Tilting his head, he comes at me again, and deeper, tasting my sounds.
I can’t get enough. I feel like a worshipper wrapped around a golden god.
Josh’s hands have undressed me with a fantastic combination of impatience and skill, and his tongue slides over mine, his sounds of pleasure and need echoing in my mouth and brain. I’m reminded how not sober we are when we collapse gracelessly onto the floor; it’s clear we’re doing this here, right now, and won’t even bother to move out of the hallway. My last bit of clothing is pulled free and then Josh climbs between my legs, reaching down to feel, eyes closed as he holds his breath and slides in deep.
But I can’t close my eyes. I can’t stop looking at him no matter how much his form swims over me—even in the dark, even drunk, I can see clearly enough: the solid mass of muscle and bone, the perfect angles of his shoulders, his jaw, the way his mouth is open and soft, letting out these quiet, deep grunts with each shift forward, each drag back.
He leans down, sucking a nipple into his mouth and then tugging with his teeth. I pull in a sharp breath at the twist of pleasure and pain, and feel more than see the way he smiles against my skin.
In the morning, I’m sure I’ll try to remember every little bit of it, because it feels frantic and wild here on the floor, with my hands on that perfect ass and my legs wrapped around him, pulling him in, silently telling him, Deeper. I’ll want to confirm internally that I really did have drunk sex with my best friend.
In the morning, I’ll tell myself it’s okay that I scream into his ear when my orgasm hits me with the momentum of a train. I’ll tell myself it’s fine that I bite his shoulder when I surprise us both and melt beneath him again. But right now, I only want to think about how warm he is, how good he feels moving inside me. I want to focus on how his hair slips between my fingers and how he babbles about soft and skin, how the words fucking and wet sound both filthy and reverent in my ear. I focus on how he kisses my neck and grows rigid all over when he tells me he thinks he’s coming.
So hard, Haze. Oh, God, I’m coming so hard.
I know I’m drunk, and I know it’s Josh Im—the blueprint for Perfect, who should never want Hazel Bradford—but when it’s done, and he goes still over me, breathing heavily into my neck, I choose to melt into that sublime blur of pleasure, the way I used to think it might feel to live in a cloud.
TWELVE
* * *
HAZEL
I must have fallen asleep beneath Josh on the new hardwood floors of my hallway, because I don’t remember getting into bed. The only reminder that last night happened is the fact that I’m naked, sore, and a little sticky. Josh is gone.
But Josh being Josh, there’s a little note on my pillow that says, simply,
I’ll call you later this morning
—J.
My stomach takes an anxious leap. On the one hand, last night was pretty great—I think?—so I don’t imagine he’ll be mad that we both got laid. On the other hand, sex always changes things, and the last thing I want is for anything to change between us. I might have enjoyed the sex more than I’ll admit to him, but I’m Crazy Hazie and he’s Awesome Josh (hangover prevents me from finding something that rhymes with Josh) and nothing—I mean nothing—scares me more than the idea of us dating and him deciding that I’m too wild, too weird, too chaotic. Too much.
Rolling over, I attempt to avoid all of this by falling back asleep, but my cotton mouth rears its head and I’m aware I’ll need to hit the ibuprofen sooner rather than later. As soon as I stand, I feel the sickening lurch of my bad drinking decisions waking up. And my phone rings.
It’s 7:17, and Josh is calling.
I drop back down to the bed. “Hazel’s Den of Sin,” I answer in a dry rasp.
“Hey, Haze.”
My throat tightens at the deep vibration of his voice, at the memory of his words last night:
You feel as soft as you look.
Ah, fuck. You’re wet. It’s good. It’s so good . . .
Oh, God, I’m coming so hard.
“Hey . . . you.”
Josh clears his throat, and I’m realizing we’ve seen each other naked. Maybe he’s thinking the same thing, because all he can manage is “So.”
I laugh, and it sounds like a screech. “So.”
“I hope . . . you’re okay?”
“Yeah.” I look down at my bare legs. There’s a bruise on my knee, and my tailbone is a little sore from the unrelenting reality of being fucked against the wood floor, but other than that, I’m intact. “I’m good.”
“And we’re okay?”
Nodding, I rush to reassure him. “I’m your best friend, Hazel. Of course. We agreed just once. We’re perfect.”
I understand the relief in his slow exhale. “Good. Good.” He pauses and I hear him inhale like he’s going to speak, but then the quiet stretches into five, ten, fifteen throbbing seconds. I like to think I’m more confident than the average person, but his silence makes tiny bubbles of insecurity rise to the surface. I know it wasn’t the best idea, but I don’t want him to like, regret it, either.
Regret me.
“The thing is,” he begins, “we didn’t use a condom.”
Well, that explains why I’m so sticky. My stomach tilts. “Oh. No, it’s okay. I’m covered.”
“You’re on the pill?”
This feels so weird. This isn’t exactly how I imagined this conversation going. Then again, when did I actually imagine having this conversation with Josh? “Yeah. The pill.”
“So, I guess I also need to ask whether you’ve been tested recently?”
Oh.
“I don’t mean—” he starts, and I can practically hear him wincing.
“Yeah,” I cut in, “no, it makes sense. I haven’t been with anyone else in over a year. But I’ve been tested since then.” Defensiveness crawls hotly up my neck. “What about you? I mean, after the whole Tabby and Darby thing . . .”
“Sorry,” he says immediately. “Of course. I should have said that first. I’m good.”
A hush falls over the line and I feel oddly melancholy. I’m not sure why. Josh and I are going to be fine. We’re bulletproof. Last night was fun, and look—he’s calling me at 7:17 the morning after. He didn’t avoid me for days following our drunken hookup. Everything is fine.
“Haze,” he says quietly, “I’m sorry I left.”
“No, I totally get it. I’m sure it was weird to wake up naked and on top of me in the hall.”
“I didn’t actually fall asleep. I carried you to bed.”
And now I have the image of me, a bag of drunken bones, snoring asleep immediately after sex and needing to be hauled naked and sweaty and sticky into bed. Awesome. “Well, I’m sure that was a great reminder of my undatability.”
He doesn’t say anything to this.
In fact, his silence feels brutal.
For once I’m able to stop myself from saying the words I shouldn’t, words that appear at the front of my mind as if projected across a screen: Am I delusional or did it feel a little like making love? Even I can tell that would tip us into the weird(er) zone, and who am I to know what making love feels like anyway? The longest relationship I’ve had was six stupid months.
Finally, he speaks. “My ass is pretty sore.”
An unexpected cackle tears out of me. “I think I remember grabbing it a lot. Your ass is pretty great. You probably have claw marks in your cheeks.”
“Your boobs are pretty great, too.”
“Emily told you that ages ago. See, you should listen to your sister.”
He pauses, and I suspect we’re both thinking of how Emily would react to this information. It could go either way, and adds more turbulence to my uneasy stomach.
“It’s probably a good thing I don’t remember every detail,” he says quietly.
This is undoubtedly the better opinion to have, but I’m actually wishing it all eventually comes back to me. It will likely never happen again, a
nd I want to be able to remember it forever.
“Yeah, probably,” I say.
THIRTEEN
* * *
JOSH
My head is a mess.
I slide my phone onto my nightstand and collapse back on the bed. Hazel sounds fine today. Which is good.
I should be glad that she’s the same Hazel she was when she woke up yesterday.
But I’m not the same Josh.
FOURTEEN
* * *
HAZEL
I haven’t seen Josh in three days, but we’ve been texting on and off like before, about nothing in particular. Today, I told him how Winnie barked and it sounded like she said “Gimme!” He replied that his chicken salad sandwich had too much mayo. I told him I found a perfect new bikini to wear on our Diarrhea Cruise next spring. He told me not to mention diarrhea after he just ate too much mayo.
All in all, I’d say things are as close to normal as they’re going to get.
The question is whether we’re still doing the whole double-dating thing after we did the whole drunk-sex thing. For obvious reasons, it’s different now, but I tell myself it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Neither of us is really in it for a love connection, but doing the dating game together has been super fun and a good distraction from work, and bills, and having to be a grown-up all the time. I don’t always trust my judgment when it comes to dudes, but Josh would never intentionally set me up with trash (dates six and seven shall be struck from the record). I also like being around him, and when the dates are lame, we have each other.
Apparently I’m not the only one who needs a status check. When we meet at Emily and Dave’s for dinner, the first thing they ask is how the dating game is going. Josh’s immediate reaction is to look at me to answer because, ha! That’s a great question!
“Well,” I say, taking a deep breath and floundering a little. I try to stall for time by slipping off my shoes and placing them with laser-like precision next to Josh’s by the door, but in my head, the image of him moving purposefully over me seems to block out any hope of coherent thought. I intend to tell them only that most of the dates have been flops and see what they suggest about moving on, but in true Hazel form, my mouth decides to take over and what comes out is “Josh and I ended up having sex with each other after we bolted from date seven.”
Silence fills the small entryway like fog and I turn to Josh to save me. His eyes are wide, like he’s watching a plane go down and is silently praying it will pull back up at the last minute. We both know it won’t.
“So, that happened!” I do a spastic little dance. “It was really fun.”
I squeeze my eyes closed because Oh, God, why did I say that?
Josh clears his throat.
“We agreed it’s just a one-time thing. We agreed,” I repeat, holding up my hand in a gesture that’s meant to invoke understanding, or something.
Josh doesn’t come to my rescue, so I’m left free to make this more awkward for everyone. Which I do. “But I mean, for two people where one has been inside of the other, we’re good, right? We’re fine. I think we’re ready to dive back into making plans for the next date?”
I nod, looking for consensus around me. Emily stares at us, wide-eyed. “You guys . . . what?”
Sometime during my breathless ramble Dave has bent at the waist, unable to contain his laughter.
Emily turns to stare at her brother, some sort of silent sibling communication happening. As always, Josh is mildly expressionless, and with a tiny swallow he seems to refocus, and nods at me with a slow-growing smile. “Yeah, we’re good. Nothing’s changed, thank God.”
Emily says something to Josh in Korean and he replies to her, quietly. This is not the moment to be thinking of how hot he sounds.
I meet Dave’s eyes, because neither of us has a clue what they’ve just said but we can’t pretend to think it isn’t about the sex his brother-in-law had with his wife’s best friend.
Awkward!
Dave claps his hands, and the moment snaps loose. Josh puts his hand to my lower back, silently telling me to lead the way into the dining room, where Dave has put his latest culinary masterpiece out on the table.
Josh takes the seat to my left, and Emily and Dave sit across from us. I watch as Dave pours wine into his wife’s glass, and my eyes widen as he fills it nearly to the brim. Josh and I stare on as she lifts it and takes down half before breathing again.
I glance at Josh, who glances at me at the same time. We share a This is going well! look, and his transitions into a Well, what did you expect? look. I can’t argue.
Dave hands me the bread. Josh takes some chicken onto his plate.
The silence is homicidal.
Emily finishes her wine and Dave pours her more. For such a small thing, Emily can really pack it away.
“Winnie has worms,” I tell the table, and spread some butter on my bread. “Took her to the vet earlier. I was so worried I was going to have to treat it with some ointment in her butt, but—nope—just a pill.”
I take a sip of wine and grin at them. Josh puts his fork down and cups his forehead. But in a few beats they all break into laughter, and Emily looks over at me with my favorite kind of fondness.
“She doesn’t really have worms. I was just kidding.”
I am nothing if not a decent icebreaker.
After this, conversation eventually flows. Dave vents about the rain gutters he has to clean again this weekend. Emily tells us about a kid in her class who didn’t make it to the bathroom in time and pooped his pants, and how that poor kid is going to be known as Pooper Peter until he’s eighty. I talk about the project we’re working on where students choose various careers to write a small report about, and how one of my boys informed the class that his dad (a plastic surgeon) touched boobs for a living. Josh tells us about his new patient, a seventy-year-old woman seeing him pre–hip replacement who has propositioned him no fewer than ten times in the past week.
Even given how the evening started, dinner is fine, mostly.
And as soon as I have the thought—in the car, as Josh drives me home—I turn to him and say it: “Dinner was mostly fine. Mostly.”
If he gets the Aliens joke, I can’t tell. He stares straight forward and gives me a tiny half smile aimed at the windshield.
I sigh, and poke my finger into the dimple in his right cheek. “Do we need to talk about it?”
He swallows, tightening his hands on the steering wheel. “Talk about what?”
I nod, dropping my hand and saying a quiet “Okay” out the passenger-side window. I can play that game, too. Sex? What sex?
“You mean about us having sex?” he says. “Or the fact that you told my sister and brother-in-law, aka your best friend and your boss?”
Ugh. Stomach flip-flops. Angst. I peek at him again. “It just came out, I’m sorry.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t actually care that they know.”
“I just blurted it. I’m broken.”
“They’d probably see it on our faces anyway,” he reassures me. And although we talked about it over the phone, it’s so good to talk about it here, too. Face-to-face. Nothing between us. Hazel and Josh.
“Sometimes your lack of filter kills me,” he says. “It’s not even like you lack a filter; you lack a funnel.”
“But seriously.” I turn in my seat to face him, pulling my leg under me. “I understand what it was, and there’s no reason it has to change anything. In some ways, it makes sense. You’re my best friend, and attractive. Of course I drunkenly mauled you.”
His smile slips a little. “Is that how you remember it?”
“I mean, you participated,” I concede, “but I practically begged you to show me your goods.”
This makes him laugh and I can tell he fought it for a few seconds. “Because I saw you peeing. You’re unreal.”
I sink down into my seat. “I’ll never get over that.”
“You vomited hot dog on television,” h
e says, sparing me a tiny glance at a red light, “but me seeing you pee is the mortification that’s going to stick with you forever?”
“I’m also still mortified about the hot dog thing.” I shudder at the visceral memory that winds through me. “I’m thrilled you remember that.”
He reaches over, taking my hand. “We’re good, Haze. I promise.”
With a little squeeze, he lets go, and my hand feels oddly cold.
··········
Mom reaches down, not even trying to be subtle when she fishes a tiny brown cookie out of her apron pocket and hands it to Winnie. Lord, the woman doesn’t even have a dog of her own and she’s stashing dog treats in her gardening apron. “Okay, kid.” She rests her hands on her hips. “Out with it.”
I stand up, brushing dirt off my butt and adjusting my gloves. “Out with what?”
Her eyes narrow and she cups my chin, leaving a smudge of dirt there as she tilts my face to the sun. “You’re off today.”
I hold my breath, feeling my face begin to heat in her hand. Her eyes relax, expression softening. “Out with it, honey.”
“The other night, Josh and I . . .” I shrug.
She bites her lips before saying, “I knew it.”
“Oh, come on. You did not know it. I didn’t even know it.”
“Mother’s intuition.”
“I think that’s a myth.”
She cackles like I’m a moron. “Was it at least fun?”
“I think so? It was mostly drunk, but what I remember was pretty great, yeah.”
Mom hums, and pulls a small weed up where she sees it by her shoe.
I groan. I thought telling her would make me feel better, but I still feel all twisty inside. “And things are already different. We decided they wouldn’t be, but—”
“You ‘decided’? Oh, kids.” She laughs as she picks up the small spade and a pack of cabbage starts, and tilts her chin for me to follow her to the next flower bed. “Honey, that’s not something you can decide. Sex changes things.”