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“These pants were hiding a fewPlayboysin one of your drawers.” I held up my right hand like I was in a court room. “But I won’t tell. I didn’t even know they still printed physical copies anymore.”
“Hey, when you’re thirteen and your friend’s older brother offers you pictures of naked ladies, you don’t turn it down, no matter the format.” He offered me a plate with a slice of my pizza on it. “Your cardboard, madam.”
When I bit into it, he paused with his slice halfway to his mouth, a piece of pepperoni sliding off with a glob of cheese.
“What?” I asked mid-chew, and he shook his head, bemused.
There was something about his enigmatic smile, the same one he’d worn the first night we met when he’d insinuated he had caught me changing from my shorts to a skirt in Frank’s driveway, that told me had another secret.
“Nothing.” He bit into his own animal-product junk. “How was your day?”
Maybe it was the comfortable way he spoke about Bare Necessities and laughed about Alex, but the effortlessness of our conversation scared me. An everyday, home from work, kiss on the cheek kind of conversation. It was scary because it was so easy. Ease that allowed minutes to slip into hours, days into weeks, years into decades, and suddenly—as Jason waxed poetic about the science behind the eco-friendly renovations to the Empire State Building, and how he was trying to use those same principles on new developments—I could see it all.
Dinners after work.
Quick kisses over coffee in the morning.
Texts about items we needed from the grocery store.
The future.
“You okay?” he asked after a while, wiping off his fingers on a napkin, almost his entire pizza devoured. I had barely gotten more than one piece down before I gave up, a slightly woozy feeling in my belly like I’d drunk too much.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine. I was…wondering if you brought dessert with you too.”
To answer, he hopped over to the gym bag he’d packed and pulled out a box of condoms.
“First of all, those are made with casein, and second of all, it’s really presumptuous of you to think I’d let you stay over.”
“Is it, though?” He closed the gap between us. “Technically, this is my home too.” He linked his arms around my middle, inching his mouth closer to mine. “And in that case, I don’t need your permission. You’re only babysitting this little sardine can, after all.”
“Good point,” I said into a kiss.
“I don’t know what casein is.”
“Those condoms aren’t vegan. Casein is a milk protein that the latex is—”
He shushed me with another kiss, his tongue teasing into my mouth. “We don’t have to use them if you don’t want to. I have a lot of ideas about what else we can do.”
My body practically hummed in anticipation, and he backed away two inches, raising a challenging eyebrow. “First one upstairs gets the first orgasm.”
I pushed off his chest and bounded out of the kitchen. Jason’s laughter reverberated off the walls as he chased after me. I had lots of ideas too.
CHAPTERTWENTY-THREE
Jason
The next few days were a blur of sex, Gemma’s homemade blueberry-and-banana pancakes, my favorite superhero movies, and more sex. We woke up Sunday morning in my old bedroom. A few posters still clung to the gray-painted walls, along with one framed photo of me in a cap and gown next to Frank.
I yawned and rolled onto my back, blinking awake in Gemma’s direction. She stretched like a cat, languid and soft, and I ran my hand along her stomach, saying, “Morning.”
Refusing to open her eyes, she draped one arm over my torso. “I couldn’t sleep last night. You were squirming all over the place.”
“Really? Sorry. Must’ve been my dreams. Have you been awake long?”
“No.” This time, she crooked her neck back to look at me, her bangs falling in front of her eyes. I opened my mouth to let her know how pretty she was in the morning, but she cut me off, asking, “What were you dreaming about?”
“My parents.”
