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I nod a couple of times and run my hands up and down my thighs.
She frowns and sets her plate down. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Fine. I mean, good.”
Winter swallows her bite and gives me a skeptical look. “Everything about your body language says different.”
I stop with the leg bouncing and stretch an arm across the back of the couch, adopting a more relaxed stance.
“You’re making me nervous,” Winter says.
“I’m making myself nervous,” I mutter.
“Are you a serial killer?”
“What?”
“Serial killer.” She makes an ee-ee-ee sound and accompanies it with a stabbing motion. “Are you?”
“No. I set spiders free, and junior year bio when we dissected the fetal pig was not my fave. I don’t think I’d be a great murderer.”
“Okay. So whatever is making you all sketchy and anxious over there can’t be that bad. Just spit it out.”
I drum on the edge of the couch, then wrap my fingers around it so I don’t keep fidgeting. “Well, you know I haven’t been in a relationship with anyone since my senior year of high school.”
“Uh-huh. I haven’t dated anyone since around the same time, so we’re in the same boat. It gets kind of incest-y when the options are limited to local guys. At least in high school we were bussed into Lake Geneva, so it expanded the dating pool.” She picks up her sandwich and takes another bite.
Maybe this isn’t as big a deal as Lovey thought. Although last night was a bit of an eye-opener. “Right. So I’ve spent the past three years of college not taking much seriously, apart from skating and my classes.”
“And?” She makes a go-on motion.
“And I’ve had a bunch of one-night stands.”
Her brows pull together. “Yeah, you already told me this. After the whole Lovey sleepover when we talked about Caroline, I asked if you’d had a relationship since her. You asked if I meant one that lasted more than twenty-four to forty-eight hours, which I took as a no. Logically, that implies that you’ve had some meaningless sexual encounters. There’s no shame in that. You’re an athlete and a dude, basically a walking hormone. And you’re exceptionally proficient with your tongue, your fingers, and your gloriously blinged-out cock. You didn’t learn how to fuck like a champion by watching porn.”
I clear my throat. “Right. Yeah. So that doesn’t bother you?”
“Should it? I mean, I avoided relationships because there was no way I was going to introduce anyone to my dad, and half the time we lived in a trailer with zero privacy. It doesn’t mean I never had sex, though. Sometimes you just need to feel something good.”
“Yeah, exactly.” I nod. I have a feeling Winter’s number of one-night stands or regular hookups or whatever happened for her is a lot different than mine, but I don’t want to keep beating a dead horse, or turn this into a thing when it doesn’t need to be one.
She sets her sandwich down again. “Unless you’re telling me this because you don’t want to be tied down to just one person now that you’re back at college.”
“No. That’s not—I want to be tied down. Not literally.” I think about that a moment. “Or like, maybe literally—depending on the mood and the setting and maybe a safe word. Lavender and Kody use duct tape, but I feel like that would not be great for arm hair.”
Winter half chokes and coughs into her elbow. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Forget I said that. It was supposed to be under the cone.”
She shakes her head. “Oh no. You can’t say things like ‘Lavender and Kody use duct tape’ and expect me not to ask questions. Are you telling me Kodiak Bowman, rookie NHL player for Philly, uses duct tape on his girlfriend? Isn’t she like, tiny?”
“Yeah, she’s tiny.” I shake my head. “But, no. It’s the other way around. Fuck. This is seriously cone. I’m not even supposed to know, but last year I found all this duct tape in his garbage and made some connections, so I’m about ninety-nine-percent sure she taped his arms to the chair. I don’t know where it went from there, and I prefer not to think about it because Lavender is my cousin, but good for them that their kinks match.”
Winter looks a little stunned. “I honestly don’t know what to do with that information. I’m going to go ahead and say right now that I probably won’t be into duct taping you to anything.”
“I kinda like my arm hair where it is. And Lovey once took a wax strip to my leg, which hurt like hell and took weeks for the patch to fill in. I spent half the summer in jeans.”
“What did you do to warrant a wax strip on the leg?”
