“Think about what it means vis-à-vis your question about whether or not I can bring myself to do it.”
“What it means...” she breathed out, fairly sure she could orgasm just from what he was doing here and now.
“It means yes I can, and when I do it’s going to be amazing. I’ll make it amazing for you, Romy. The moment you say yes.”
Same man she’d been friends with for ten years, same man who’d hugged her, tousled her hair, dragged her onto his lap, forced her earrings through her ill-pierced left earlobe. But this was different. He was different. And she had a premonition that he would always be different, from this moment.
The fear of losing him if she said the “yes” he was asking for was real, because women in whom Matt had a sexual interest were never around for long. The only women who lasted in his life were those who dated his friends—like Veronica, whom he treated like a sister even after her split from Rafael. And wasn’t that at least one reason Romy had transferred her starry eyes from Matt to Teague in their freshman year? Not only because Teague really was perfect but because Matt had brought him to her, thereby marking her place in Matt’s life while she got her head around consigning Matt to the friend zone?
How long would she last if she stepped out of that zone? Matt had said friendship at the end was possible with women he’d had sex with but that most didn’t want it. Why would she be any different from all those other women?
The baby, of course. The baby made her different. But the baby made her vulnerable, too, because it was precious not only for its own sake but because it would be a part of Matt that would always belong to her, a part she was allowed to love. She so wanted to believe Matt would come to love the baby, which would be like loving a part of her, even if he didn’t call it love.
Impossible to risk all that for one night...and yet just as impossible not to after wanting him for so long. Oh, how she wished she could blur the line between sex and friendship instead of stepping over it, keeping everything in its proper place.
If the sex was awful, she probably could. They’d laughingly accept that they’d given it the old college try and there was no harm done whether she was pregnant—experiment concluded successfully—or not—back to Plan A.
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
