by Emma Hart
I couldn’t place the song, but Shelby wasn’t singing, so maybe it was new.
Trust me.
Nobody—and I mean nobody—needed to hear Shelby sing.
“Hello?” I called out, shutting the door behind me and dumping the bag with my dirty clothes. I’d put them in the laundry in the morning.
Hey—look at that. I was becoming an adult, finally.
“Jay, that you?” Shelby yelled from what sounded like her bedroom.
“Yes.” I walked in her direction. “Is there another guy with a key I should know about?”
“Not that I know of.” She appeared in her doorway with her hair tied back, held with a headband, and dark-green, shiny gloop on her face—one that brightened when she saw me. “Hi!”
I swallowed. “Do you know that your face is growing some form of algae?”
She looked at her fingers, two of which had a great big clump of it on, and the other hand that held a small pot with it in. “Oh! Facemask. I guess you’ve never seen me use it.”
“No, and I’m not sure I want to see it.”
“You should try it.” She stuck her fingers out. “Your skin is dry. Let me make you pretty.”
I took a step back. “My skin is fine, thank you, Dr. Pimple Popper.”
“No. It’s dry on your forehead. Come on; it’s not that uncomfortable. I won’t tell anyone.” She advanced toward me.
“Shelby, if you put that shit on my face, so help me, I will smack your ass so hard you won’t be able to sit down.”
She waggled her eyebrows, smiling.
Or she tried to.
Whatever it was on her face, it was setting.
“You’re turning into something resembling an ogre.”
Before I could say another word to her, she darted out, quick as a bullet, and smeared her fingers down my cheek.
She laughed, trying not to move her jaw. “Got you!”
I smeared my fingers through the stuff on my cheek, my face crinkling in disgust. “Why would you do this? I don’t need this shit on my face!”
“It’ll make you pretty!” Her eyes shone with the laughter she wouldn’t let her face express. “Now, come here and let me finish.”
She dove her fingers into the pot and pulled out another clump.
“Nuh-uh. No way. You’re not touching me with that shit!”
“Yes, I am!” She wiggled her fingers and chased me into the kitchen.
I gripped the edge of the island. “Shelby. No!”
“Come onnnnn,” she pleaded. “Just one time. I won’t tell anyone. What use is it living with your best friend if you don’t do anything fun together?”
“We do lots of fun things together.” I moved to the right as she slowly mirrored me. “We watch TV, we watch movies, we cook… You teach me about cleaning, and I pretend to listen.”
She narrowed her eyes for a split second before she winced and put her expression back to normal. The paste was lightening now. “I won’t complain at you for an entire day if you do this with me.”
“Not good enough.” I pointed a finger at her and carried on rounding the island, keeping pace with her. “You won’t even be able to talk soon. Give it up, Shelbs. You’re not putting the girly crap on my face.”
“I am!” She launched herself at me with incredible speed, and once again, she caught me, but this time on the other cheek. “If you’d just—stand—still!”
The first cheek she’d hit was going hard, my skin feeling tight and uncomfortable. “Why does it feel like someone poured cement on my cheek?”
“It’s supposed to feel like that,” she said, her voice now a lot more muffled than before. “If you’d just let me finish—”
I laughed and walked back.
Right into the sofa.
I staggered back onto it, only having the arm of the sofa to steady myself with.
Her eyes glimmered with laughter, and I knew I was cornered.
She’d won.
She was going to put the fucking green gloop on my face.
Expertly balancing the pot in the hand where she already had that crap on her fingers, she used the other, clean hand to grab my shirt and hold me in place. She climbed onto the sofa next to me, on her knees, and pinned me in place with her fist.
“Sit still. I don’t want to get it in your eyes,” she ordered.
“This is the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever made me do. I should just hand in my man-card.” I met her eyes. “Not to mention that I can still get away from you, given that you have the upper-body strength of a newborn giraffe.”
She sniffed. “But you won’t.”
I quirked a brow at her.
Then moved.
Shelby squealed, moving faster than I thought possible once again, hooking one leg around my waist as I moved onto my side. We went down together, me twisting so I was lying on my back, and her straddling me.
Heat flushed through my veins at the feel of her thighs on either side of my waist and her hand flat on my chest.
She was sitting on top of me.
Right on top of my dick that was twitching like a fifteen-year-old’s in front of a Playboy magazine.
I swallowed hard, and she froze, inhaling through a small hole in her now-cemented-in-place lips.
Something flashed in her eyes, something indiscernible, and her throat bobbed with her own swallow.
“Well,” she said through her tight face. “This worked out well.”
I didn’t say a word as she sat up a little straighter, then scooped some of the facemask onto her fingers and smeared it across my forehead. I didn’t say a word as her fucking bare thighs rubbed against my hips when her constant leaning forward and sitting back up made my shirt ride up.
It was taking all my self-control not to toss that goddamn pot at the fucking wall and kiss her. Taking everything I had to control my most base desires not to let my cock get as hard as it should have been right in that moment.
She was moving and wriggling, leaning left and right and back and forth as she smeared this stupid shit all over my face, and I let her because I was afraid that if she stopped, I’d grab her and do something I’d regret in ten minutes.
So I gritted my teeth and let her get on with it.
She didn’t seem to be affected by the fact she was practically sitting right on top of my cock, so I wouldn’t let her know that I was.
The woman was a menace.
If I wasn’t careful, she’d be my downfall.
Maybe she already was, with her tight ass touching my thighs and her soft fingers rubbing green shit into my face and her brown eyes shining with laughter.
“There.” She sat back, pressing herself right against my cock, and examined her handiwork.
My cock twitched, slowly hardening at the extra pressure on it. If she noticed, she didn’t say anything, but her chest did rise and fall more sharply than it had been a second ago.
I think.
I was too busy trying not to get a fucking erection.
“See? That wasn’t so bad, was it?” she said brightly.
Too brightly.
“Shelby,” I ground out.
She slid her way down my body, making my nostrils flare, and got up. “I need to wash my hands. Be right back,” she garbled out, her voice too high and her words all stringing together. “Be right back!” she repeated again, disappearing into the bathroom quicker than I could tell her to wait.
Pushing myself up from the sofa into a sitting position, I adjusted my pants. Thank God they were sweatpants because the second the bathroom door clicked shut a little too loudly, my cock sprang to life like it had a fucking switch on it.
I groaned, shutting my eyes.
With any luck, she hadn’t felt the semi that’d been plaguing me for the last few minutes.
Given the fact she’d been sitting right on it, I doubted that was the case.
Fucking awesome.
CHAPTER NINE – SHELBY
Do Not Think About
Jay Naked
I grabbed the towel to dry my hands and leaned against the door.
My entire body felt like it was on fire, especially my cheeks, and my heart was beating like mad. My exit from the living room had been obviously awkward, and that just made my cheeks burn hotter beneath the facemask.
It’d only been a joke.
I’d only planned on teasing him.
Then he’d fallen on the sofa, and I’d laughed, and he’d moved, and I’d—
Oh, God, it was all me. I’d hooked my leg around his body like he was a tree and I was a koala bear. Momentum had done the rest, and the next thing I knew, I was practically giving him a gentle dry-hump as he lay there and let me put this mask on his face.
He’d felt it, too, hadn’t he?
Oh, God.
I needed to leave the country.
I couldn’t live with knowing what my best friend’s penis looked like when he was naked, never mind what it felt like as I rocked on him like a wave rocked a boat.
It was unintentional. A total accident. Yet it’d happened. A little twitch. Slowly getting harder until I moved off him as inconspicuously as possible, which for me, was about as inconspicuous as an avalanche.
This was a disaster.
All for some facemask.
What was I doing with my life?
I groaned, pressing the towel against my stomach. I’d just climbed my best friend like a tree, rocked on his cock like a boat, and plastered him in facemask like we were about to have a girls’ night in.
Except he was a guy. Not a girl. And we weren’t going to paint each other’s toenails and whine about men over wine and snacks.
This was why I’d lived alone and did shit like this in private.
Not once had I ever accidentally rocked on Brie’s genitals.
I pushed off the door and looked in the mirror. Even though I couldn’t see the redness of my cheeks, I knew it was there. My eyes gave it away—they were bright and shining, and even if I couldn’t see the embarrassment in them, I felt it.
All the way to my freaking pink-painted toes.
Ughhhh.
I took a deep breath and set my shoulders. Lord knew I couldn’t set my face. The mask had done that for me. I couldn’t even twitch my lips without being afraid it would crack.
Double ugh.
I pulled open the door and went back into the living room. Jay was sitting on the sofa, feet up on the coffee table, with a bottle of water in his hands—and a straw inside the bottle.
“What are you doing?” I asked, even though half of it sounded like gibberish.
He looked at me, his face covered in the same, half-cracked, light green mask that mine was. “’Inking,” he replied. “’Ot you one, ‘oo.”
I looked at the bottle on the table with a straw poking out of it.
I sat down, taking the water with me, and forced myself to look at the TV. No matter how much I wanted to look at his crotch, I wouldn’t.
Not today.
No, siree.
I was done with that nonsense today.
I didn’t want him to know that I’d felt it. He had to know, sure. I mean, it was his cock. That didn’t mean I wanted him to know that I knew. It wasn’t exactly small, you know what I mean?
You weren’t likely to miss his erection in a blackout, that’s all I’m sayin’.
My cheeks burned. Why was I thinking about Jay’s erection? I was a strong, independent, relatively-slash-questionably successful twenty-five-year-old woman in the prime of my adult life. Surely, I’d grown up past thinking about penises in my spare time.
Well, you’d think.
Apparently, I hadn’t. Especially not when said penis was attached to my best friend.
Damn it!
I needed an intervention of some kind.
Maybe a date?
Yes! A date! That was a good idea! A chance to think about someone else’s penis. Let’s be honest, it was more likely that I’d get to ride a stranger’s disco stick than it was Jay’s. It’d been a while, but riding cock was like riding a bike, wasn’t it? You never forget how to do it? Skill for life and all that?
Man, I was gonna be so pissed if that turned out to be wrong the next time I got me some.
There would be a lot of people behind spam emails who’d get a piece of my mind if they’d been lying to me.
Ugh, no, I didn’t want a date. Not with the idiots the dating apps always spat out at me. Not a single one of those had ever gone well, and that didn’t even take into consideration the ones who did actually look like their picture.
I was sure most people my age met people to date in bars. The problem with that was that the only bar I ever went to belonged to my parents, and, well, people in general.
I was an introvert by nature. Bars were not a place for me.
Why would I drink around other people when I could drink at home without pants on?
Exactly.
“How long does this stay on for?” Jay asked, prodding at his cheek. “Is it supposed to feel like cement?”
“Fifteen minutes, and yes,” I replied, grabbing the remote from the coffee table. I was not going to sit here and watch sports news. He could get that on his phone.
“I was watching that!” he eked out through his now-stony face.
I shrugged. “I wasn’t.”
“I thought we were compromising?”
I met his eyes. “We are. I’m not putting The Big Bang Theory on. Compromise.”
“If you put Friends on, I swear to God…”
“I wasn’t going to put Friends on! I was going to browse the guide, but now I might just to piss you off.” I shuffled farther down on the sofa and put my feet on the coffee table.
“Why are you allowed to put your feet on the coffee table but you yell at me?”
“I’m wearing socks. Nobody wants your crusty man-feet on the table, Jay.”
“I don’t have crusty feet. I shower daily, unlike someone else.” He slid his eyes toward me, and they flashed with amusement.
“I showered this morning after that stupid run, actually.”
“You showered because you went on a run. Not that what you did was running. It was more… lumbering.”
I punched him in the thigh. “I do not lumber.”
“You don’t run, either.” His lips twitched like he was trying to smirk, but the mask stopped him from being able to.
Thank God.
I didn’t need to dry-hump him and see him smirk all in the same evening, thank you very much. God only knew what that would do to my sanity.
“Whatever. Just because we’re not all super-fit freaks like you with a stupidly healthy diet and an actual exercise routine.” I swung my feet from the table. “Come on. We can take these off now.”
He followed me into the bathroom. “You don’t even need a routine. You just need to eat something other than pizza and get off your ass once in a while.”
“My job is dependent on me sitting on my ass.”
“You can get standing desks now.”
I tossed him a wet washcloth. “You know, you’d be a better friend if you sat down and pigged out once in a while. Then I’d look a little hotter standing next to you.”
“If you want to look hotter, just wash your hair more than once a week.”
“I’m thinking of rescinding that roommate agreement and kicking you out.” I rinsed my cloth and continued cleaning the mask off my face. “You’re a lot ruder now that you’re on the lease.”
His laughter bounced off the walls of the small room. “It’s only rude because it’s true.”
“You don’t have long hair. You have no idea how hard it is to be a woman. If you had to wash and dry this hair on a daily basis, you’d stop washing it, too.”
“Right. Yet you willingly put this fucking cement on your face.”
I looked up. He’d barely gotten an inch of it off his face, despite the fact he’d clearly tried hard. I bit the inside of my cheek to stifle my
laugh. My face was clear of it apart from a few rogue flecks around my hairline, and I reached up to clean those while Jay frowned at the washcloth.
“This is fucking ridiculous.”
My laughter burst free from me, and I grabbed a towel to dry my face. “Oh, my God. It isn’t hard. You just have to scrub it a little.”
“I did!” He held out the cloth, clearly affronted.
“Not hard enough!” I took it from him and spun him so that he was resting against the sink. “This might be uncomfortable.”
He grunted. “No more uncomfortable than the concrete sidewalk you’ve put on my face.”
I shook my head, got the cloth wet again, and lifted it to his face.
The problem with this was that I was right in front of him, and my eyes had no other option than to examine every inch of his face.
Slowly, I scrubbed at his skin, pulling the mask away. Bits of it flaked off into the short stubble that coated his sharp jaw, and I had to reach up and wipe them away more than once, feeling the roughness of the tiny hairs as they rubbed against my fingertips and my palm.
It sent…things…firing through my body. Things I couldn’t focus on when I was standing here, practically leaning against him, cleaning his face.
As I wiped facemask from his skin, getting stuck in, leaving his normally lightly-tanned skin red and a little raw.
His bright green eyes seemed focused on me, yet he never quite met my gaze. He was always focused on a part of me, but it was my nose, or my hair, or the dimple on my left cheek.
It was awkward. It was almost as if it toed the very edge of our friendship, but I swallowed and carried on cleaning the facemask off him.
My heart jumped inside my chest when he moved, shifting his weight to the other foot. It was so freaking stupid that such a small movement could elicit such a sudden response from my idiotic little heart.
He’s your best friend, Shelby.
Give it up.
“Close your eyes,” I said quietly. “So I can do your nose.”
He shut his eyes, his thick, dark eyelashes casting shadows over his skin. It was horrible to ignore it, taking all the strength I had, but I managed it as I wiped and scrubbed the cloth over every inch of his handsome face.