Wrong Bed, Right Roommate (Accidental Love)

by Rebecca Brooks

  Two minutes later, he was standing in the middle of the empty street with his backpack, a duffel bag, no answer from Jessie, and no idea what to do.

  He tried to think of what someone who definitely, totally had his shit together would do. Someone who could successfully meet production requirements and help a small business grow. Probably not say “fuck it” and camp out on the sidewalk. Probably not go back to Brandon’s, either. Just the thought of that couch made his back hurt.

  He buzzed a few other units in the building, in case the intercom worked for them. He was surprised when the outer door actually buzzed, letting him in. Convenient but disconcerting. Who had ordered Chinese food or a Tinder date at midnight and was expecting to have their doorbell rung? What if he was an ax murderer?

  He pushed open the door and climbed the steps. If anyone stopped him, he’d explain that he was moving in but had gotten locked out.

  Unless it was a hot, single woman who’d been expecting a delivery or a booty call. In which case, all bets were off.

  “Don’t even go there,” he muttered to himself. That was what the old Shawn would do—find someone new to take up with and not worry about anything except having a good time. Until the good times turned sour, but who cared? It was easy to move on.

  But he wasn’t going to let himself get distracted by all that anymore. He was here to show he could do this. Be a real brewer—not just the guy who mopped floors, poured kegs, and hauled grain bags sometimes. If Thunder did well under his watch, he wouldn’t just have a career under his belt. He’d be able to save up some money, find a decent roommate, get an actual life. It was time to start feeling like he was doing something right for a change.

  At least Talia had left a key for the subletter under the welcome mat—because of course his sister had a welcome mat and a key already waiting. He didn’t have to bang down the door trying to get Jessie to wake up. This wasn’t like crashing with a bunch of guys who thought Lucky Charms constituted a balanced meal as long as they added a splash of OJ, since the milk had already gone bad. He needed to not be an ass on day one.

  He was as quiet as possible when he pushed open the door. He slid off his boots and left them next to a pair of plain black flats, along with his duffel bag. He’d worry about his stuff later. It was late, and he needed to get to Thunder early tomorrow to get the lay of the land before his official shift started. Right now, all he wanted to do was sleep.

  Quietly he tiptoed through the apartment, moonlight showing him the way. He recognized Talia’s crazy zebra pillows and the thrift store polka-dot blanket she’d had for years, all neatly organized on the couch. Jessie must be the clean freak—his sister probably hadn’t folded a blanket in her life.

  All the more reason for him to lay low, focus on the brewery, and not get in the way.

  At the end of the darkened hallway, he paused. There were four doors clustered together. One was open—the bathroom. One was narrower than the others—a closet, he guessed, based on the size. One was shut firmly. And the other was slightly ajar.

  The closed door had to be Jessie’s, with her sleeping soundly inside. The open one was Talia’s, inviting him in.

  He nudged it open wider with his toe, pulling off his shirt and dropping it on the floor as he entered. It was dark in there with the blinds closed, and his eyes weren’t used to the change. He couldn’t tell where the bed was.

  All he could see was a large shape to the side that he guessed was Talia’s dresser, and across from it, her desk. As long as he kept a clear line to where her bed must have been up against the wall, he could collapse into it and sleep for hours without bothering to turn on a light.

  He unzipped his jeans and yanked off his pants, leaving them on the floor as well. This was so much better than Brandon’s shitty couch. Quiet, darkness, a door that closed, an actual bed, and no need to worry about leaving his stuff all over the floor.

  By the time he’d stripped down to his boxers, he didn’t even want to brush his teeth. Tomorrow. He’d deal with everything then. He pulled back the covers, ready to collapse into bed.

  All of a sudden, somebody screamed.

  He fell onto something that was warm and wriggling wildly against him. “Get the fuck away from me!” the voice cried, pushing him off.

  He tumbled to the side, tangled in sheets, heart pounding as he tried to keep from falling off the bed. What the ever-loving fuck?

  He was turning over, trying to keep his boxers up and his sensitive parts protected as a leg kicked at him, when a light came on, blinding him instantly. In bed—in his bed, the bed he’d been about to crawl into—was a very startled, very beautiful, nearly-naked woman.

  She snatched up the sheet to cover the gorgeous curve of her breasts filling out a thin tank top, the straps falling partway off her shoulders. But it was too late, he’d already gotten an eyeful. Thank fucking everything he hadn’t taken off his boxers, or it would be even more obvious what he thought of the view.

  Talia must have had a second roommate she hadn’t mentioned, or else he was in the wrong apartment altogether. Nothing about this woman matched the high school girl in his memory—except for the mane of dark curls. Dark, wild, luscious curls that tumbled over her bare shoulders and that flimsy nothing of her tank top strap, which seemed to make her even more exposed than if she wasn’t wearing anything at all.

  “You must be Jessie,” he finally said, barely able to get the words out.

  She stared like it was taking her a minute to place him, too. He could feel her taking everything in—his bare chest, his boxers, the swirl of tattoos that ran around his left shoulder and tapered out across his pecs. She definitely wouldn’t have seen that ink before, or the three days of sandy stubble on his jaw. Or the pecs, for that matter—he’d been leaner, smaller, in his baseball-playing days.

  But she blinked in recognition, and her eyes widened.

  “It can’t be,” she said, still staring. Then she scrunched up her face like something smelled. “Shawn?”

  Chapter Three

  Jessie cursed. Like, a total fucking curse storm, the kind that would have Talia straight up applauding if Jessie ever told her about it.

  Which, fuck, no, she would never breath a word of this. Because holy fucking shit.

  Her heart was pounding from adrenaline and the split second when she’d imagined a break-in, a murderer, the next sick bastard to have his mug shot posted all over 60 Minutes. She was so not expecting to know the person who was suddenly in her bed.

  And she sure as hell wasn’t expecting it to be Shawn Lassiter.

  In his boxers.

  Staring at her as though he’d never seen a mortified woman scrambling to cover herself with a sheet before.

  Which, granted, he probably hadn’t, since any woman he wound up in bed with was undoubtedly scrambling to take off her clothes, not hoping for a giant sleeping-bag-size parka to wrap herself in forever. She’d need it when she moved to an ice floe in Scandinavia so she never had to risk running into him again.

  This was Shawn. He’d single-handedly torn apart her closest group of friends in high school. “My best friend’s jerk brother,” and “naked in bed together,” belonged nowhere in the same sentence. The same zip code. The same layer of the stratosphere.

  “What are you doing here?” she practically squeaked when she felt like she could form words again—and because he wasn’t doing a very good of explaining himself, lying there in his boxers looking at her. What the hell?

  “I’m so, so sorry,” he said. And then, when she didn’t say anything—since that really didn’t answer her question—he said it again, his eyes wide and staring like she was the intruder.

  “Get out of my bed!” she finally cried when he didn’t move his butt.

  His tight, round, nearly naked butt, which she got a good look at as he scampered out of her bed. Since the room was so small and the other side of the bed was up against the wall by the window, this involved an acrobatic attempt of his to c
limb over her. For a moment that felt like forever, she was pinned underneath him, his arms on either side of her torso, his legs straddling her, his chest so close she could have licked it if she’d wanted to.

  Jesus, where had that thought come from?

  Jessie had never licked anyone in her life. She obviously wasn’t about to start now.

  Then he was off of her in an instant, the heat from his body suddenly gone. But not before his thigh accidentally grazed hers and she felt—

  She couldn’t even say what it felt like. Like something had zinged straight through her, something hard and sharp and hot and jagged but also rich and soft and warm all at once. Talia’s brother had always been an athlete, but Jessie’d had no idea he was this ripped.

  Or tattooed.

  Or covered with such a masculine layer of sandy hair.

  Or—good God—so perfectly filled out in his boxers.

  An article of clothing she’d definitely never given any thought to before. Maybe at one point she’d had a teeny, tiny fantasy about Shawn meeting her under the bleachers after baseball practice, or asking her to the prom even though she was two years younger and he’d barely said more than “Have you seen Talia?” to her in his life.

  But then Ellen lost her virginity to him when they were sophomores and he was a senior. He dumped her like two weeks later…and Steph jumped right into his bed. That Steph did it at the Lassiters’ house, making Ellen convinced Talia knew what was going on, was the popped cherry on a massive drama sundae. Jessie’s stupid crush went up in smoke. He’d never looked twice at her, anyway. His underwear choices were absolutely, positively never on her mind.

  Except for right now, when that blue plaid was right at eye level. If he turned just a little to the side, she was sure she’d catch a peek of what was in there.

  She felt herself flush all the way up her chest and out to her ears. She was not looking at her best friend’s brother’s junk. In her bedroom. In the middle of the night.

  Talia had taken to describing Shawn as a black hole, for the way he sucked girls in. “The Shawn Effect,” she’d called it. It was like some kind of irresistible orbit, and no one could withstand his pull. “Thank God you’re not sleeping over just to try to get closer to him,” Talia had grumbled one night as they stayed up watching movies and drinking hot cocoa after Steph and Ellen had both stopped calling or coming around. “You’re the one real friend I have.”

  Fifteen-year-old Jessie had felt massively guilty for spending even two seconds fantasizing about so much as resting her arms on Shawn’s shoulders at the prom. If Talia knew her BFF was this close to him now, and with barely any clothes on, she’d freak.

  Of course, it wasn’t Jessie’s fault Shawn had walked in on her. But that didn’t explain why her heart was still pounding. Not from surprise—not anymore. But from the line of hair that ran down from his navel and disappeared into his waistband, and the divot of his hipbones where the elastic hugged.

  She put on her most serious voice, the one she used for job interviews, difficult phone calls, and, it turned out, pretending her nipples weren’t peaking into hard, sensitive points under her sheet. No more squealing. No more shock. No more helpless, half-naked flailing while her eyes drank in every inch of that bright, wild ink accentuating the cut of muscles in his arm. She had to remember who she was dealing with, and all the destruction he’d caused.

  “What are you doing here?” she repeated, working to keep her voice steady.

  “I guess you didn’t get our texts.” He ran a hand through his hair. She couldn’t tell if it was calculated, like he knew how delicious he looked when he did it, or if he did it without thinking because it didn’t even take any work for him to look that good. Either way, the result was the same. She had to wrench her eyes away.

  How could he be so calm? She didn’t know whether to be infuriated or envious. If only she could live that way, without worrying all the time about what other people thought or what she was supposed to do or what everyone wanted from her.

  But she wasn’t like Shawn—and that was a good thing. She didn’t do whatever she wanted, without thinking of anyone else. She didn’t lose one job after another, she didn’t move across the country without warning, and she definitely didn’t fuck everything that so much as breathed in her direction.

  She also didn’t show up at people’s apartments in the middle of the night. Let alone their bedrooms. It just wasn’t the kind of problem that usually arose.

  She reached for her phone. “I didn’t hear anything from Talia.”

  But when she lit up the screen, she had twelve messages, plus a whole bunch of missed calls—some from Talia and more from an unknown number she could only guess was Shawn’s.

  “I guess I missed something,” she grumbled as she scrolled through Talia’s messages. Stuff about Kathy, her flight being delayed, talking to her brother… Then there was a break in the time stamp, followed by a wall of text that began with OMG PERFECT NEWS and a zillion exclamation points.

  Her eyes widened. “No,” she said out loud, before she realized the word had escaped.

  She looked up from her phone. This couldn’t be happening. What was Talia thinking?

  “You’re not—” she started.

  “Surprise!” Shawn did some kind of jokey jazz hands thing he must have picked up from a lifetime of watching Talia’s recitals. He tried to laugh off the incredible awkwardness, and she snorted out a giggle. But she didn’t know if she was laughing with him, at him, or at her own crazy-ass situation.

  I’m going to kill you, she wrote to Talia.

  But she deleted it before she hit send.

  No fucking way, she tried again.

  But she deleted that, too.

  Talia was over the ocean and couldn’t respond. Shawn was already here. And how could she explain why she didn’t want to live with him for two and a half months?

  Because he was hot? Because she was shy and uncomfortable and so nervous around him she clammed up like some kid who had no idea what to say?

  She didn’t have another subletter lined up. She had no choice but to take this situation that had literally fallen into her lap. Talia obviously didn’t think it would be a problem.

  “I hope it’s okay with you,” Shawn said, the jazz hands falling to his side.

  “Um,” she faltered.

  “I know this was a little…unexpected.”

  “Talia’s room is the one across the hall.”

  “Yeah, I kind of gathered that.” He grinned, but he still didn’t move.

  “And my first day of work starts early tomorrow. Today, actually,” she added, glancing at her phone. God, could she make this horrible situation even more awkward?

  “Me, too,” he said.

  She almost blurted out, “Seriously?” but caught herself in time. Shawn Lassiter had a job? Whatever, she reminded herself quickly. It wasn’t any of her business what he did.

  There was a beat of silence, as uncomfortable as everything else between them.

  “Well,” he said. “Good night.”

  “Good night,” she murmured as he turned and picked up his shirt, jeans, and socks from the floor on his way out. He left the door opened a crack, the same way he’d found it, but she got up and closed it after him.

  When she was finally alone, she leaned her back against the door and let herself exhale.

  Shawn Lassiter. Her roommate. In his boxers. In her bed. She didn’t know whether to burn her sheets or save them forever.

  But one thing was certain. Something like that could never happen again. Quickly, she changed out of her tank top and shorts and put on an oversize T-shirt and pajama pants. The night was warm, but she’d crank up the fan. Just having the extra clothes on made her feel better.

  In college, Talia had once starred in a modern dance production where everyone was naked and covered in body paint. Things on stage were…jiggly. Her main comment when Jessie, horrified, asked if it wasn’t weird to get up on stage
in front of people like that, was that she was glad her breasts weren’t ginormous, since it kind of hurt to have them bouncing around.

  No, thank you. The pajamas were her fortress—the extra protection she needed knowing that Shawn was right across the hall, so close their beds would have been touching without the flimsy wall in between.

  Just listening to him moving around let her know that there was a boy in there. Someone louder, messier, more there than Kathy would have been.

  But when she looked at her phone, she felt like she had to respond to Talia with something that wasn’t an overblown freak-out over what shouldn’t have been a problem at all. Talia obviously didn’t think it was an issue. There was no way she thought the Shawn Effect would have any impact on her steady, reliable friend.

  Didn’t get your messages until Shawn showed up.

  Technically true.

  He’s here now, though.

  Also true.

  Hope you had a good flight.

  What else was she supposed to say?

  It was just for the summer. It’d be over before she knew it. She’d be working all the time. Talia was right—they’d hardly see each other. The rent would get paid, which was what mattered.

  Then Talia would come home, Shawn would leave, and everything would go back to normal.

  Even if, right now, it felt like huge hands had taken her neat, tidy little life, turned it upside down, and given it a good, hard shake.

  Chapter Four

  Shawn closed the door and collapsed on Talia’s bed. The right bed this time.

  Holy shit. He ran his hands through his hair and tried to stop his heart from racing right out of his chest.

  That was Jessie Santana? It couldn’t be. He would have remembered a face like that. Curves like that. Eyes that looked at him like that.