Stitches

by Sam Mariano

  She shoves her key into the lock and opens the front door for me to come inside while she pushes buttons on the alarm. I follow her inside the darkened entryway, but fuck, I can’t keep my eyes off her. She offers me a little smile and takes her jacket off, hanging it on the coat rack. Then she moves up behind me and peels off my overcoat, hanging it up beside hers and Seb’s.

  “Come on,” she says quietly, taking my hand and guiding me to the staircase. It’s not a far walk, but I’m so drunk she must not trust me to get there on my own. She lets go so she can walk ahead of me, but she glances back to make sure I don’t miss the first step.

  If she looks back at me again, I miss it. My gaze starts at her bare legs, then drifts up to the short little nightie she’s wearing. She should not have walked in front of me. I can see practically all the way up…

  Fuck me. She isn’t wearing panties. I’m at least 90% sure she is not wearing panties.

  Seriously? She couldn’t pause long enough to pull on panties before coming to get me? Now I’m just thinking about the whole time she was driving me home, when she was sitting there with her exposed thighs and her panty-free ass and I was too drunk to notice.

  Of course, not noticing is the right reaction. I should definitely not be noticing that my best friend’s wife has a bare pussy and a nightie so short it barely skims her ass.

  Unaware of my thoughts, Moira opens the door to the guest bedroom and walks in ahead of me. “I made it up earlier in case you came over for the movie,” she tells me, glancing back over her shoulder. “So everything is nice and fresh for you. You have your own bathroom right through here,” she adds, pointing to the door. Her gaze wanders over my chest. “If you need a fresh suit in the morning, you might be able to wear one of Sebastian’s. You’re a little bit bulkier than he is, but it might work.”

  “Nah.” I shake my head. “I’ll go home and get clothes. Thanks, though.”

  Moira nods, but she looks reluctant to leave. “Do you need anything?”

  Since I’m feeling ornery, I can’t stop a very bad idea from tumbling out of my mouth. “You could help me get undressed.”

  Her eyebrows rise and her mouth opens just a couple inches, but then she catches herself and steps forward. “Sure, no problem.”

  This is a mistake. This is a terrible idea. I look down at her as she stops right in front of me. When she looks up at me, uncertainty is written all across her pretty face. She hesitates before finally reaching for my jacket and pushing it down over my muscular shoulders. She swallows audibly and shakes the wrinkles out of it with impressive focus. She takes a step back, sets it aside, then comes back to stand in front of me. She looks up at me again, and I can’t help reading into those little glances. What is she thinking?

  I don’t mean to ask, but my brain overrides my hesitation. “What’s on your mind, Moira?”

  Her gaze drops to my chest pointedly, but I can see from the rise and fall of her chest, she’s breathing a little less evenly than usual. She adopts what I think she intends to be a stern look, but Moira’s like a kindergarten teacher who can’t even control the little people in her classroom. Sternness is not her thing. She can’t pull it off. She’s gentle and sweet. Still, since I’m her husband’s best friend, she tries for stern. She stares at the button hole as she undoes the top buttons of my shirt.

  “I’m thinking that I feel sorry for your liver right now. You haven’t treated it very well tonight.”

  God, she’s so close. I could reach out and touch her right now if I wanted to. Instead, I watch her fingers move down my chest, pushing little plastic buttons through the neatly sewn holes. I’m a head taller than she is, so looking down at her like this, I can see right down her top. I can see the tops of her high, rounded, perfect fucking breasts, not even restrained by a bra. I force my eyes away, but then I’m just thinking about the curve of her ass, her long, strong legs. She’s a runner, I think. I know she used to be, not sure if she still is. It certainly looks like she still is.

  I want to touch her ass. I want to grab it and yank her against me right here in the guest room. I envision it, imagine her gasp as she falls against me, her hands moving to my chest to instinctively push me away. Maybe she would hesitate. Maybe I would see just a split second of longing in her pretty blue eyes before she did the decent thing and pushed me away.

  I keep my hands to myself and my fantasies in my head, but fuck, I don’t want to.

  Is it cheating if Ashley cheated first? Wait, no, Ashley isn’t the problem. Seb is. That bastard has never cheated, and he probably wouldn’t take too kindly to my pinning his wife against this wall and kissing the fuck out of her, my hands roaming down to squeeze that incredible ass.

  Nope, he wouldn’t like that at all. I’m pretty fucking sure of it.

  She probably wouldn’t, either. Unlike Ashley, Moira is actually happy with her marriage.

  That brings me back down. Fucking reality is a real asshole.

  What a shitty fucking day. I woke up this morning with at least a little enthusiasm for Palm Springs, now here I am, drunk and lost while Moira undresses me—and not because she wants to fuck me, but because I’m too fucking drunk to do it myself.

  Suddenly I push her hands off my chest and scowl. I can unbutton my own damn dress shirt. She takes an uncertain step back, but waits for me to peel my shirt off and drop it on the floor.

  Sighing, she bends down to pick it up.

  I look down the front of her nightie again.

  Dammit, Griff, quit that shit.

  She drags her ass out of bed in the middle of the night to come pick you up; you stop acting like an asshole and pay her a little respect.

  I have the best of intentions until she pops back up, tossing my shirt on the chair, and gets distracted by the sight of my bare chest. She looks vaguely surprised, and I’m not sure whether to feel insulted or flattered. She clearly likes what she sees—and why wouldn’t she? I log the gym time and I was born with a good arrangement of muscles to begin with—but still, that she sees Seb naked every day and still pauses at the sight of me makes me feel kinda good about myself. Seb and I look absolutely nothing alike. His appearance is more refined—dark hair, deep blue eyes, a touch of elegance to cover up all his rough edges. If Hollywood approached him tomorrow and asked him to be the new Bond, exactly zero people would be surprised.

  Me, I could never pull that off. No one expects me to pull up in an Aston Martin with a Bond girl in the passenger seat and a tumbler full of expensive liquor in my hand, ready to take care of business in time for us to make our dinner reservations.

  I vaguely look like the questionable man in all black that you would meet at a dive bar and slide an envelope full of cash to kill your spouse so you can collect the insurance money. It’s always worked for us in business. Seb is slick, he’s got the charisma and he’s a good wheeler and dealer. I’m good at playing bad cop, coming down hard on people and making them wiggle when they’re positive there’s no wiggle room.

  Just not good at keeping my wife from fucking around on me, apparently.

  Fuck, my mind had to go back there.

  Moira has recovered from ogling my muscular chest and now she nervously plucks pillows off the bed and pulls back the blanket. She has to lean over the bed to do it though, and I cannot help looking at her ass again.

  I just want to move closer. I’m not going to touch her. That’s my intention, but I’m too fucking drunk and I bump into her, knocking her on the bed.

  I hear Moira gasp as she catches herself on the soft surface beneath her.

  “Aw, shit,” I mutter.

  Moira looks back, startled, then she laughs when I trip and catch myself on the bed.

  “Oh, my God, you are so—”

  I’m fairly certain she’s about to tell me how drunk I am, like I don’t already know, but the words die on her tongue. Instead of letting her up, I shove her little ass to the center of the bed and lie down beside her.

  When I initially
move so close to her scantily clad body, Moira looks understandably hesitant. I can only imagine what’s going through her mind as her eyes follow my every movement, then cautiously dart to my face. I settle in beside her, but I don’t make a move to touch her, so she tries to pretend this is a normal thing for me to do.

  “You didn’t finish getting undressed,” she remarks, since apparently that’s all she can think to say.

  “So finish undressing me,” I murmur, watching her.

  “Um, I…” She hesitates, but loses whatever argument she has with herself in her head. Rolling her eyes, she finally says, “Fine.”

  My heart kicks up a couple speeds as her hands move toward my belt. I watch her fingers as she pulls back the leather and pulls the prong from the hole. She’s careful—too careful—not to touch me as she slides the leather through the buckle, then drags it through the loops of my slacks. She leans over me and tosses the belt near the chair where the rest of my clothes are.

  “Missed,” she remarks with forced lightness.

  “Zero points.”

  She cracks a smile, then it drops as she looks down at my pants. “I’m not sure I should take these off. Your drunken brain might get the wrong idea.”

  I scoff, amused. “Probably. Don’t be offended if you encounter a hard-on.”

  Moira blushes, but at least she doesn’t seem uncomfortable. “Like I said, probably shouldn’t take those off. If you want to, feel free. I can go grab a pair of Sebastian’s pajama pants for you, if you’d like. That would be much more comfortable to sleep in. You both have slim hips, so I think those would fit you just fine.”

  My drunken brain tells me an okay thing to do right now is to reach for her hips and draw them closer. I’ve resisted the bad ideas up until now, but somehow this one travels through me before I can stop it, and before I know it… I do. She lets me pull her closer to my body, but she looks understandably uncertain about it.

  “Griff, what are you doing?”

  I know the right thing to do here is tell her to go back to Seb’s room, but that leaves me alone, and alone is the last thing I want to be right now.

  I shouldn’t take advantage of her sympathy—and that’s exactly what I’m doing—but I can’t keep the words from tumbling out of my mouth. “Stay with me.”

  I see resistance in her eyes. I see the very reasonable argument that she can’t stay with me because she needs to go back to her husband, my best friend, and while she feels terrible for me that my wife is a faithless cheater, she isn’t, so she isn’t going to lie here and cuddle with me while her husband sleeps alone in the next room.

  Since I see that argument in her turbulent blue eyes, I add, “Please.”

  It pokes a hole right in her perfectly good argument, exactly as I intend it.

  Fuck, drunk me is an asshole.

  But he’s a smart enough asshole, because Moira nods and stays put.

  I don’t want to make her uncomfortable, but Drunk Asshole Griff isn’t as worried about it. I find myself reaching over and touching her face, running the back of my hand along her smooth cheek. I can’t help being drawn to her. I’ve never been able to help it. I was drawn to her at first sight, but that’s nothing new. Moira is an incredibly beautiful woman, so it’s commonplace for men to be physically attracted to her.

  I tell myself it’s normal to think about her breasts and her ass, to imagine yanking up that pale blue nightie and pinning her body beneath mine. It’s normal to imagine kissing her, to think about how soft her lips would be, what she would sound like. Is she a loud fuck, whimpering and crying out? Or is she more soft sighs and low moans? She seems like she would be soft sighs and low moans, but then I think about the naughty stories she used to tell us. Maybe she’s dirtier than I give her credit for. It’s always the quiet ones, after all. When Seb says she was busy sucking his cock before dinner, I imagine him as the aggressor, but maybe she’s hungry for it.

  Fuck, now I’m hard.

  Now I’m picturing Moira opening her pretty little mouth for my cock, looking up at me with those big blue eyes as I slide into her throat.

  “Fuck.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  I shake my head, tempted to roll on my back so I don’t have to keep looking at her, but that might draw attention to the tent currently erected in my pants.

  I gotta get my head right before I end up doing something I’ll regret.

  “What movie were we going to watch tonight?” I ask, to distract myself.

  Her expression lightens, since this is a safe subject. “Sabrina. It was a Hepburn night.”

  “Oh, well, I’m despondent that I missed that.”

  She smiles and pokes me in the arm. “Whatever, you love it. Remember when we all watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s together?”

  “I’ve tried to block it out. I lost street cred that night.”

  She grins up at me. “You still have all your street cred. I kept your secret so no one knows.”

  “Mm hmm. They can smell it on me.”

  “Remember when you guys made me watch Boondock Saints?” she asks, raising a pointed eyebrow. “You got me back.”

  “Please. You thought the one guy was hot.”

  She nods. “Got me there. He was hot. I can’t deny that. Still, not my favorite movie. I also watched Scarface with you guys. Nobody in that movie was hot.”

  “And we watched—what was the one with the cheerleaders?”

  Moira rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I’m sure it was a real hardship watching a league of hot girls jump around in skimpy skirts with exposed midriffs. I feel enormously sorry for the emotional trauma I must have inflicted upon you.”

  “You should,” I mutter.

  She smiled and shakes her head at me. “Just for that, we’re doing a Hepburn double feature next time. You should come over tomorrow after work. I’ll make you guys dinner—whatever you want—and then we’ll watch movies all night long.”

  “I don’t like being your third wheel,” I tell her.

  Her smile falls. “You are not our third wheel. We both love having you here. You’re our best friend. What’s third wheel-like about that?”

  “You just described being a third wheel,” I inform her. “You two are a couple and I’m the friend that tags along. I’m not going back to that. I can’t.”

  Her brow is creased and she looks a little sad. “You don’t like hanging out with us? I loved all those nights with you guys. You were just enduring them?”

  “It was fucking torture.”

  Not for the first time tonight, Moira looks completely disillusioned. “But why? We never tried to make you feel that way.”

  “We, we, we.” I roll my eyes, rolling onto my back and bending one arm to rest a hand behind my head. “That’s why I had to stop coming around, Moira. It was too hard.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  I cut her a look. “Yes, you do.”

  “I just said I don’t.”

  “Girls like you always know. You used to torture me.”

  Her jaw drops open. “Girls like me? What is that supposed to mean? And please elaborate on this torture, because I always remember being nice to you.”

  “You’re too fucking nice, that’s the problem. You’re lying here in bed with me, both of us half-naked, you without any panties, because you’re nice.”

  That leaves her speechless. There are a lot of things she could say, a lot of things she probably should say, but she knows I’m hurting, so she chooses not to. She keeps her mouth shut, simply rolling over and climbing off the bed.

  I don’t ask her to stay this time.

  It’s best she goes.

  5

  Moira

  I can’t sleep, so I finally give up and go for my morning run a couple hours early. It works out, anyway. I’m feeling the need to run a little longer than my usual two miles. I go for three, then walk for another half hour before returning home to shower.

  Sebastian is awake. I feel rel
ieved when I get back to the bedroom and he’s up. Griff is still in bed—poor guy’s probably going to have a hell of a headache. I took a bottle of water in and left it on the end table before I went for my run, just in case he woke up and needed it.

  I don’t know exactly what to make of last night, so I do my best to shrug it off. My handsome husband swallows up my attention, joining me in the shower and getting me off while he soaps me up. I’m weak from my orgasm and he bends me over, shoving his glorious cock inside me and fucking me like a ragdoll.

  God, I love him.

  I’m weak and fully under his spell when we step out. It’s hard to let him leave in the morning sometimes. I miss him terribly when he’s gone. I think about him on and off all day. I’ve never been so in love in all my life, and I didn’t know this feeling could last. He’s just the most incredible man I’ve ever met. Sexy and generous and elegant. Any given day, he’s dressed so well he might’ve just stepped out of GQ. He turns me to mush.

  He knows it, too. Right now, as he straightens his tie and looks at me draped naked and exhausted across our bed, he’s so damn smug.

  “Shut up, you handsome devil,” I tell him.

  “I said nothing,” he says, with ridiculous innocence. There’s not an innocent bone in this man’s magnificent body.

  “You wore me out and now I have to go make cookies.”

  His dark eyebrows rise with surprise. “Cookies? For breakfast?”

  I manage a nod. “I promised Griff cookies. I’m not sure he’ll even remember, but on the off chance he does, I don’t want to disappoint him.”

  Sebastian walks over and smacks my ass. “You couldn’t disappoint a man if you tried.”

  “Yes, well, you probably feel that way because we just had shower sex. Given Griff did not just get a morning orgasm, he probably doesn’t feel the same way. I have to give him cookies.”

  “If they’re supposed to make up for lack of orgasms, you better be making one hell of a batch of cookies.”