“Sounds good, Dallas.” He bends, reaching up to cup my face and kisses me, slow and warm. I can feel his cock stir against me again, already.
But for once, he doesn’t press. He takes a step back, bending to pull on his boxers, and then walks me to the door. He doesn’t say anything else as I walk out, down the steps, along the sidewalk to my car, but I feel his eyes on me the entire way.
“Still fun,” he shouts from behind me. I turn to see him leaning against the doorframe, practically naked. The porch light overhead throws shadows across his body, accentuating the width of his shoulders, the planes of his stomach, the definition of his hips. His boxers hang so low I can see the suggestion of hair, just above his waistband. Lucky neighbors.
“What was?” I ask.
I can see his smile from here when he answers. “You.”
Chapter SIX
Luke
I’M ELBOWS-DEEP IN a legal brief I can barely understand when my phone buzzes on the table at my elbow.
Beeeeeeeeeers, the text from Dylan reads.
I look up at the clock. Shit, how did it get to be six already? Where?
New place, on Island and 10th.
I groan—I fucking hate going downtown during the week.
Anticipating this, Dylan adds, Most of the team is coming. Jess broke up with Cody. We’re helping him drown.
I blink a few times, staring in shock at my phone. My former water polo teammate, Cody, has been with his girlfriend, Jess, since high school. In the best of moods, Cody will drink until he’s crawling. I can’t imagine how tonight will go down.
Still, weeknight or not, I can’t say no. Cody, Dylan, Andrew, Daniel, and I have been tight since freshman year when the seniors on the team locked the five of us on the pool deck for an entire December weekend in nothing but our Speedos, with a vending machine full of food as our nourishment, though no money. You don’t get through something like that, and go on to win two national championships without sticking together.
Be there by eight, I reply, putting down my phone and packing up my desk.
* * *
THE GUYS HAVE taken over two tables as close to the dance floor as one can get and reasonably remain seated. Not five feet from where Daniel has done a complete one-eighty in his seat is a group of girls dancing suggestively, pretending they don’t notice the six-foot-eight water polo player turned fitness instructor staring at them.
“Sorry I’m late,” I say in greeting, pulling out a chair and sitting down. I’ve never been to this club—it’s new but the décor wants to fool you into thinking it’s been here since the seventies. Looking to Cody, I ask, “You good?”
He puts his empty beer glass down next to another one. “No. But don’t feel sorry for me. I’ve been a dick to her lately. I think she might be doing this to scare me straight.”
I feel my brows lift. “Well, okay then.” I can’t tell if he’s being truly honest with himself, or if he’s in complete denial. Even if he’s wrong, and Jess is actually done, I wouldn’t blame him for wanting to stay in a hopeful place a little longer. He’s been with her for nearly six years.
Six years . . . it’s such a huge portion of our lives, and still, it’s shorter than the decade I spent feeling like I belonged to Mia. We grew up together in nearly every way possible. From eleven to nineteen she was mine.
The first time I was with someone else it felt like a distraction. Two weeks after we’d broken up, and I didn’t want to think too much about how I felt. I hadn’t needed to dig deep to understand why I was constantly nauseous and wanted to sleep half the time: I was fucking heartbroken.
But then I got drunk, and kissed Ali Stirling. She took off her shirt, then mine. One foot in front of the other: I got hard. That night, I fucked her three times in her aunt’s condo in Pacific Beach. Turns out, sex was still fun.
Until the next morning when I visited Mia at her dorm and broke down. We weren’t even technically together anymore but there I was, confessing, because that’s what we did. All of the air left the room the second the words “I slept with Ali last night” came out of my mouth.
Mia had stuttered out a quiet “Wow,” and we both felt it end, like the crack of a gunshot. We were sitting on her bed and had gone completely still, like a photo of us ripped in half straight down the middle. We’d agreed to break up, but I knew neither of us had felt it yet. Until that moment we didn’t really even know what broken up looked like. No one had ever touched me besides Mia, and suddenly that wasn’t true anymore. I wasn’t the guy who had one love. I wasn’t the Luke half of the one-word phrase, Luke-and-Mia. I was the guy with an ex-girlfriend. I was the guy who had sex with other people now. I moved on from our first love with a hard shove.
I shiver, blinking back into the present, asking, “Remind me why we came all the way downtown for after-work drinks when none of us work downtown?”
“I do,” Cody says.
Silence rings out at the table before Andrew finally can’t take it anymore. “Cody, you work part-time at Starbucks.”