the dining room.

“I notice that Nat has a tendency to bury her head in the sand over big things,” he said wryly. “That might explain how Andy got away with so much for so long.”

“Shush,” I told him. “You know she regrets it.”

“The shower is running. She can’t hear me.” A hungry look crossed Ethan’s face. “I miss you, Ellie. I can’t take not being able to touch you for much longer.”

He moved in front of me and pulled me close to him, and now his hand traced my face until he reached my chin, then gently, he tilted my head upwards and kissed me. I felt his arousal rise against my body and moaned into his mouth.

“I missed you too.”

A wild glint lit in Ethan’s eyes. “Let’s go to your room. Right now.”

That made sense. Ethan’s room was in the front of the house, closest to where Nat slept in the living room.

I didn’t wait for another invitation.

I had barely locked the door behind me when Ethan’s lips were on mine again, his hands on me again. We stripped as fast as we could, then Ethan pushed me down on my bed. My nipples pebbled in his hands, and as he lowered his mouth to them, I moaned, the sensation of his warm, hard tongue driving me to the edge. My body had gone without him for far too long.

Ethan hushed me. “We don’t want Nat to hear, do we?”

I shook my head. No, we did not. We were still a secret, and to be fair, there was no we . It was just Ethan and I enjoying each other’s bodies. Nothing more.

The more I thought about it, the more it made my heart ache, so I stopped thinking and just let myself enjoy the moment.

“Now, I’m going to do everything I can to make you scream.” Ethan’s voice turned husky as he started playing with my clit. “And you’re going to do everything you can to stay quiet.”

“You’re not the quietest yourself when you come,” I teased back.

“Then we both will have to stay very quiet if we want to come.”

Ethan touched me with his skilful hands, and I barely contained my whimper. Then when all the nerves in my body were aflame and my body was more than ready for him, he finally slid himself into me and my universe exploded.

When we started having sex, it had been rough and feral. But now, he was gentle as he took me. It was tender and sweet and oh so devastating.

He fucked me like he loved me, but I knew it couldn’t be. I fucked him back like I loved him because I did. It wasn’t as if either of us could tell the difference anyway.

He made me come on my bed, our mouths crashing together so neither of us could scream. At the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but wonder how many more times we could do this before it all came to an end. But for now…

We both rolled over on the covers, very satisfied at what we just did to each other.

“I think that worked out quite well.” Ethan lay flopped on my bed with a huge grin on his face. “We need to do this more.”

Noise came from outside the door. I put my finger on my lips and put my ear to the door. Clonking sounds came from the kitchen. Nat was up and about, and from the sounds of things…baking?

Nat hated cooking, but she did bake. In fact, she stress-baked, which meant she was doing just that right now.

“Nat’s going to be in the kitchen for a while,” I whispered to Ethan. There was no way he could sneak past without her seeing him.

Ethan didn’t seem fazed.

“Come back to bed.” He shuffled to one side of the bed. It was a queen, so it had plenty of space for both of us. His arms opened, beckoning me back into them, and I did just that.

“You’ll be here all night at this rate,” I warned him as I snuggled against his warm, hard body. Nat would be in the kitchen till past midnight, and it was a workday tomorrow.

“It doesn’t matter.” Ethan pulled the covers over the both of us.

I stayed in his arms, trying very hard not to think about how real, how right this all felt. This was all just an illusion, this was all just temporary, I reminded myself. I couldn’t let myself read too much into it, because that way laid only heartbreak.

~

I woke up the next morning with Ethan’s arm still around me. The spring nights were still chilly, and usually, I wouldn’t be able to sleep naked, but Ethan really did run warm, and his body never left my side all night.

“Good morning, Ellie,” his voice whispered into my ear.

“How long have you been up?” I murmured as I turned to face him. His eyes were still half-lidded, as if he just woken up. The gentle morning light illuminated his smiling face. He was just so handsome that it made my heart ache.

“Long enough to hear you snore,” he grinned.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was cute.”

Cute. Did he just call my snoring cute? Yes, he did.

If I was panicking last night that things between us were starting to feel too real, waking up next to him this morning felt even more so. Ethan and I had been sleeping together for a while, but we had never slept together until now. This was a whole new level of intimacy.

I grabbed my phone on my bedside table and checked the time. It was still early.

“I’m surprised you didn’t take the chance to sneak out.” Nat didn’t wake up as early as we did. Ethan could have gotten back to his room easily.

“Are you that keen to get rid of me?” He actually pouted and pulled me back against him. “What if I just want to lie here with you?”

I didn’t want him to go either, but this was heading into red-alert territory. We weren’t anything to each other. He didn’t feel a thing for me, and the more we did things like this, the more I kept falling for him until I reached the point of no return. I was probably there already.

“Ethan, you need to go.” I forced myself to get out of bed.

Ethan made a cross, grumbling noise and sat up, but he didn’t get out of bed. Instead, his eyes roamed across my room. He had been in here plenty of times when we had sex, but he hadn’t actually spent any time in it at all, and right now, in the bright morning light, he could see everything.

“You have a lot of books.”

I did, and they all sat on tall, neatly stacked piles on the floor at one end of the room. They had almost become a decorative feature unto themselves, and I had each pile organised in my own system of genre, author and how much I needed to access certain books for rereading.

“You ought to get proper bookshelves for them,” Ethan continued.

“I know I should.” But I hadn’t, because bookshelves were large and they were heavy, and putting them in felt like it was way too permanent. I had bookshelves when I lived in Nat’s old apartment and falling out with Nat aside, leaving my shelves behind was the next most traumatising part of being kicked out. I hadn’t quite felt ready to get new ones yet even though I had so much more space here, but I really should have.

Then Ethan looked over the edge of my bed and paused, before reaching for something that caught his eye. He pulled my clipboard out. On it was the list of what I wanted from a date slash potential boyfriend right after my disastrous first one with the cheapskate bloke. The list wasn’t long. I didn’t get very far with it because Hannah and Joyce video-called me just as I started writing it to hear about the date and we three ended up stalking my other dating app matches on social media in a bid to screen them for red flags.

“Put that back,” I whacked him with a pillow.

Ethan ignored me and started reading off my list. “Requirements for someone I am willing to date. First bullet point: Not like Andy or that cheapskate bad date. In brackets: Too much to expand on. Will require another sheet of paper. Second point: Has good manners. Third point: Wants a girlfriend, not another mother. Fourth point: Does not kick animals.”

At this point, he had to stop because he couldn’t help laughing his head off.

“Oh Ellie,” he gasped when he finally came up for air, “Leave it to you to make a list.”

“Give it back to me.” I reached for the clipboard, but Ethan held it away, still shaking with laughter. There were more points, but Ethan didn’t bother to read the rest out loud.

“A lot of things on this list are the bare minimum of what you should expect from a date, let alone a relationship,” Ethan held me at arm’s length as he read through the rest of my list. Halfway through, he stopped, and a strange look came over his face, then disappeared before I could ask him about it.

“You’d think so, but you’d be surprised. Stop reading it. I know you find it super entertaining and all—”

“You don’t say.”

I tackled Ethan, but he grabbed me by the wrists and flipped me back on my back, sinking me into the mattress. The entire time, he didn’t let go of the clipboard.

His naked body pinned me gently to the bed, one hand holding my wrists. I wriggled to get free to no avail.

“Keep still, Ellie,” Ethan warned me. “You’re making me hard again.”

“That’s your problem, not mine.” I wriggled some more, this time focusing my effort on the parts of my body that touched his semi-rigid cock. Ethan grunted. One hand reached for my bedside drawer and rummaged in it. I couldn’t see what he was doing.

“It will be your problem really soon, but first, I need to add to this list.”

Pressure lifted off me and I wrenched myself free. By the time I scrambled back up to a sitting position, Ethan was already sitting cross-legged, penis semi-hard and twitching, and scribbling away on my clipboard with the pen he had fished from my drawers.

I made a face.

Ethan seemed to sense it, even if he didn’t lift his head from what he was doing. “Patience, Ellie.”

Finally, he returned the clipboard to me. I looked down at it. He had added a few more points.

Friends must like him. Can cook. Can clean. Thinks Ellie is beautiful. Makes Ellie come. Consistently.

I lifted my eyes to Ethan. He hit every point on the list. Every point.

All my friends loved him. It helped that they were his friends too. He did his fair share around the house without complaint. And he always, always made me feel good about myself. I had felt plain and disregarded as a woman all my life, but when I was with Ethan, he made me feel sexy. Attractive. Beautiful.

As for the last point… he worked hard at it, making sure I always did.

This thing we were doing was starting to feel a lot more than a mere friend with benefits arrangement. The lines were getting blurred. And yet, we had both agreed that there were to be no feelings involved. This thing had an expiry date, even though we never talked about when that would be. I assumed it would be when he found someone he really wanted to date. And on my end, it was becoming harder and harder to just be friends and keep on doing what we were doing.

But Ethan had never been anything but clear about what this arrangement was about. I was the one who lied that I was over him. But when he looked at me sometimes, when he was really sweet, and when he wrote things on my list of ideal men that sounded like it could be exactly him, it felt like there was something much more going on between us. Maybe I was reading too much into it. And yet, when he wrote things like this, parts of me fluttered, wondering if he was telling me that I didn’t need anyone else because I had him. Maybe there really was something more between us.

Something unspoken.

Something real.

“That’s a tough criteria to meet,” I said as I watched him warily.

There was a distant look in his eyes, but it was gone in a flash.

“Well, you deserve only the best,” he said, his words careful.

“I mean, making me come is a really tough ask,” I joked. “Did you know that most women don’t actually come from penetrative intercourse?”

A smile crossed Ethan’s face. “Oh really?”

“Really. The stats are like seventy-five percent or something for women who don’t orgasm from sex, or something like that. I had read it on the internet somewhere once and somehow the figure had stuck with me—Oh!”

Ethan had pushed me back onto the bed again and was pushing my knees apart with his own. His cock was rock hard again, and his thumb descended on my clit with a vengeance.

“Let me make sure you’re in that twenty-five percent,” he murmured as he rolled a condom on. Then he drove himself back into me and made good on his promise.

Damn it. I was in trouble. So much trouble.