Eggo accepts a slobbery kiss from Trekkie and takes my bag and the dog’s bed from me. “You okay?”
I nod. Then shake my head. “I feel like I don’t know whether I should cry or not. You know?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he wraps his enormous arms around me and just holds me as though he can hug this weird numbness away.
I lose track of how long we’re standing like that in the middle of his kitchen.
“Doesn’t Megan’s mum live in Kent?” I ask eventually.
He still doesn’t let go. “Yeah, Tunbridge Wells.” He pauses. Figures it out. “Was Megan at your house?”
“Not quite. She was parked around the corner from my house, waiting for me to leave.” Thank god.
“Sounds about right.” Eggo pushes a gap between us. “You know . . . we should really work on this ‘how to be good co-captains’ thing.”
I’m not sure if he’s changing the subject for his benefit or mine, but either way I’m grateful for the distraction.
“Agree. We should figure out a way for us to work . . . in harmony with each other.”
Eggo smirks, evidently pleased with his ability to create a smokescreen to cover the mess that is my love life.
But I’m certain I can go one better than him. “Actually, earlier, when I was in your shower . . . I douched.”
Bingo.
The effects are instantaneous. He barely suppresses an animalistic grunt and spins me around, crowding his front against my back and burying his face into the side of my neck, in those curls he’s so obsessed with. “You want me to fuck you right now, right here?”
“Yes.” I loosen my belt buckle, and his hands slip down the seat of my jeans, cupping my ass cheeks. “Fuck me until I forget about her.”
“As your best mate, it’s my duty to do anything I can to help you get over your ex. And I plan to take my duties very,veryseriously.” His hand slides around to the front and skims along my thickening cock. “Shit, let me go grab a condom.”
My dog, who’s essentially made up of nothing but the world’s boniest, kickiest, scrankiest limbs, has decided he doesn’t want to sleep on his eighty-pound luxury hypoallergenic dog bed in the kitchen. Nor does he want that same special bed moved to the floor in Eggo’s room.
No, he wants to sleep on top of Eggo’s king-sized mattress between Eggo and me like a pointy, farty crossbar between goal posts.
Georgia always hated it when I let the dog sleep on the bed with us, but my Cornish friend, despite taking several direct hits to the gonads, has yet to voice his objections.
He—Eggo not Trekkie—is lying on his side and facing me. I’m a back sleeper, but I can’t help turning my head to the left so I can see his brow, cheek, and beard silhouetted against the moonlight pouring in through the window.
So far, for all our back and forth and promises of developing a plan for this co-captaincy gig, all we’ve agreed upon is that kitchen counters are the optimum height for getting railed against and that in the future, it’s probably best to move the fruit bowl out of firing range before ejaculating. Thank goodness apples are wipe-clean.
“They’re gonna ask us about becoming skippers tomorrow,” Eggo says. I see his cheek bunching as he talks. “They’re not supposed to know about it, and we’re not supposed to say anything, but they’re going to ask. And they’re going to have questions prepared about our clashing styles and how we’re gonna make them fit together. And we’ll be expected to come up with vague and throwaway yet ultraspecific answers that they can drip feed in their promos and stuff.”
I puff out a long sigh. “I hate media day.”
“Same, but what should we tell them?”
“We could just tell them the truth?” I say it like a question. The weirdest thing about this entire conversation is that Eggo’s the one worrying and overthinking for a change, not me. Usually he’s more horizontal than . . . something very horizontal.
He props himself up on his elbow. The entire bed wobbles as his weight shifts. “That we’re sweeping each other’s chimneys?”
I bark out a laugh. “I mean, that’s certainly one way to make the whole day about us. And a very effective and public method of breaking up with Megan.”
He groans and lies back down.
“We should just explain that we’ve never been in this position before, and we’re both aware of the personality clashes, but that the team and the game mean the world to us, and we’re going toput everything we have into developing a unified leadership,” I say.
“Have you been practising that?”
