Kendall
I hadn’t yet ventured into long form content but this video would be a couple minutes of me demonstrating a recipe for a simple apple tart.
Stuff like this always got crazy numbers on my socials.
People seemed to love watching me in videos.
It probably helped that I always made sure to look extra cute when I was going to be on camera, to really play up the whole pastel twink thing a lot of my followers were into.
My content wasn’t NSFW by any stretch of the imagination, but my followers were total simps.
On top of that, I was always getting comments begging me to start an OnlyFans or another channel dedicated to spicier content.
Honestly, I was starting to get kind of tempted. I didn’t want to be stuck in this tiny apartment kitchen forever.
Picking up my phone, I grinned as I saw Benji had posted a meme in the group chat we shared with Josie.
I’d respond to it in the morning, since I knew they were probably both in bed and I didn’t want to risk disturbing Josie’s rest. She had a lot of work to do, developing the baby that I would be an honorary uncle to. I couldn’t wait.
A string of loud and staccato raps at my door startled me out of my thoughts, a shiver of anxiety immediately racing up my spine.
The time on the corner of my laptop screen let me know it was nearly midnight.
Who the hell would be knocking on my door at a time like this?
Cherryvale was probably too small for serial killers, but I didn’t necessarily want to risk it.
“Open up, Sparkles.” A muffled version of a very familiar voice made itself known, before another loud smack on my door echoed through the otherwise silent night.
Scrambling up from the couch and setting my laptop aside, I hurried to the door and swung it open. I didn’t want my neighbors being woken up by the police raid style knocking and getting upset with me.
“Rhys?” I asked, blinking up at him in shock. He looked ridiculously hot, still in the old t-shirt and jeans he’d been wearing when I’d seen him earlier. But he had the kind of sculpted figure that could really pull off anything.
His eyes instantly dipped down to my body. I wasn’t exactly dressed for company, in an old baby tee that was cropped above my navel and a loose pair of pink heart-printed pajama pants that hung low on my hips.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered, almost caustically, his eyes locked on my exposed stomach.
I didn’t have anything particularly special or interesting there, just the standard barbell with a silver stud floating in my bellybutton.
I had way cuter ones that I sometimes switched in.
I wished I was wearing one of those so he’d stare even longer.
“Rhys?” I repeated, confused now by his presence and his reaction. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to see you,” he responded matter-of-factly, finally able to tear his eyes off my body and nudging me aside with his shoulder as he made his way into my apartment without my invitation. “I found your apartment number with your name on the mailboxes at the front of the complex.”
Oh, right. I’d told him I lived here when we’d met at the store earlier.
“Have you been drinking?” I asked, tilting my head. He wasn’t exactly stumbling or slurring his words, but he seemed buzzed at the very least.
“Yes, I have,” he answered bluntly. He dug into the pocket of his jeans and extracted the keys to his dad’s car. “And I drove, too,” he said, dangling them in front of me.
“Give me those,” I said, snatching them out of his hand, probably only because the alcohol had dulled his reaction time. But he didn’t look particularly upset or unhappy that I’d taken them. Guess he didn’t plan on leaving anytime soon. “Aren’t you supposed to be on a date?”
“I was on a date,” he responded, glancing around my living room, before plopping down on my sofa to stare up at me. He shifted into a relaxed posture with his knees spread apart, probably trying to appear casual, but I could tell he was feeling tense and irritated about something.
“Did it… go okay?” I wondered, closing and locking the door behind me.
I’d never really seen him like this. I knew he’d gone to tons of parties in high school with the popular crowd, and I’d heard rumors and stories of some of the things he’d done at those parties, but of course Benji and I had never been invited to anything like that.
“No. It did not go okay.”
“What happened?” I couldn’t help but ask, my eyebrows drawing together in worry.
I’d spent a lot of time looking at his face, usually when I thought he wasn’t watching me so I could sort of get away with staring at him.
I was pretty decent at deciphering his emotions.
Under the weird, tipsy bravado, he was pissed.
Not at me, but at someone or something. My instinct to fix everything panged in me for a moment as I waited for his answer.
I couldn’t help it. I was a Pisces, after all. And I happened to know that as a Taurus, Rhys would totally crave the loyalty and emotional nurturing I could give him. If he wasn’t straight, I mean. I’d looked for Pisces and Taurus together in every zodiac compatibility chart I’d ever read.
And maybe it was crazy to always check your compatibility with the sign of your best friend’s straight, married brother. And maybe even checking astrology charts at all made me kind of a sad, gay stereotype. Well, so be it. There were certainly worse things I could be.
“I couldn’t get hard. My dick, I mean. My dick didn’t get hard.”
I stared at him for a silent stretch that probably felt much longer than it actually was.
But my brain was operating at maximum capacity trying to decode the mystery of what he’d said and apply whatever the context was that I wasn’t immediately understanding.
Because there was no way Rhys Kensington was sitting in my living room with the intention of having a chat about his actual cock.
But as he stared back at me unblinking, I began to suspect that maybe he was.
“Well, that’s no big deal,” I said, composing myself.
I didn’t want him to mistake my shock for any kind of judgment.
He was the last person I would ever judge.
“You have so much going on in your head right now. And being out on a date for the first time since… You know, everything, of course you’re going to feel a little out of it. ”
He stared at me again for a few moments once I was done, his light eyes shining with an emotion I couldn’t quite identify, before he slid his palms over his face, bursting into slightly hysterical-sounding laughter.
“Oh my god. I knew you would say that, Sparkles. I fucking knew it.”
More confused than ever, I could only wait for him to finish laughing, nervously fidgeting with the drawstring of my pajama pants, idly tying it into a little bow. Anything to keep from thinking too hard about the dick he’d been so blunt in mentioning to me. What had he expected me to say, anyway?
Once he’d finished what I hoped was not the start of some kind of nervous breakdown, he lowered his hands, and his face was suddenly serious, his eyes intense. A tingle sparked in my stomach and spread, spilling warmth through my limbs as I watched him carefully.
“You’re kind of predictable, you know that?” He said, the sound of his voice low and laced with a sexy rasp. The shift in the atmosphere, hot tension suddenly forming in the air like a heavy fog, was enough to give me whiplash.
“Is that bad?” I asked.
“No,” he answered. “It’s good. It’s very, very good.”
The compliment, if it could even count as that, only had the butterflies in my stomach fluttering and writhing even more.
It didn’t seem exactly fair, having to stand there with my heart pounding while the guy I’d been obsessed with since before puberty pierced through me with his sharp gaze, and knowing I couldn’t ever really have him.
But that was something I should have come to terms with over a decade earlier, so it was my own fault if I was still aching and pining for Rhys Kensington.
“The problem,” he went on, and suddenly he couldn’t look at me anymore as a flush of color began to wash over his perfectly handsome face. “Is that I really needed… I needed to…” He trailed off, groaning lightly in frustration.
I knew what he was going to say. The thing he’d told me at the store, about how he and his wife hadn’t slept together in, like, years before they’d finally separated basically hadn’t left my mind since he’d said it.
And based on how he was acting about the whole date thing, I got the impression he hadn’t been with anyone else since then either.
In other words, he was desperately horny and probably touch starved.
“I get it,” I said, hoping to spare him from what I was sure he would consider abject humiliation.
I didn’t see it that way. If anything, it only made me hate his ex even more.
I didn’t know much about Brie, the girl he’d gone out with.
Like Rhys, she’d been a senior when I’d been a freshman.
I knew she was pretty. Evidently, that hadn’t been enough.
“I’m sorry things didn’t work out. It’s not your fault. ”
“And then the problem on top of the problem,” he said, and it looked like the idea of voicing whatever thought was in his head was causing him physical agony. “Is that I couldn’t get hard for her, but…” He trailed off again, and cleared his throat, still not able to meet my eyes.
When my gaze snapped down to his lap, my heart smacked up into my ribs and I couldn’t stop my sharp gasp. He couldn’t get hard for her, but he was definitely hard for me. His cock was a thick, rigid outline in the front of his jeans, obviously straining against the denim.