Page 58 of The Best Shot

Yasmine:

Hale: I’ll do better for the committee.

Hale: also it’s kind of weird that you were all there.

Ava: It was a group thing. It was meant to take the pressure off of a one on one.

Hale: If you say so

Ava: Fine.

In between the setups, there was my apartment.

Low lights. CeeCee asleep on the couch, the TV murmuring some late-night infomercial about miracle blenders. The hum of the refrigerator.

His hands braced on either side of me at the kitchen counter, low enough that if CeeCee stirred, we’d have half a second to look innocent.

His mouth at my neck, not kissing. Just breathing, hot against my skin, the scrape of stubble sending shivers straight down my spine.

We always let it go further, just never to a bed. As if that left us some plausible deniability about what this was.

There was laughter sometimes, the quiet sort you swallowed because the walls were thin. Like the time he whispered something filthy about rope and blindfolds. I bit my lip to keep from gasping, nails dragging faint lines down his forearm.

Other times, there was urgency, the kind that left no room for thinking.

Him lifting me against the kitchen wall. My thighs wrapping around his waist. The slow, deep rock of him inside me, too controlled to be fair, until I was whispering please against his mouth and he finally gave in, one hand covering my lips to muffle the sounds I couldn’t help making.

And there was the quiet after. Him still half-tangled with me, sweat cooling, his heartbeat steady under my palm.

By the second week, I knew his knock without looking through the peephole. Noticed that and didn’t examine why.

Ava: HALE.

Annie: oh no

Tabby: what happened

Hale: I swear to God I’m not doing this on purpose.

Ava: She was a pediatrician. A literal saint. Coached youth soccer on weekends.

Tabby: you said you wanted someone nurturing???

Hale: I do.

Ava: Then why did she leave early.

Hale: She asked what I do for fun and I said “read.”

Ava: AND??

Hale: Then she asked what I read.

Tabby: …

Hale: It escalated.

I choked on my water reading the thread.