My Favorite Half-Night Stand(10)

“It’s cool. It’s small,” I say. “I mean, sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be sorry.”

The sex is front and center now. Millie stares directly at me and it’s a lot, having her undivided attention like this; it always is. Only now instead of simply enjoying it, my mind toggles between the calming surety of her expression and the memory of her eyes falling closed in relief when she moved on top of me and found that buckling moment of pleasure.

“You sure you’re okay today?” I ask.

She nods decisively. “One hundred percent. You?”

“Same.” I wonder whether she’s also having these disruptive flashes of recollection. I don’t exactly know how to extricate us from this topic, but letting the words “It was really good, though” tumble out of my mouth is probably not the way to do it.

She could make this awkward—and it’s absolutely what I expect her to do because making us uncomfortable is Millie’s favorite pastime. But she’s feeling generous, apparently. “Of course it was good. We’re both amazing in bed.” When I laugh, she adds, “But . . . we’re still on the same page, right? About . . . us being friends?”

“We’re on the same page.”

And we are. For as good as last night was, I don’t want to be with Millie that way again. At least, I don’t think I do. I definitely shouldn’t. We’re too good at being smart-ass friends to be very good tender lovers. I can’t really imagine Millie like that, anyway.

She reaches across, squeezing my hand. “You’re my best friend, Reid.”

“You’re going to make me cry.”

With a laugh, she shoves my hand away. “But seriously, I can’t do the dating-a-colleague thing again. What a disaster he was.”

“To be fair,” I say, grateful for this easy entrance back into normal, “his name is Dustin.”

She quickly swallows a sip of coffee to protest this. “There are some who might say Reid is an especially pretentious name.”

With a hand to my chest, I feign insult. “No one says that.”

Millie reaches out, curling her hand around the forearm of a passing student. “Sorry. Quick question. Is ‘Reid’ a douchey name?”

The guy doesn’t even hesitate or bother to look at me. “Totally.”

Millie releases him with a smug smile and brings her mug to her lips.

I mirror her movement with my own mug. “He just said yes because he was intimidated by the obvious, hot professor randomly grabbing him.”

“Be my guest,” she says, spreading a generous hand. “Ask someone yourself.”

“Excuse me,” I say, stopping a female student with a raised finger. “Would you say the name ‘Reid’ is pretentious?”

She’s very pretty—soft brown skin, a halo of curly hair—and when our eyes meet, she flushes. “Is that your name?”

“It’s immaterial,” I say, softening it with what Millie calls my Flirty Eyes.

“I mean,” the girl says, “I don’t think it’s a pretentious name.”

I thank her and she wanders off when I turn back to Millie. “See?”

“Her answer sounded like a nice way of saying, ‘The consensus is that name is douchey.’ ”

I laugh. “Her answer was a clear no.”

“If it was a no, it’s because she wants to fuck you.”

The word fuck coming out of her mouth does strange things to my pulse. She says it all the time, but just last night she gasped it into my ear, right before telling me she was close.

Again.

I try to make my voice sound as wounded as possible. “I had no idea you think my name is douchey.”

Millie is not falling for it. She grins over the top of my mug. “I don’t, really.”

We fall into an easy silence and I try not to think about Sex Millie too much or study Friend Millie too closely. She’s completely rebounded. Millie really is as constitutionally solid as she seems.

And holy shit, she’s just as fun in bed as I would have guessed.

“So,” she says out of the quiet, “in the interest of returning to Best Friendship, we should probably find other dates for commencement.”

“Looks like it.”





chapter three


        millie


Hey, Taylor,” I say. “This is Millie. Millie Morris? I’m not sure if you remember me or not—we saw Girl on the Train together at the dollar theater last summer? You kept insisting that the new wife couldn’t be the killer because she was a mother, and I argued that forty-two percent of children killed by a parent are killed by the mother, alone or with an accomplice. Um, anyway, I have this thing in June and I was wondering if you’d like to be my date. It’s black tie and I have to RSVP, so if you could give me a call as soon as possible. And haha, I promise not to talk about mothers murdering their own children—”

The line disconnects. That’s weird, I think, but I pencil in a check mark on the MAYBE column next to Taylor Baldwin’s name anyway.

“A ‘maybe’?”

I jump at the sound of Reid’s voice so close to my ear. Heat radiates off his skin as he tries to read over my shoulder. His hair is damp where it brushes my cheek; he’s freshly showered and standing so close that even during lunchtime rush in the campus café I can smell the lemongrass soap he always keeps in his gym bag. It’s been three days since our sexcapade, and I swear my blood pressure still hasn’t completely recovered.