“Like… meet/cute. Two guys bump into each other at a library and help pick up each other’s books.”
“Then have sex in the public bathroom?”
Sebastian shrugged. “Well, itisporn—we have to skip the first dates and meeting the parents.”
“What else?” I finished undressing and reached for my pajamas, left on the bed from this morning.
“Amnesia. But that would be tricky with porn, because it’s all about the characters falling in love again. Still, I think it’d be possible.”
“You’ve thought about this more than once, haven’t you?” Dressed in flannel pants and a T-shirt, I turned around.
Sebastian’s cheeks, perpetually covered in a few days of whisker growth because the man just couldn’t be bothered with any personal grooming beyond the bare minimum, were pink from a blush. It was cute. It was always cute, the way he’d get a little embarrassed or self-conscious, but then steamroll himself by forcing the conversation. We’d been together for two years and he still got hung up on sex-talk, or the recent disclosure of his enjoyment of romance books. But Sebastian always tried, always pushed forward. And in that respect, he would always be more courageous than me, whether he believed that or not.
“‘Only one bed’ is my favorite,” Sebastian said instead of answering my question.
“That’s a trope?”
“Yeah. Two characters forced to share a bed due to extenuating circumstances. We’re actually in the perfect setup for that trope right now.”
“Being married seems like a compelling reason to share a bed,” I told him, moving close, setting my hands on his hips, and tugging Sebastian forward.
He rolled his eyes. “No.”
“No?”
“That’s not how the trope works. We’re supposed to be forced to share because—for example—there’s a blizzard that’s trapped us in an isolated location and there’s one bed and it’s cold, so neither of us can be stubborn and sleep on the floor.”
“So we’re not supposed to be married in this situation?” I asked, for clarification.
“Right. Even better if, on the surface, we don’t like each other.” Sebastian patted my chest. “Like when we first met.”
“You make it sound a lot worse than it was.”
“You threatened to arrest me for being a smartass.”
“I stand by that.”
Sebastian squirmed out of my hold, started down the stairs, and said, “And it can’t be a big bed.”
I glanced at our bed in question, then followed him. “It’s a comfortable bed, though.”
“But the enjoyment of the trope is its forced proximity,” Sebastian answered. He reached the bottom and turned to watch me coming down the remaining steps. “Having the characters share an intimate spacebeforethey’re ultimately together.”
“I didn’t realize romance had so many rules.”
“It’s not all that different from understanding character archetypes in mysteries,” he concluded before sitting on the couch.
I joined him as the same animated meteorologist exclaimed that Manhattan was going to get an estimated fifteen to twenty inches of snow by tomorrow morning, with Brooklyn expecting—
The power snapped off suddenly, plunging the apartment into a near-pitch blackness.
“Well, crap,” Sebastian stated.
I shifted on the cushion, pushed aside the curtain behind the couch, and took a look through the fogged-up window. “The entire street is out.”
Sebastian’s phone screen turned on—a sudden beacon in the darkness. He grumbled while dialing down the brightness level, then tapped out what looked like a text message. “I reported the outage to—”
I threw one of the couch pillows at his head.
