by Desiree Holt
“You take things too seriously, you know, El.”
“I take things like my best friend’s feelings seriously, yeah,” she replied, but after an extra second of tight squeezing, he was all himself again. Shrugging it off, grinning like a lunatic, calling her a worrying Wendy.
Then he was gone.
* * * *
She couldn’t think how best to couch it. Jimmy’s gone—probably because he realised he really likes you, and doesn’t know how to deal with it? Jimmy’s gone, because he was totally taking advantage of our horniness, to get into contact with your sweet, sweet ass?
Neither seemed the right side of soothing, or close enough to the truth. And a combination of both things just seemed simultaneously too perverted and too heartbreaking.
So she sat on the couch and mindlessly watched soap operas, waiting for Evan to stumble out of bed. Evan, who’d she done that to. Evan, who apparently made her crazy just by looking at her with those lust-fogged, I’ll-do-anything-you-want-me-to eyes.
They were just sleepy, when he emerged from the bedroom. And his hair was sticking up at all angles. And he looked as adorable as always, so much so that it took a lot not to tell him to get back in there.
Luckily, he was on hand to help.
“Where’s Jimmy?” he said, and she had weird flashes of telling little kids that their dog had gone to live on a farm. That sure put a dampener on things.
“He felt that…he should go and stay at my apartment, for a while.”
And it was weird, but she really hadn’t expected his face to fall so fast. It practically went through the floor and his body language shifted with it. Evan had never been very good at hiding his feelings—the whole amazing love thing aside—but this was pretty extreme even by his standards.
She resisted the urge to get up and hug him, and tell him they were all still friends. It might look like the opposite, if she insisted too hard. Plus, there was the whole I think I might be in love with you thing she wanted to get out. Calling all of them best buds forever might not be the best way to go about sharing true feelings.
“He hasn’t gone for long. He just—”
“No—it’s okay. I get it.”
The monotone his voice usually existed in intensified—to the point where it made her heart drop. Other people got high voiced or shouty or up and down when they were upset.
Evan hit on one note and stuck with it, hard.
She couldn’t help but think that perhaps he was going to miss Jimmy a lot more than she had assumed. Like, a lot more. That kind of a lot more. After all, he had stroked him off and when they’d all been sleeping together after stuffing their faces with Chinese food, he’d drifted off with his arm around Jimmy’s waist.
Maybe she’d misread the whole situation, and really—
“You and Jimmy want to be alone. That’s cool. I mean—he’s a great guy. You should probably be with him,” he said.
She damned Evan, and his terrifyingly long pauses. It was the fault of the long pause and all it had a let her imagine, that made her jump up as soon as he’d finished talking.
“Oh you idiot! No no no—God. Trust you to get it all wrong!”
He looked startled by the sudden shouting.
“Not that I’ve got any room to talk—I got it all wrong, too. Probably several times.”
“Oh no but I—”
“Evan, stop. Stop. Whoa. He’s not gone to my apartment so that I can go there too and have some kind of love rendezvous. Okay?”
His face scrunched up at the words love rendezvous. Relief seemed to be a long time coming to him, however, so she plunged ahead into whatever this was going to be.
“He’s gone so that…well. So that we can be alone. I think he kind of brought us together through the medium of threesomes—that is, if you want to be together.”
Medium of threesomes definitely sounded like something Jimmy would do. And it was almost true. It was true enough.
And whatever it was—it made Evan’s face light up like a pinball machine. It made her feel an answering warmth like nothing else.
“You want to be with me? Just me?” he asked.
“Of course I want to be with you! And not to knock the awesome ménage thing we had going on this weekend, but yeah. I do just want you, really. I think I always have. I definitely wish you’d told me earlier about the whole doing stuff with my underwear thing.”
At which he covered his face with one hand. It couldn’t disguise the smile behind it, however.
“Oh,” he said. “The underwear.”
In that way he had. That way of being all adorably embarrassed while kind of laughing at himself. It made her think of all the other things she knew about him, all the other reactions that seemed so perfectly familiar.
It made saying things easy.
“I love you, you know.”
When he peeped out from between two fingers, and asked—
“Seriously?”
It just seemed like the sweetest thing in the world. Everything was more than easy, with him.
“Seriously.”
He dropped the hand from his face.
“God, you don’t know how many times I’ve wanted to say that to you. And it’s been the best, but I’ve been worried all weekend that you would think…that you would…I don’t know. That I wasn’t real about you. That I didn’t…mean stuff.”
She stopped his breathless rambling with arms around his middle. Her face tilted up to his, ready to be kissed.
“You seem pretty real to me, now,” she said as he leant in, slow, slow. Then finally, his mouth on hers and words murmured close enough to taste.
“I love you too, Ellie. I really love you too.”
About the Author
Charlotte Stein has been published in numerous erotic and erotic romance anthologies, and has written her own longer length works for both Black Lace books and Total-E-Bound. She has been writing for more than half her life, but only recently worked up the courage to submit something to actual publishers. Thankfully, the story ended well.
Email: [email protected]
Charlotte loves to hear from readers. You can find her contact information, website and author biography at http://www.total-e-bound.com.
Also by Charlotte Stein
Waiting in Vain
Sultry Solstice: Tigerlily
Desire Through Time: Past Pleasures
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