Chapter Thirteen
Thirteen
“You’ve had sex.”
Stella’s butt had barely touched the seat at their regular brunch table when Chelsea had thrown this accusation at her.
It was Saturday, which meant they were at brunch with Effie and their friend Kira.
Kira was one of the few people Stella and Chelsea had actually kept up with after college, mainly because as a proud lesbian Black Nuyorican, she fit right in with Stella and Chelsea, who were both queer and from Harlem and Long Island, respectively.
All three of Stella’s friends had their eyes trained on her as she grabbed the pitcher of water and poured herself a glass.
“Well,” Chelsea said, eyeing her.
“I’m sorry, that didn’t sound like a question,” Stella said before taking a sip of water.
Beside her Kira snorted and Effie’s mouth quirked up in a half smile. Chelsea, who was sitting directly across from Stella, put her elbows on the table and leaned forward.
“Where were you last night?”
Effie and Kira both whipped their heads to look at Stella, and it was then that Stella realized she was not just at brunch. This was an inquisition.
Truthfully, Stella should’ve expected it. She’d gotten home so late it was obvious she hadn’t come straight from work. Moreover, she’d arrived at their apartment (in an Uber that Max had paid for) at the same time Chelsea arrived home from her own Friday night plans.
To say Chelsea was surprised to find Stella not in bed with a good book but out in the streets was an understatement. However, Chelsea was clearly inebriated, so she’d asked no questions as they went into their apartment and promptly fell into their separate beds.
But now, the questions had arrived.
“I had a date,” Stella said.
She was feigning nonchalance, but Chelsea and Kira, who lived for drama, still gasped. Effie, to her credit, simply raised her brows in surprise.
“?Con quién?” Kira asked.
At this, Stella hesitated. If she told her friends the truth about who she was with last night, especially with Effie here, it would become a whole thing.
She’d been doing her best to put who Max was into a little box in the corner of her brain to be dealt with later, and she wasn’t ready for it to be later yet.
Not when Max had texted her this morning asking what she’d like to do tonight.
For the first time, in maybe ever, Stella had someone who was totally into her who she was into, too.
Moreover, after last night’s second failed attempt to go all the way, but still a very successful orgasm, Stella was excited to do more.
Besides the regular ol’ P in the V, Stella wanted to try giving Max a blow job.
(He was up two in giving rather than receiving at this point.) And she wanted to try phone sex or maybe video sex.
She wanted to know what he liked, and more importantly, what she liked.
Although he seemed to already have a pretty good handle on that.
Stella wanted to do it all, and Max was the perfect person to do it with. He was kind, gentle, respectful, and very, very hot. If he wasn’t the owner of AIX and Miles’ brother, he’d be the perfect man, which is why she didn’t want to think about that part.
Stella didn’t want to lie to her friends, though, and the truth was, now that she was finally getting some actual experience, she was dying to talk to them about it.
“It’s that guy Max from work,” Stella said more to Effie than anyone else.
“Max?”
Effie’s face scrunched up in confusion as she attempted to place the name, and Stella decided it’d be quicker to just tell her.
“The guy with the AI company,” she said.
Effie’s eyes widened. “Excuse me?”
Kira waved a hand between them.
“Who the fuck is Max?”
Naturally, that was when their food arrived. All four of them sat back in their chairs as the servers put down their plates, but as soon as they were gone, Kira was leaning in so far Stella was worried her boobs would end up in her food.
“?Quién es?” Kira asked again.
“He’s the owner of that company I told you about,” Effie said.
Stella wasn’t surprised that Effie had already told Kira about the situation at work.
She had been nervous about introducing them at first. Stella loved Kira, but she didn’t always jibe with people, and if she didn’t like someone, she did not try to hide it.
Meanwhile, Stella quickly realized that Effie was a very straightforward, levelheaded kind of person.
She dealt mainly in facts and refused to argue with people she deemed unworthy of her effort.
Thankfully, when Stella finally brought the two of them together at her birthday party a couple years ago, they surprisingly hit it off. So much so that they went home together and, as Kira put it, “Banged it out of our systems so we can be friends.”
And now they were thick as thieves.
“Okay, well, can someone catch me up?” Chelsea asked from across the table. “Because clearly my roommate has been holding out on me.”
Stella rolled her eyes. “We haven’t had a chance to catch up this week! When was I supposed to tell you?”
“Oh, does your phone no longer work?” Chelsea said. “You were able to text me to get toilet paper yesterday.”
“Because that was an emergency,” Stella said. “If I was going to explain the whole Max situation to you over text, it’d be a long-form essay.”
“Max, is it?” Effie asked, her brow raised once again. “You’re on a first-name basis with him already?”
“He literally introduced himself like that when we were in the office,” Stella said at the same time Kira said, “She better be if she’s letting him hit it.”
“Can you all please keep your voices down?” Stella hissed. She began rubbing her temples and wished she hadn’t forgone the bottomless brunch option and had just taken the risk of being hungover later when she met up with Max.
“Girl, no one is paying attention to us,” Kira said. “Now talk. Tell us everything, from beginning to end, and in explicit detail. Especially the juicy bits.”
With a heavy sigh, Stella started talking and caught them up from the moment she spilled her drink all over Max to his hand down her pants last night. By the time she was done, her food had gone from hot to lukewarm.
“Well, well, well,” Chelsea said, sitting up in her chair and looking smug. “It would appear my idea to go to Red as Sin and get laid actually worked.”
Stella glared at her. “Do not think me meeting Max absolves you of ditching me.”
Chelsea held up her hands in defense.
“I didn’t say it did,” she said. “I’m just saying that as I predicted, getting up and going out is the only way to actually meet people. The apps were never going to work for you.”
On either side of Stella, Kira inhaled sharply and Effie was shaking her head.
Chelsea looked around at the table. “What?”
“What do you mean the apps were never going to work for me?” Stella asked.
She could feel irritation with a sprinkle of anger vibrating just under her skin, but she tried to tamp it down and give her best friend the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps Chelsea wasn’t trying to say that there was something about Stella that would never get her the kind of response on apps that Chelsea always received.
Even if Stella often had that thought herself.
“I don’t mean it in a bad way,” Chelsea said, immediately backtracking. “I just meant you weren’t having any success on them so they weren’t meant for you. You need to meet someone IRL, and now you have.”
Stella wasn’t sure what to make of this explanation.
On one hand, it sounded reasonable. On the other, Chelsea was always sticking her foot in her mouth, especially when it came to Stella’s trials and tribulations in the dating world.
Chelsea, who seemed to flirt as easily as she breathed and used her sexuality as her occupation, could never understand Stella’s struggles.
Honestly, Stella wasn’t sure if she’d ever really tried.
Effie thankfully jumped in, and Stella took the opportunity to eat her now-almost-cold eggs.
“While it is certainly nice that you’ve met someone, Stells, you’re not going to keep seeing him, are you?”
“Of course she is,” Chelsea responded while Stella chewed. “She doesn’t work for him, so it’s not really a conflict of interest or anything. Why shouldn’t she have some fun with him?”
“Chelsea, mi corazón, Stella is not you,” Kira said, reaching over and taking Chelsea’s hand. “This will not be some simple fun little fling for her.”
“Um, hello,” Stella said, waving a hand. “I’m right here, and I can speak for myself. Who says I can’t just have a fling?”
All of her friends exchanged looks before it was finally Kira who stepped up to the plate.
“Babes, he’s your first,” Kira said, her voice leaning way too close to pity for Stella’s liking. “And while that maybe wouldn’t matter to some people, I think it matters to you.”
“It doesn’t,” Stella said defensively. When no one said anything, she said it again. “It doesn’t.”
Chelsea reached her hand across the table to cover one of Stella’s, but Stella pulled away, irritated.
She hated when her friends treated her like she was some innocent baby simply because she didn’t have experience like they did.
She wasn’t some pure-as-snow doe-eyed girl.
She watched hentai and had sex toys and read very dirty AO3 fanfics.
Her friends probably didn’t even know what knotting was.
Yes, Stella believed in romance and wanted to fall in love, get married, and do the whole white-picket-fence thing someday, but if things with Max ended right now, she wouldn’t have a breakdown.
Sure, she’d be disappointed, and maybe even a little sad, but she barely knew the guy!
Just because he gave her two—admittedly great—orgasms didn’t mean she was in love with him.
“Look, I’m not telling y’all about this to ask for permission, nor did I ask for advice,” Stella said.
“You asked what I’ve been up to, so I told you because I was actually excited to have something to tell for once.
And now you’re making me feel like I’m some kid who has no idea what she’s gotten herself into instead of a full-grown adult who, by the way, is the oldest one at this table. ”
Kira snorted. “Your birthday is exactly one month before mine.”
“It still counts!”
“Alright, alright.” Effie held up her hands and turned to Stella. “I’m sorry we were infantilizing you.”
“That’s a big word for Elmo,” Chelsea said as she took a sip of her mimosa.
Effie ignored her. “But Stella, that aside, this guy is bad news. He’s some tech bro. Is this really who you want to be spending your time with? What if people at Yellow Sparks find out?”
Stella’s immediate reaction was to say she didn’t care, but that wasn’t true. She wasn’t the kind of person to think of her coworkers as her family, but she was close with enough of them to not want them to think she was betraying them by sleeping with the enemy.
And Max was the enemy in their eyes. Thus far, most of the writers had agreed not to use Sparky as a kind of silent protest, or a fuck you, as Effie put it, to Miles.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that if her coworkers didn’t want to use Max’s tech, they certainly wouldn’t be happy to know she was sleeping with him, even if that technically hadn’t happened yet.
Despite that, Stella’s gut told her Max was a good guy, and maybe if she did hear him out about Sparky and why he thought it was actually a good thing, she could stop feeling guilty about what she was doing.
“I don’t know,” Stella said finally. “But I don’t think Max is the villain you think he is.
I genuinely don’t believe that Max made this…
thing to put us all out of our jobs. Maybe Miles has some nefarious plans, but I don’t think Max would be doing what he’s been doing with me if he knew he was going to cost me my job. I simply don’t believe that.”
The table was silent so Stella pushed on.
“We decided to keep our personal and professional stuff separate, but maybe you’re right,” she said. “Tonight when I see him I’ll ask him about his work and see what he knows. For now, though, I won’t be telling anyone at work about this, obviously. And you won’t either, right?”
Effie rolled her eyes. “I’m not a snitch.”
Stella grinned at that. “Thank you.”
“Okay, now that that’s settled, can we get dessert?” Kira said. “I need some flan before I nap.”
This was enough to set the girls off in giggles, and Chelsea flagged down a waiter so they could get Kira her flan.