2 #3
I am struck by how uncovered he is. He’s only wearing a pair of black boxer shorts. I can see his muscled stomach. I can see the dark hair that accentuates every one of his muscles. I can see the hair on his bare legs. I can see his feet.
I suck in a shaky breath.
“I’m up here,” he drawls, amused.
I meet his gaze, and I can feel my face heating up.
He’s grinning at me. “This might be fun, actually, Hannah. This might be really fun.”
What might be?
He smirks. “I’m going to take a leak.” He goes past me and into my bedroom.
I stand there, holding my phone, running my hand over my hair, trying to make it lie down. I wander into my bedroom, but he’s peeing with the fucking door open, so I jerk back out of there, swearing under my breath.
He comes out and finds his jeans. He steps into them. “We should talk about… what this is, how it works, if you have boundaries or something.”
“Um… okay,” I say.
“Cool,” he says, buttoning and zipping up. He does not put on a shirt. He goes out, shirtless—gloriously shirtless—and sits down on my couch. He spreads out, legs open, arm over the back of the couch and raises his eyebrows at me, an invitation.
I sit down next to him. I put my knees together. I fold my hands over my knees.
He lets out a regretful noise and pulls himself in, his posture mirroring mine. He puts his hands together between his knees and studies them. “Uh… how are you?”
“Fine,” I say.
“Dumb question,” he mutters.
It’s quiet.
“So, did it, um, did I hurt you?”
“No,” I say very immediately. I look up and study his profile, his perfect profile, his curls hanging over the dark slashes of his eyebrows. It’s hard to exist in the same room with this man. He’s almost unworldly in his attractiveness. My mouth is dry.
“I don’t know why I…” He sighs heavily. “We obviously just could have said it happened without it actually having happened. That was really shitty of me.”
“It’s fine,” I say. “It was… fine.” Okay, find another word, Hannah. I blow out air and look around the room. “Maybe I should make breakfast or something.”
He gets up from the couch. “I can do that.”
I look up at him. “You cook.”
He shrugs. His shoulders are bare. My gaze gets snagged on them.
He laughs. “Okay, uh, yeah.” He goes into the kitchen part of the room and starts opening up cabinets. “What you think of me has been sort of obvious, and it was really shitty of me to take advantage of it, but it’s… I mean… it’s flattering.” He’s grinning.
“Fuck you,” I say. Obvious?
“I mean, you have some kid crush on me, and I knew that, and I just don’t understand why you’re still…” He finds a box of pancake mix. “Maybe you did like it.”
I get up and come over to the kitchen. “You’re the worst person in the world,” I manage.
He shrugs at me. “Sorry.” He sounds actually sorry, which makes it worse somehow. “But, I mean, maybe it makes it okay in a way. I don’t think you’re suffering.”
I pull out one of the stools in front of the breakfast bar and perch on it. “You don’t have to cook, seriously.”
He opens my refrigerator, pokes his head in, and pulls it back out. “You don’t have milk?”
I shrug.
He looks back inside. “You don’t have eggs.” He shuts the refrigerator and leans against it. “So, what sort of breakfast were you thinking about making?”
I point to the freezer. “There’s mini quiche. You put them in the oven. They’re good.”
He raises his eyebrows, turns around, and opens the freezer. He gets out the container of mini quiche and reads the back.
“It’s, um, three hundred seventy-five degrees for fourteen minutes,” I say.
He turns on the oven and opens the drawer below. Finding a cookie sheet, he begins putting mini quiche on it.
“You were saying something about, um, pictures?” I said. “On my socials? You want to make it look like we’re, um, like we’re…”
He opens the oven and puts the cookie sheet of quiche in. “Yeah, like we’re dating.”
“You have to preheat the oven,” I say.
He shrugs. “I always just set the timer for a couple extra minutes. It comes out fine. I’m impatient.”
Okay. I don’t think that’s the right way to do it, but I guess I’m going to let that go, all things considered.
He sets the timer and turns to me. “You’re all right with that?”
“So, you want us to fake date,” I say.
“Fake date,” he repeats.
“Like one of those romantic comedy movies or any number of trashy romance novels,” I say, although I don’t think the plot of any of those is to fake date to make a married woman jealous and get back at her husband by fucking his little sister.
My stomach turns over. I feel a little queasy. This is fucked up.
“No, not like that,” he says. “I mean, this, with us, I’m never going to…” He gestures back and forth with us. “You get that.”
“Obviously,” I say.
“And is that a problem?” He leans against the breakfast bar from the other side, still just gloriously shirtless.
I stare at his bare skin, and I cannot breathe.
“Should I put on a shirt?” he says, very amused. “Having trouble concentrating there, Hannah?”
“Fuck you,” I breathe, and I flounce back over to the couch.
He ducks into my bedroom. When he comes back, he’s putting his shirt on, and it’s kind of stiff, like cotton shirts get after being in the rain.
He shrugs into it, and it looks uncomfortable, and I start to tell him he doesn’t have to do that, and then I feel like that’s going to go over in a totally embarrassing way, so I don’t say that.
I pick up one of my legs and hug my knee to my chest. “For how long?”
He thinks about this as he sits down on the couch next to me. “I don’t know.”
“I mean, what do you want from this?” I say.
He clears his throat. “You know what I want.”
“What?” I say. “Her to suffer? Andrew to suffer?”
“Basically,” he says.
“That’s…” I don’t even know what to say. “That’s very fucked up.”
He shrugs, not arguing with me about that.
“So, for how long?” I say.
“A while,” he says. “I want us to be, you know, embarrassingly public. I want to take you to family functions and have you draped all over me, and I want to make out with you pointedly in front of both of them, and I want to do that… for a while.”
I swallow.
“If you don’t want to be part of it…” He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I mean, I can’t see what would really be in it for you. Except, uh, if you liked it when I touched you.”
I make one of those whimper noises that sounds exactly like the noise I made when his cock was slamming all the way into that inner, deep part of me, and my face explodes in heat, and he jerks, looking up to meet my gaze. There’s some oddly destroyed and regretful look on his face.
We’re stuck like that for a minute.
Then he scoots over on the couch. “Shit,” he breathes.
I try to shy away from him.
But he cups my face again with one of his hands, holding me still, forcing me to look into his eyes. He searches my expression. “Are you all right, Hannah?” He’s very serious.
“Not really, no,” I say, and I don’t know why I say that.
He nods. “Of course you aren’t. Well, I’ll do better, okay? It won’t be like that again. I promise.”
So, what will it be like? Less? More? Nicer? More detached? I tug myself out of his grasp and get up off the couch and go over to look at the mini-quiche, even though they’ve barely even been in the oven for any time at all.
“We shouldn’t,” he says. “We shouldn’t do this.”