3
“Welcome to my humble abode,” I said, stepping back from the front door to let Nick in.
Under the apartment’s bright ceiling light, I noticed that his skin was olive-toned and his eyes were on the green side of hazel. Now, though, his perfect face twisted into a frown. “It’s real humble,” he said, looking around the open-space living area, which included the kitchen, dining and lounge room, as well as a balcony that overlooked the city. “The rent for this place must be crazy.”
“I share with my sister,” I explained. “She’s out with friends now. Well, friend. She has one friend.” I laughed nervously. “Do you want anything to drink?”
“I’m okay.” He looked at me expectantly.
“What?” I asked, trying not to fidget.
“Are you gonna show me to your bedroom or what?”
“Oh! Right, yes. Follow me.” I led him to my room. “This is where the magic happens.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I fought the urge to facepalm. What the hell was I saying?
“Good view,” he said, looking at the floor-to-ceiling windows. Sometimes, in the morning, I’d watch people running or walking their dogs in the nearby park before hitting snooze on my alarm and promptly returning to sleep.
“It faces east, so it’s nice when the sun rises,” I said.
He nodded, eyes shifting over the rest of my room. “It’s clean,” he says. “That’s good.”
I smiled.
His gaze swung to me. “Have you showered?”
“Oh, yes, I did before you got here. I also dried my hair.”
“And is that what you wear?” He pointed at my body.
“No, these are my home clothes,” I said, gesturing at the loose T-shirt and fluffy pants. “I’ll get changed now.” I ducked into the ensuite and changed into the pair of pyjamas I’d picked out: cream and navy striped pants and a matching button-up shirt made of soft satin. I checked my reflection in the mirror, then returned to the bedroom.
Nick was sitting on my desk chair, and for the first time that evening, his brows moved, jumping halfway up his forehead. It was admittedly satisfying to incite a reaction from him rather than blankness, but my satisfaction immediately dissipated when I realised he looked…horrified.
“Is that what you wear when you’re going to do it with a girl?” he asked.
“They’re my pyjamas.” I tugged the hem of my shirt down nervously.
“I can see that they’re your pyjamas. I can also see that they make you look like a fifty-year-old accountant.”
“There’s nothing wrong with fifty-year-old accountants. That’s both ageist and accountant-ist. Also,” I continued, “I thought they were stylish. My stepmum bought them for me.”
“What are you, three? Can’t you buy your own clothes?”
“They were a Christmas gift. What’s wrong with them?” I looked down at myself. The satin was super soft against my skin, and I thought the colours were nice.
“How do I put this?” Nick said. “They’re not very… sexy.”
“So what? They’re my pyjamas.”
“Listen, Hayden,” he said. “Think about women. What do they wear to bed? Yes, sometimes they wear an old band T-shirt with a hole in the sleeve, but a lot of the time, when they’re with a guy, they wear sexy stuff. Silk and lace and little dresses or a matching set with a low neckline.”
“So you’re saying I should wear lingerie.”
His eyes widened, but I might’ve imagined it, because a second later, he was frowning at me again. “No, I’m not saying that—unless that’s what you’re into. I’m saying… show a little skin.”
“How?” I looked down at myself. “Do I need to buy new pyjamas?”
Nick sighed. “Come here.”
I obeyed, standing before him, his face eye-level with my torso.
“I suppose these can work if you take the dorky angle.” He touched the shirt between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the material. “But do this.” He reached up and unbuttoned the top button, which rested against my collarbone. He didn’t touch my skin directly, but I sucked in a sharp breath, feeling strange.
He regarded me, then unbuttoned another. Then another. Then—
“Okay, I think that’s enough,” I said, stumbling back because, with four buttons undone, my chest was out for the whole world to see.
“There,” Nick said, raking his gaze over me, and I suppressed the urge to shiver. “Much better.”
I looked down at myself. “Are you sure?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“What do you wear?” I asked. He hadn’t brought anything with him, just his clothes and whatever he had in his pockets, which I doubted had enough space to stow a whole pair of clothing.
In response, he reached for the back of his shirt and pulled it off in one swift motion. Then, before I could say anything, he unzipped his jeans and peeled them off. He didn’t even hesitate. I don’t know how he could get undressed so easily, though I suppose that in his boxer briefs, he wasn’t any more exposed than if he were at a swimming pool.
Also, if I had that body, I wouldn’t hesitate either. He didn’t have muscles like an Olympian or a movie star—in fact, he was leaner than I thought, his jumpers and jeans adding some bulk to his figure. There were hints of ab definition, and his legs were long, reminding me of a gazelle with slim but firm-looking calves. His areolas were a reddish brown, his nipples puckering in the cool air.
When my gaze finally made its way up to his face, I was met with a dry expression.
I’d been staring for too long. “Sorry,” I said, clearing my throat. “You’re just really, um…”
“Don’t make this weirder than it already is,” Nick said. “The next step is to set the mood.”
I knew how to do that. I turned on my bedside table lamp, turned off the ceiling light, and closed the blinds so my bedroom was filled with soft light. I paused, then rifled through a drawer and pulled out a few candles. I’d never used them in this apartment, but I might as well go all out to demonstrate to Nick I wasn’t totally hopeless.
“Wait here a second,” I told him before rushing out to the kitchen to grab matches. I returned, lit up three candles, and placed them around my room—one on the bedside table, one on the desk, another on my bookshelf.
“Not bad,” Nick said. “Do you ever play music?”
“No, but I can.” I picked up my phone and scrolled through my playlists. “What should I play?”
“Whatever you like. Whatever you think will set the mood the best.”
I opened up Google and searched up ‘music for sleeping’. The first result was a YouTube video titled 9 hours of underwater whale sounds for deep sleep .
“Got something,” I said, starting the video. The noise was low, and I heard the front door of the apartment open—Elena returning—so I turned the volume up. I didn’t want to be distracted from Nick’s lessons by the sounds of Elena moving around the apartment.
“What is this?” Nick asked two seconds after the video started playing.
“It’s whale noises,” I explained.
He stared at me, and this time, it was different from all of the previous looks. Those expressions had been incredulous, but now, he was looking at me like I’d grown two heads and started reciting prime numbers in Latin.
“Give me that,” he said.
Usually, I didn’t hand out my phone to just anyone, but something about his tone made me want to obey. As soon as he grabbed my phone, he opened up my music app and found a song. A smooth male voice began to sing about fucking slow with the lights on.
It was actually a pretty good song, and I told Nick so. “But isn’t it a bit… I don’t know, distracting?”
“How is it distracting?”
“The lyrics. I figured it’d be better to listen to something with no words.”
Nick rolled his eyes. “We don’t have all night. I’ll send you a list of songs later. For now, let’s get to the next part.”
“What’s the next part?”
He set my phone down on the desk behind him and crossed his arms. “Get on the bed,” he said.
“Um. Okay.” I crawled onto my neatly made bed, sitting cross-legged, my back up against the headboard.
“Stretch your legs out. You’re not in kindergarten.”
I did as he said.
“Spread your thighs.”
I baulked. “What?”
“Just a bit,” he said. “It makes you look masculine. Like this.” He gestured to himself. Like most men, he sat with his legs spread. He moved his knees an inch or so more apart, then leaned back in his chair, looking effortlessly cool and admittedly pretty hot.
I followed his instructions, then relaxed my legs, hoping I looked as nonchalant as him.
“Okay, now watch me.” Slowly, Nick stood up and approached the bed. He placed one knee on the bed, pausing to regard me, and the look in his eyes made me feel like prey. He crawled towards me, but somehow, he didn’t look ridiculous on his hands or knees. Instead, he looked as dangerous as a jaguar.
“See the way I’m keeping eye contact?” he said. “It’s like you’re the only person in the universe. It’s nice, isn’t it.”
It wasn’t a question, but I answered anyway. “I guess,” I said. “It’s a little scary.”
“It’s important to show your partner that all of your attention is on them,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “There’s so much you can do without even touching someone.”
He was right—he wasn’t touching me. His hands and knees were on either side of my body, but there wasn’t a single spot where our skin touched. So why did I feel weirdly… flustered?
It hadn’t been like this with Sophie. We didn’t do all this build-up before going to sleep. We just lay down, heads on our separate pillows, and closed our eyes.
“Now,” Nick continued, face moving closer to mine. “I—”
My bedroom door swung open.
“Hayden!” Elena barked. “Are those candles I smell? They’re a fire haz—oh.”
Nick, still on his hands and knees, looked over his shoulder. He was still for a few seconds before carefully moving to the side of me, hands in his lap—probably for modesty—and his legs crossed. You’re not in kindergarten, I wanted to tell him.
“Hi, Elena,” I said, waving a hand. “This is my sister,” I explained to Nick. “Elena, this is Nick.”
“Nice to meet you,” Elena said, then turned her attention to me. “We’re not allowed to light candles. It’s a fire hazard.”
“Sorry, I didn’t realise. I’ll blow them out.”
Elena nodded and took a step back. “Sorry for interrupting,” she said, reaching for the door handle.
“That’s okay,” I said. “Nick’s just here to teach me how to be good at sleeping.”
No one said anything for a long while, apart from the singer on my phone crooning about flicking tongues and throating dick.
Elena looked at me, then at Nick’s almost naked body, then at me again. “Right. Well. Good luck.” She shut the door.
As the sound of her footsteps receded, Nick slowly turned to me. “Please don’t tell me your sister interrupts you when you’re with a girl.”
“She doesn’t,” I said.
“You don’t seem very embarrassed,” he observed.
“Should I be?”
“You have a half-naked man in your bed.”
I shrugged, pushing myself off the bed to blow out all the candles. Once I was done, I returned to the bed.
Unsatisfied with my lack of response, Nick continued, “And you straight up told her that I was here to teach you.”
“So what? She’s probably relieved, to be honest.”
“Relieved?”
“Yeah, she knows how annoying I am in bed.”
Nick’s mouth parted. “You’ve… with your sister?”
“Yeah. Well, not now, only when we were kids.”
Nick didn’t just look horrified—it appeared I unlocked a brand new emotion because his entire face twisted up with repulsion.
“Why are you giving me that look? It’s not a big deal. When my family would go on holiday, we’d get a hotel room with two beds, so my dad and stepmum had one bed, and my sister and I had the other.”
“You slept with your sister when you were kids?” Nick said.
“I just said that.”
His eyes were big, his mouth open. “Let me get this right,” he said slowly. “You. Had. Sex. With. Your. Sister?”
“What?” I flinched so hard that my shoulders hit the headboard behind me. “No! Why would you even ask that?”
“You just said—”
“We shared a bed on holiday,” I explained, skin going hot. What the hell was he playing at, asking such a question? “I was annoying in bed then because I always moved around and kicked the blankets. When did I ever mention having sex with my—how could you even—how did your mind even go there?”
Nick glared. “You’re the one who was being unclear, talking about how your sister would be relieved…” he paused. “You told her I was here to teach you to be good at sleeping.”
“Yes,” I said.
“When you say sleeping…”
“Because I’m a disruptive sleeper. That’s why Sophie ended things. She said she didn’t like sleeping with me and that I was selfish in bed.”
“As in, you steal the blankets and stuff?”
I nodded.
“Are you fucking with me?”
“About what?”
To my surprise, he reached out and grabbed my arm. His grip was tighter than I expected, but I didn’t struggle. “Hayden. Level with me. Is this some kind of joke, or are you…” he gazed into my eyes as if trying to find something hidden there.
But I wasn’t hiding anything, except for the fact I was trying not to react to his closeness. This was the first time he’d actually touched me, and even though he was only holding my arm, I could feel his body heat all over me.
“You did have sex with this Sophie chick, didn’t you?” he asked.
I yanked my arm away. “That isn’t any of your business.”
He just looked at me.
“Well, yes,” I admitted. “But still, none of your business.”
“I don’t know whether you’re an idiot or whether you’re actually some super genius pranking me by pretending to be a mega moron. When she said she doesn’t like sleeping with you, she meant she doesn’t like having sex with you.”
I blinked at him. “You don’t know her.”
“And when you said you wanted me to teach you to be good in bed,” he continued, “I thought you meant how to be good at sex. That’s why…” he gestured at himself and then me. I realised how much of my chest was on display and quickly buttoned up my shirt. “That’s why I played the sensual music… when you played those whale noises, I thought you were just weird, but now I know…”
“Know what?” I asked.
He shook his head. “You really are fucking clueless, aren’t you?”
I got out of bed, crossing my arms. “If you’re just going to insult me, then leave.”
He didn’t argue. He moved off the bed, picked his jeans off the floor, and started pulling them on. I averted my eyes.
“And you shouldn’t make assumptions,” I continued. “Sophie never said she didn’t like having sex with me—”
“Yeah she did,” Nick said, sliding his arms through the sleeves of his shirt. “Maybe she didn’t say that exactly, but her meaning was still explicit. How dense can you possibly be?”
“You’re being rude,” I said.
“You deserve my rudeness. You’re dumb as hell.”
“Get out,” I snapped. “You can’t talk to me like that.”
“I’m going,” he said. His eyes surveyed over the room a final time, probably to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind. Finally, his eyes settled on me. “It’s a pity,” he said.
I wasn’t going to ask what was a pity. Instead I felt insulted and angry and humiliated. Had Sophie really meant ...? Then why didn’t she speak plainly? Or perhaps she did, and Nick was right: I was a dumbass.
Well, even if I was a dumbass, he didn’t need to be so rude about it. I walked him to the front door. Thankfully, Elena was in her room, so she didn’t have a chance to witness my absolute failure of a night.
“See ya around,” Nick said as he stepped out of the apartment into the hallway. How was he still so unruffled?
“Goodbye,” I said, then shut the door in his face.