“I don’t care if cheugy is a word used on TikTok. You cannot use it in a Scrabble game.”
I agreed with Avery, but her seriousness about the issue had me working hard to suppress a laugh. A quick glance at Nolan said his challenge was mostly meant to wind her up, and it was working.
“I really don’t think that’s right,” he protested. “The rules say the word has to be in the dictionary. Does it specify which dictionary? Urban dictionary should count.”
“Urban dictionary should not count!” she practically screamed, her eyes wide, her face red and puffed. Remembering the baby asleep in the next room, she lowered her volume but kept the intensity. “Anyone could make up a word and add it as an entry, and then where would we be? In chaos! That’s where.”
I gave up on my attempt not to laugh.
Nolan remained straight-faced. “But does it say that in the official rules?”
“Yes!” She typed furiously on her phone.
“She probably doesn’t even want to challenge me. She just wanted an opportunity to look up her own word. Now who’s the cheater?” He said it to me, but it was obvious he was trying to get a rise.
“I’m the cheater? I’m the cheater?” Avery jumped from the couch and across the coffee table, almost knocking down the Scrabble board to show her screen to her husband. “Merriam-Webster is the official dictionary of the game. See that? Right there.” She quickly typed something new into the phone then turned the screen back to him. “See what comes up when I type in cheugy? ‘The word you have entered is not in the dictionary.’ Which means you can’t play it on the board.”
“Oh. Okay. Wait, I didn’t mean cheugy. I meant chewy.” He changed the u and the g out for a w. “There. Twenty-six points.”
“You can’t take your turn after you’ve been challenged!” Avery went into another tirade about the rules of a challenge.
Nolan finally cracked a smile. “She just gets so serious about it,” he said to me. “I can’t help myself.”
“Why would we play a game if we weren’t going to take it seriously?” But then Avery started to laugh as well. “I guess I do get kind of spirited.”
I was about to say that neurotic was more like it, but the buzzer for the door rang before I got a chance.
“Since you two have descended into hysteria, I guess I’ll be the one to answer that.” He picked up his empty wine glass, and I suspected he was going to fill it while he was up.
I quickly got control of myself so I could hold up my glass. “Mine too?”
“I’ll bring the bottle,” he said, already halfway across the room.
“That was fun,” Avery sighed, several seconds later. “I needed that.”
“Me too.” It had been hard saying all the things I’d needed to say to Brett in the break room today. Surprisingly, it had been even harder to walk away. I desperately wanted to text him or call or just show up at his apartment. When Avery had suggested a competitive game of words, I’d scoffed, but then Nolan had opened a bottle of wine, and an hour into the match, I felt a lot better.
Or I did as long as I stayed focused and didn’t let myself think about Brett.
Now that we’d quieted down, and Avery was concentrating on her next turn, and Nolan wasn’t here to entertain me, my thoughts flew once again to him. What was he thinking? Was he laughing at me? Had I humiliated myself? Had I scared him off permanently?
I lay backward onto the floor with a groan.
“Don’t think about him.” Avery didn’t even look up from her letters.
“Easy enough for you to say.” I groaned again.
“Eden’s distracting me from finding a bingo,” she said to Nolan as he came back into the room.
“That’s too bad, sweetheart, but I think the game’s over now.”
I raised up onto my forearms to give him a questioning look. Sure, Avery was ahead, but we could catch up. I could, anyway.
“That was Brett at the door,” Nolan clarified. “He’s on his way up.”
Avery actually put down her tiles and looked over at me. “Oh my God!”
My heart sped up instantly, as if I’d been the one to go answer the buzzer and had sprinted the whole time, but I wasn’t going to get ahead of myself. “He’s here for me?”
“I think that since he specifically said, ‘Hey, Nolan, is Edie in tonight?’ it’s safe to say that yes, he’s here for you.”
“Oh my God.” I jumped up, immediately regretting that I’d changed into sleeper shorts and my Feminist AF T-shirt instead of staying in my work clothes. Worse, I hadn’t done anything to my face yet, and considering how much I’d been crying from laughter, there was a good chance my makeup was all over the place.
“You look great,” Avery said, reading my expression. “Just…” She lifted the edge of her tank and used it to dab at something on my cheek, flashing her tits as she did.
“Stop. I’m not two. And we don’t need to see your boobs.”
“I don’t know. They’re good boobs.” She continued, of course, and I hoped whatever she’d done had actually helped, because by the time she was finished and her tits were put away, there was a knock on the door.
I grabbed her hands and laced them in mine. “Oh my God.”
“He’s here.”
“He’s here!”
“This is good,” she said, coaching me through my nerves. “This is really good. You’re good. You deserve good things.”
“Okay. Okay.” Deep breaths.
“I guess I’ll get that since you two seem otherwise occupied.” Nolan was already halfway to the door. “Come on in. Don’t mind the women. They seem to be having a...a...thing. Can I pour you some wine? We’re drinking one of Eden’s favs so of course it’s overly sweet.”
“I’m good, thanks.”
I dropped Avery’s hands and turned toward his voice. Oh, damn. He was good. Looking good, anyway. Still wearing his suit pants from the office, but he’d ditched the jacket and the tie. And his shirt was unbuttoned at the collar. And I wanted to peel it down and place a kiss on his skin right there.
“Avery,” Brett said, nodding a greeting to my sister.
Then his eyes met mine, and the earth moved. “Hi.”
He gave me a smile, the kind that felt secret and only mine. “Could we, uh, talk somewhere?”
I moved around the coffee table, coming closer to where he stood. “My bedroom? Or I could change?”
“Your room is fine.”
“Okay. Lead the way.” I needed the extra seconds walking behind him so I could wipe my sweaty hands on my shorts and exchange one more glance with Avery, who was doing the finger in the hole gesture when I looked over, and my whole face went red just as Brett looked back at me to make sure I was following.
“All good. I’m fine,” I said, like an idiot. “Right behind you.”
He knew where my room was, of course, having been there a dozen times before, but after several weeks being estranged, his presence in my space felt magnified. And when I closed the door behind us, I felt oddly like a teenager sneaking around behind Avery’s back.
He seemed to feel the same. “Are you going to get in trouble for having a boy in your room with the door closed?”
I laughed way too jubilantly, nervous energy getting the best of me. “Yeah, they’re…” I didn’t have a snappy comeback. “I don’t know what’s with them. So you, uh, wanted to...hi.”
He chuckled. “Hi.” His expression fell serious. “Why don’t you sit down?”
My stomach tightened. People sat down for bad news, not good news. The last thing I wanted to do was sit down.
But not sitting wasn’t going to change whatever he had to say, and defying him wasn’t the way to winning him over, so I perched myself on the edge of the bed. “Do you want to sit, too?”
The room wasn’t that big and didn’t have a lot of furniture, but my vanity had a bench that he could pull over. Or he could sit on the bed with me, which might have been distracting, but I needn’t have worried because he shook his head. “No, I think I need to stand.”
“Sure, sure.” I wrapped my fingers in the bottom of my shirt, hoping that he wouldn’t notice I was wringing my hands if they were hidden.
“So. Earlier.” He cleared his throat, and every second that he spent not talking felt like an eternity. “I should have said this then, probably. Honestly, I was a bit taken aback.”
“I’m sorry. I was trying not to invade your space, but I—”
“Don’t.” He held a commanding hand toward me. “Don’t apologize. Please.”
“Okay.” My skin was on fire, yet goosebumps were forming all over my arms and legs. Obviously, my body was as confused as my head. If he didn’t want an apology, then I hadn’t fucked up, right? “So...why are you here?”
“Well, I have more to say, if you let me.”
“Sor—” I cut myself off before the apology fully formed. Then I did the zipping mouth gesture and hid the key under my butt before I sat on my hands and tried not to rock back and forth.
“I should have said that the last ten years—me brooding on the sidelines—”
“You weren’t really brooding.”
He gave me a sharp look, and I immediately slammed my mouth shut. But seriously—how did people stay quiet when they were this nervous?
“That isn’t all on you. I could have tried to move things forward a hundred times. I could have brought it up. And I never did.”
My mouth opened before I could think about it. This time I shut it before any words escaped, but I was uncontrollably antsy.
Brett’s gaze drifted to my bouncing leg and back to my face. “It probably isn’t fair to say that you never picked me when I didn’t let you know I was a choice.”
It was hopeless. I had to ask. “Are you still a choice?”
I was suddenly pushed back onto the bed, his palm over my mouth as he hovered over me. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?”
“Not when it comes to you,” I said against his palm, and wondered if he could tell I was grinning. Then I put my hands on his hips and pulled them toward mine because he was pinning me down, and that seemed to mean he wanted me.
The stiff baton poking at my thigh confirmed that his body did, at least.
And still he was attempting conversation. He pried one hand off his hip, and then the other, and pulled them over my head. “Don’t you want to know why I didn’t try to make a move?”
I spread my legs and lifted my pelvis so that I could feel the brush of his cock where I wanted it. “If this is the answer, then yes. Definitely.”
“That might be the answer to a follow-up question, if you let me say what I need to say.”
I stopped wriggling and gave him my full attention. “Why didn’t you make a move on me, Brett?” The truth was I wanted to know, even though I was slightly afraid of the answer. Afraid to find out I’d hurt him in some other way.
He let go of one of my arms and brought his hand down to brush reverently across my cheek. “The only thing I thought would be worse than not having you was losing you.”
Emotion swelled through me, and I had to catch my breath. The wall he kept erected between us—that protective barricade of glass—was gone, and for the first time in the ten years since I’d known him, he was completely fragile and soul-bared.
It was frightening being that naked. Being that exposed.
And I was right there with him.
“Then don’t lose me,” I whispered.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” His mouth grazed against mine, and I wet my lips for the kiss I knew was coming, but just as it started, I interrupted.
“This is the answer this time, right?” Once again, I bucked against his cock.
“Yes,” he laughed. A frustrated laugh that ended as soon as his mouth met mine.
The kiss began tenderly. Each shift of his lips against mine spoke something new, in a language bodies knew intuitively. Soon, the kiss grew frantic, and our hands raced to tug off clothes—his shirt, then mine. My shorts and panties came off together. His pants were a struggle since he didn’t want to let go of me while he stripped. He managed to get them down to his shoes before he let out a frustrated growl and stood up to finish the job.
I giggled, then the sound of Avery and Nolan whispering in the hall made me freeze and listen.
“We’re just going to bed now,” Nolan called out, and I almost started giggling again. “Good night.”
I could hear them shuffle away from us down the hall, then a door shut.
“They think we’re having sex,” I whispered.
“We are having sex.” He was naked now. And glorious. And pushing me farther back on the bed so he could settle his whole body over me.
“Not yet, we aren’t,” I said, but then he pushed inside of me, bare and thick and probing. “Ah,” I shivered. “There you are.”
“Here I am.” He pulled out just a bit before thrusting all the way into me.
My eyes closed briefly while I adjusted to his size. When I opened them again, his were there, waiting for me. Did I really deserve this? Deserve him? “Winning you was supposed to take a long time.”
“Are you calling me easy?”
I laughed but then he reached his hand down to my clit, and I shuddered with pleasure. “I’m saying I don’t feel like I earned this.”
“You never had to earn me. You just had to figure out you were mine.”
“I’m yours.” I wrapped my legs around his waist. “You’re mine too.”
“I’m yours.”
My lip quivered. He soothed it with his tongue, followed by a greedy kiss. When he tried to pull away to get a condom, I stopped him.
“Don’t get it. Be like this with me.” Risky, maybe, but he knew I was on birth control, and it hadn’t even been two months since Sebastian Industrial sponsored the last corporation-wide, bi-annual STD testing, and we’d both gotten straight As. (Aka, we were clean.)
He didn’t argue, and the brisk tempo he assumed said he was ready to not be talking at all, so we kissed instead, and made other sounds. Involuntary gasps and moans of pleasure as his cock moved in and out of me and my pussy clenched around him.
Eventually, the words demanded to be said, not because he didn’t already understand, but because they wouldn’t remain inside. “I love you.”
He slowed, as though he wanted to fully process my claim. I helped him out and said it again.
Then it was both of us, a chorus of I love yous chasing after each other while we raced to climax.
“Does this mean you’re my boyfriend now?” I asked when we’d collapsed onto our backs, our breathing still fast. “Except no boy has a cock that big. You’re definitely a man.” I reached to stroke him. He was still semi-hard, and from experience, I knew it wouldn’t take much before he was ready for another round.
Good thing it was the weekend.
“Mm,” he moaned. “It means you’ll be spending a lot more nights at my place.”
“It’s like I should move in.”
He pulled me closer, rolling me to my side. “You really should.”
It was a given now. I’d move in. We’d be official. We’d probably get married. I could picture the ring I’d tell him to get.
...I was getting ahead of myself.
“I’m still going to fight for you,” I said, kissing a trail down his chest. I could feel his heartbeat under my mouth, and I kissed that spot again. “Every day. So you’ll always believe that you’re the only man for me.”
“As long as I get to fight for you, too.”
“I guess I can live with that.” If fighting for me meant more of his monster cock, I was more than ready for him to bring it on.
I totally deserved it.