“At the game, you mean. The sex was stellar.”
She doesn’t answer, but her practiced silence tickles me, and I can’t help but push, just one more time: “Does being back here, at the start of it all, have you feeling nostalgic?” I ask her over my shoulder before bending to grab the remote.
“No,” she says, and then shoves my shoulder so I know even if she means it, she’s not trying to be an asshole.
Even if I am, just a little.
We sit down next to each other—definitely not touching—waiting for the game to load. The crinkle of her straw wrapper crackles through the silence and when I look at her, she cheekily punctures the top and slides the straw into the side of her mouth, saying “I love fruit punch” around it.
Fucking fuck. I am so screwed.
The best and worst part about being near her is that I know she’s not trying to flirt. She isn’t a cocktease. She’s just honestly that cute.
I look away from her mouth and back to the television. “I’m usually an apple juice guy, but I thought it was time to mix it up.”
We sign in, choosing our Titans, and drop down into the map without more discussion. When I’m not obsessing about kissing her, being with her is surprisingly effortless. We can just hang, talk or not talk—it’s easy either way. It’s like being with a guy friend I just really want to bang.
Wait, no.
I fumble with the controller, get shot, and the game resets.
London turns and looks at me with her bright smile. “You okay there, Sparky? I thought you had been practicing?”
“Just had a mental tangent that left me momentarily incapacitated.”
She shakes her head, looking back at the screen. “I don’t think I want to know.”
We drop in again, and this time the action continues for ten, twenty, thirty minutes. Our elbows collide as we work the controllers, and London shoves Ritz crackers into her mouth the same way I do—in handfuls, in the few seconds we have between bouts of action. I’m definitely better than the last time we played together, and it makes for a perfect afternoon. The idea of falling in love with a girl who plays video games, eats crackers like Cookie Monster, surfs, and bartends feels in some ways like the perfect male fantasy, but it’s also a little shadowed because I know there is more to London than this. This life—games, bars, girls—for me is just a phase; I know with some distance that it isn’t going to define this entire decade, or even the rest of this year. I’m going to leave for law school in a matter of months, and it will require me to have true responsibility away from my family. But what does London even want out of life?
I’m pulled out of the preposterous train of thought when she does something really stupid—hits the jump control instead of fire—and is killed.
“Damnit!” she yells, smacking the couch cushion. “Mother-trucking truck!”
I turn to her, smiling in delight. “Did I just kick your ass?”
“I think that’s an exaggeration.” She looks at her watch. “We were playing for—”
I interrupt her, leaning in. “You were totally thinking about my penis just then, weren’t you?”
She throws her empty juice box at me and her eyes widen when I catch it before it hits me and chuck it right at her, hitting her squarely in the chest.
London lunges for me, shoving me back on the couch before lifting a pillow and smacking me in the face with it. Her bubbly laughter hits me in an emotional space, somewhere high, where chest meets throat, and I’m unprepared for her assault, cough-laughing through a flurry of her fingers digging down, tickling me roughly.
I buck up beneath her, growing more aware of what we’re doing—wrestling—and what it means—motherfucking foreplay, ma’am—and I advance toward her on the couch, swatting at her hands, darting my fingers between her arms to tickle her ribs, and, with my other hand, grab a pillow from behind her and use it to hit her right in the face.
She shoves—hard—sending me off the couch and onto the floor, where she dives onto me, pinning me, wrestling in earnest. We’re laughing and yelling and one of us knocks the sleeve of Ritz crackers to the floor and it crunches under her shoulder when I roll over to hover above her, getting the upper hand and finding the place on her waist that, when prodded with a long finger, makes her wail in hysterics.
She smacks my hand when my tickles get too close to her boob, and scream-calls me a pervert so I bend down and blow an enormous raspberry right into where her neck meets her shoulder.
London shrieks even louder, and holy fuck, I am deaf. I clamp a hand over my ear, working to fight off her relentlessly tickling hands with only my left hand as defense.
We seem to realize at the same time that I’m over her, lying completely on top of her and situated between her legs and, in unison, we both freeze. I’d climb off her if she didn’t have two tight fistfuls of my shirt in her hands and if her eyes weren’t currently traveling the slow path from my stomach to my face.
It feels like I count to a hundred in the time it takes for either of us to breathe.
Finally, I feel the slide of her legs up my hips. Feel the give of her body beneath mine, and am suddenly, intensely aware of that soft, warm place between her legs. Her eyes have gone wide and I watch as they make their way back down my face, stopping at my mouth.
“Logan?”
She sucks her lower lip into her mouth to keep from smiling.
I press forward, not much but just enough to feel more, the gentle heat of her. Her eyes grow heavy, mouth goes slack, and I watch a pink blush creep up her chest. In the span of one of her tight breaths I go from half hard to desperate for her.
“Luke.”
“Fuck,” I growl, bending and pressing my mouth to her neck as I start to rock against her.
I nearly come at the sound she makes, that soft, restrained cry, and I’m fucking her through my clothes, through hers, sucking and licking her skin, just insane to be with her like this.
My need for her ratchets up, climbing from this heated infatuation to something more, something that traps my lungs, threatens to break me.
“I missed this,” I say into her skin. “Fuck, I missed this. The feel of you . . .”
Three rough grinds in and her hands are on my chest, sliding down and over my pecs to the hem of my shirt, where she makes fists in the cotton again.
She could pull it up and off me in a single tug.
I can feel her reaching the fork in the road, and then she hesitates, going still under me. “Luke. Wait. Wait.”
I stop moving, closing my eyes where my face is pressed into her neck.
No. Please.
She pushes at my hips with her fists still around my shirt, pushing me away from her. More than the desperate tension in my body, my heart feels like it might tie itself into a knot.
“We can’t,” she says through a tight exhale. “We shouldn’t.”
I push up off her, sitting back on my heels and watching her scramble to her feet.
“Sorry,” I say. I fucking mean it, too. I know she’s not into me that way, and I keep pushing.
“No, I’m sorry,” she says. “It was me.”
Her hand comes out, gesturing for mine, and I wave it away, pushing myself to stand.
“Ugh, this is awkward,” I say in a quiet growl.
Laughing, she says, “No . . .” in a way that totally means yes.
I don’t really know what to do with myself now. I look to the side, feeling her discomfort and drowning in it.