My Favorite Half-Night Stand(8)

“Wow.” I pull back, looking down at her. “Never mind. If that’s off the table then I gotta go.”

She pinches my nipple, laughing at my high-pitched shriek.

“I was kidding.” I punctuate my point by pushing her underwear down her hips.

“I know.” Her mouth slides over my shoulder. “But I wasn’t.”

“I’m not really into it, either.”

“Really?” she says, and I love the genuine way she searches my eyes. I’ve never been this close to her before, and she’s certainly never looked at me like this—with the combined tenderness of best friend and lover. “I assumed you were into everything.”

“When did you assume this?”

Her hand comes around me, stroking slowly, and my mind goes all wavy. “You know. Just . . . random Reid thoughts.”

“While we were at Gio’s last week, you looked at me and thought, ‘Huh. I bet he likes anal.’ ”

“I think it was when you were eating a club sandwich at lunch Wednesday,” she jokes.

I laugh, and it fuses with a groan when she leans forward to drag her teeth along my neck. “I swear, Ed needs to never wear that shirt again.”

“The white one?” she asks. “Chest hair extravaganza?”

“It’s just so thin . . .”

I bend to kiss her throat, her shoulder, and then I forget what I was saying because she’s pulling me down onto the bed, and her nipple is in my mouth and she’s stroking me and I probably couldn’t remember my own name if asked.

“Is this weird?” I murmur into her skin. “Why are we talking about the guys while I’m doing this?”

“I like talking,” she says, and digs her free hand into my hair. “I like talking to you while—”

Her voice falls away when I suck.

I half expect it to be like this the entire night—easy conversation like we’ve always had, but through kisses, touches, even through the sex itself. But when her hand finds a certain rhythm, it shifts something over inside me, something more instinct than conscious thought. I make my way down her body, she later makes her way down mine, and when she finally comes back up over me, on top of me, she looks directly into my eyes as she sinks down and I wonder during the first gasping burst of sensation why we haven’t been doing this every day for the past two years.



I leave Millie’s around two, when she’s fast asleep and starfished across ninety percent of the mattress. I kiss her cheek when I go; it feels weird to leave after only half a night together—but I have to think it would be even weirder to wake up with your best friend naked in your bed.

I didn’t have much to drink, but the next morning I feel hungover anyway. It’s a cocktail of the light-headed relief that comes on the heels of a night of great sex . . . mixed with the nauseating anxiety over a fight with a friend.

Not that Millie and I are fighting. I mean, I can’t even imagine Millie angry. She wasn’t that drunk, but if there’s anything that could piss her off, it’d be the perception that I took advantage of her last night.

Chris’s office is in the building next to mine, and just inside the entrance closest to the campus coffee kiosk. This proximity means that he’s lucky enough to be able to slip out and back in for coffee without running into fifteen colleagues in the hall, but it also means that people are constantly walking past his office, on their way to or from the kiosk, interrupting his workday.

Like I do now, stepping through the open door and into his office. “Hey.”

For a chemistry professor, Chris keeps his office impressively tidy. There are no teetering stacks of dusty lab notebooks or piles of outdated textbooks being used as makeshift tables. He has a small plant on his desk, a jar of pencils, a few molecular models here and there, but—much like the man himself—Chris’s office is much more put-together than any of the rest of us seem to manage.

He looks up, pulling his glasses off and setting them down near his keyboard. “Hey. I assume you guys got home okay last night?”

I expected him to ask, but the way the question comes out so immediately feels almost accusatory—almost knowing. The answer bursts out of me, a touch hysterically: “Of course we did.”

He stares at me a second longer before he reaches for the paper takeaway cup I’ve put down on his desk. “Cool. Thanks for the coffee.”

Out of all of us, Chris is the most intuitive, and—because he and I first met in graduate school nearly a decade ago—he also knows me better than anyone else. If even a flicker of last night passes through my thoughts, he’ll see it. But maybe that’s exactly why I’m here. Millie and I drove a mallet into our easy rhythm, creating a fault line that will either lie dormant or break everything into pieces. I need to know I can still act normal . . . where normal means I pretend the fault line is not directly underfoot.

“You good?” Chris asks.

“Oh, yeah.” I stare with intense focus at his bookshelves, specifically studying a worn copy of Wade’s Organic Chemistry, and finally, the moment snaps free. “Just wanted to come by and say thanks again for hosting last night.”

“Of course, man. I’m really happy for you.”

My gaze swings higher up on his bookshelf, to some molecular models, some awards on small pedestals, and . . . “Nice cock.”