If it was awful...
But Romy knew it wouldn’t be awful.
The tightness of her skin told her that. Her racing heart, too. The way the smell of his pine-tree-scented soap made her want to lick him.
Those were the feelings lovers had, not friends.
Lovers.
Love.
Don’t call it love. Call it anything except love. Friendship, camaraderie, affection. A window of opportunity. A cheaper, faster, more efficient method of sperm insertion. Release valve. Direct deposit. Plan B. Sex, just sex.
If she kept all those descriptions in mind, surely she could do this. She could blur the line, she would blur the line, and she’d survive the end.
“All right, yes,” she breathed, both brave and terrified.
He pulled her in even more tightly. “Then I suggest we go upstairs immediately because it’s not your forehead I want to suck right now, and if we don’t move, I’m afraid I’ll drag you down to the floor and have my evil way with you right here.”
She huffed out a desperate laugh. “Evil is fine by me.”
He rubbed his cheek across the top of her head, and she felt him sigh even though she didn’t hear it. “Careful what you say, Romy.”
ROMY MADE IT to the entrance hall—and stopped.
“The stairs on the left.” Matt, behind her.
She hesitated. “Do you really think we can be friends at the end of this?” she asked.
“That’s the idea.”
“It didn’t work out that way for Veronica and Rafael. They haven’t spoken to each other since graduation.”
“Those two weren’t friends to start with, Romy. They were a Molotov cocktail from the night we all met, hell-bent on being in love. But you and I are a whole different ball game. We’ve got our plan straight.”
“Plan B,” she said. What a time to realize that for once in her life she didn’t really have a plan—not for the mechanics of what would happen next. She was far from having an encyclopedic knowledge of the Kama Sutra—whereas Matt, whose sexual prowess was the stuff of legend, probably had his own annotated version.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said in a small voice.
Pause. “Do you want to stop?”
“No.” Same tiny voice.
“Because if you’ve changed your mind, this would be a good time to tell me.”
“I haven’t changed my mind,” she said, and made it to the base of the stairs before stopping again. Oh God, what if she couldn’t even get him to have an orgasm and he ended up just as sexually frustrated at the end as he’d been at the beginning?
Matt’s hands landed on her hips. She expected him to urge her to go up, but instead he pulled her back against him as though they had all the time in the world. She swallowed a mouthful of saliva as she felt his erection prodding against her back. He’d said he had a very big cock and he wasn’t kidding. If its size really was illustrative of Matt being ten years past his sexual peak, he must have had the penis of a freaking giant at eighteen.
“Romy?” he said, with a tingle-inducing nudge at her ear. “Be certain you want this, because there’ll come a point when I’ll stop asking and you’ll have to tell me if something’s bothering you.”
“There’s no problem,” she lied—because she wasn’t going to ask him if he’d ever been bored enough to fall asleep halfway through sex—and headed up the stairs, only to stop again at the top.
Matt must have reached that point where he stopped asking, because all he said was, “To the left, fourth door, the open one.”
Inhale, step, exhale, step, inhale, step, exhale.
Just the feel of his hands on her hips was making her lust for him in a way she’d never thought possible. What would she do for him when his hands were on her naked flesh? Anything, she suspected. Anything at all. Everything he asked.
Now breathe. Because they’d reached the bedroom. The final frontier.
She stepped over the threshold. Dark floorboards, white walls, a night view of San Francisco Bay in the distance, through curtains opened wide. There was an inner door she assumed led through to a bathroom. Aside from a built-in wardrobe, the only furniture was a gigantic bed and one armchair—a scarcity that amplified the room’s size.
“It’s big,” she said.
“So all the girls say.”
And somehow, that made her laugh as she turned to face him, despite her anxiety. “Are you obsessed with size?”
“Only with what I can do with it.”
“Don’t overpromise, Matthew.”
“Not an overpromise,” he said huskily, and ran his hand over her hair—a sensual stroke that made her breath catch in her throat. “Are you nervous, Romy?”
“No,” she said—but a tic jumped to life at the side of her mouth and gave the lie to that. “Not...really.”
Matt pressed his thumb over the tic. “We’ll take it as slowly as we need to. I’m not going to do anything I think you won’t like, I promise. Stop me anytime. I won’t be angry. I won’t argue. I won’t pressure you. We’ll just find another way.”
She gestured to the bed, so nervous she could barely stand. “Why don’t you tell me what position you want me in so we can get started?”
“Romy! We’re not even naked yet.”
“I’d rather have it worked out in my head before we take our clothes off so we don’t get...you know...distracted.”
“Getting...you know...distracted is kind of the aim. So why don’t we just play it by ear?”
“By ear?” She reached up and touched her left earlobe, the one he’d nudged with his nose, feeling a residual tingle. “No, that won’t work.”
He looked at her for a long, quiet moment. “If you don’t want to touch me, Romy, there’s no point to this.”
“I do want to. But I...I just know I could prepare myself better if I knew where we were headed.”
“You’re overthinking it.”
“But what if I suck?”
“Then that’ll be perfect.”
“Oh!” She laughed. “You know what I mean.”
He sighed. “I want you, Romy. I want you, however this unfolds. I’m telling you that straight. And you know how important you are to me outside this room, which means I have to know this is what you really want. So tell me. Tell me you want me.”
“I already t-told you.”
“Tell me again. Make me believe it. Or this stops now.”
Her pulse leaped—fear, excitement. “I want you.”
“Tell me you want me to not only make you pregnant, but to make you come.”
Another leap. “Oh God.”
“Tell me.”
“Fine.