by Nikky Kaye
She stilled on top of me. “You don’t?”
“Uh…”
“Because part of you is on board.” She rocked into my erection.
I held her hips. “Stop.” When I opened my eyes, I saw that the flush in her face from the yoga had mutated into an embarrassed look. Shit, I didn’t want that. “Cass, I just don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”
“The wrong idea? What, that you wanted me?” She slid off me, her hands trembling as she reached for her pants. “Well, I won’t make that mistake again.”
“No!” I reached out for her, my hand slipping over her ankle as she stepped away. She wasn’t getting this. I wasn’t making myself clear. “I do want you. Fuck, I want you more and more every day, every hour that I know you. But—”
“But what?”
I sat up, my muscles already beginning to protest. Fuck, I was going to feel that in the morning. “You don’t have a lot of experience—”
Her gasp cut me off. “So I’m not good enough?”
“No! Jesus fucking Christ, will you just listen to me?” I ran my hand through my hair then looked at the sweat on my palm with faint disgust. “I made you come. I’m really, really fucking happy I made you come. But now that you know that you, well, can, what kind of asshole would I be if I just presumed you wanted to be with me and my magical dick?”
“So what? You were just doing me a favor? You think I should go get a vibrator instead? Or a different guy?”
Fear shot through me. “No!” I shouted. That was the last thing I wanted her to do. As she finished getting dressed, she refused to look me in the eye. I felt like I was going to throw up, and I still wasn’t sure if I’d made my point clearly.
I slumped as I realized it wasn’t up to me—that was the whole point. “Cass, I’m just trying to tell you that you have choices. You’re in control of your body. You don’t owe me anything. I like you—a hell of a fucking lot—but you need to know how you feel, and I’m not sure that you do. I don’t want to assume. You know what happens when you assume…”
She snorted. “Oh, I think you’ve already made an ass out of you and me, Will. Mostly me,” she muttered under her breath. “Fine, point taken. I guess I have to give this some thought. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t put all my eggs in one basket.”
Being a gentleman was fucking hard.
Chapter Four
Cassie
“Tell me how the egg gets fertilized.”
“Cheap wine and an expired condom?”
Dylan’s sudden and sincere laughter made me feel a little better about myself. I’d been plagued by self-doubt for forty-odd hours, ever since Will rejected me at the gym.
I’d scrambled off of him at first, speechless with humiliation. He tried to say something about… oh, who the hell knows; I didn’t even listen. I was too busy putting my clothes on and shoving my feet into the boots I’d stowed outside the studio door.
Now it was almost dinnertime on Sunday, and I hadn’t seen, texted, or talked to Will since I fled on Friday night. I’d spent Saturday in a potato chip and Netflix-fueled fugue state, and agreed to meet Dylan at the lab Sunday afternoon.
“You’re funny,” he said—Dylan, not Will. His green eyes crinkled at my lame attempt at embryology humor.
Although, apparently my tall, dark, and handsome friend thought I was a joke as well. He didn’t waste much time in getting away from me two nights before. That wasn’t totally true. He’d actually walked me to my dorm, which was hella awkward.
A few times he’d started to say something, but didn’t get much further than “It’s not—” and “Cass, I don’t—” I held my hand up each time he tried to talk, and walked faster. By the time he’d spluttered “C’mon…” I was a dozen feet ahead of him, trying not to slip on the ice.
Turns out that tears freeze faster on your face than sweat.
Then, radio silence. Crickets. No texts, no calls, no emails, no calls up from dorm security about gentleman callers. It was positively twentieth century in my world for all of Saturday and most of Sunday, until Dylan asked if I wanted lab time before class met the next day.
Little did I know that our Bio TA could actually juggle the eggs as well as fertilize them. That little circus trick had produced a wan smile from me, but the way that Dylan’s face lit up made me feel like the Mona Lisa.
Maybe Will had been right—maybe he did have a thing for me. Was that such a bad thing? I was flattered by his attention, and for a brief moment wondered about using my new powers for good instead of evil. Maybe I should try actually dating, now that I knew I wasn’t frigid or asexual.
My phone pinged on the lab bench that I’d put my stuff on, making my whole body stiffen with some kind of Pavlovian response. How pathetic. I felt like an idiot for wanting to check it.
“Just a sec,” I said to Dylan and retrieved my phone.
Free for dinner? –W
I thumbed in when?
Nowish -W
Huh. He sure was a master at waiting until the last minute, but that had never bothered me when we were just friends. Why was it more annoying and presumptive after you’d slept with someone? I really wished I had a guidebook for this kind of thing. There had to be something on Amazon I could buy.
At lab right now w D. Later?
There was a pause, which seemed much longer as I stared at the screen. Then the telltale little gray dots fluttered as he composed. And composed. Then paused. And composed again. Was he channeling Mozart? Writing a short story?
Sure -W
I texted back that I’d let him know when we were done before placing the phone back on the desk.
Dylan was pretending not to watch me as he arranged a bunch of slides beside a microscope.
“Sorry about that.”
He smiled. “No problem. Here’s a series of fixed and stained slides of the chick’s development. Put them in order and then label each of them in your notebook. I’ll warm up the culture dish.”
Within half an hour, I was very carefully cracking an egg into a big petri dish. When I reached for a pipet, the door opened.
“I don’t want to interrupt you, but I thought you might be getting hungry,” Will drawled. He was holding a cardboard tray with two cups in it and a paper bag from the diner.
I dropped the pipet. Thankfully, it was a disposable plastic one, so it didn’t break. But my composure sure did.
“What are you doing here?” I shook my head as I walked over to where my phone was sitting.
Nope, no new texts from him, nothing to say he was bringing dinner here. I stared at him while he casually put the tray down on another bench and started pulling things out of the bag.
“Oh hey, Dylan. Didn’t see you there.” Will flashed his white teeth. “Sorry, but I only brought enough for me and my girl. You’re almost done here, right?”
What the actual fuck?
“Will, I thought I was going to meet you,” I ground out. Later.
“I know, baby, but I was passing our diner anyways.”
Baby? Our diner?
My mouth was still hanging open in shock when he laid a searing kiss on it. Despite my irritation and confusion, I still tingled when he whispered, “Besides, I missed you.”
“Will…”
Dylan crossed over to where the food was and peeked in the bag. “Might as well eat, Cassie,” he said, shrugging. He held out a container and a fork.
Will’s arm around my waist tightened as he reached forward with his other hand. “The salad is mine, Dylan. Cass gets the big, greasy cheeseburger.”
“Oh.” Dylan fumbled with the container as he handed it to Will. “Sorry, I just assumed—”
Will snorted. “Some scientist you are,” he commented under his breath. I wanted to hit him.
But Dylan had already turned back to hand me the burger. I held the box in my hand like it was a bomb to be defused, and I didn’t have the first clue what wire to cut.
“Uh, thanks.”
“Oh, he’s not my boyfriend.”
He’d made that totally clear on Friday night. Even if I wanted him to be, the last thing I wanted to do was go all psycho hose beast on him and turn into a Stage Five Clinger. From what I understood, friends with benefits was its own category of pseudo-relationship, which meant no awkward birthday and Christmas gift expectations, no Valentine’s Day date assumptions, and no labels.
Will’s arm dropped from my side. I looked up at him as he stepped to the side to see his lips pressed together in a thin line and his jaw clenched.
“I guess we’re done, then.” Dylan started putting away the slides and scope. “Maybe you could stay after lab tomorrow and we can run this again,” he suggested.
“But what about my egg?”
He dumped my petri dish into a marked container for bio waste and started washing up. His back was to me as he looked down into the sink. “There are other chicks. Right, Will?”
“Right.”
I looked between the two of them, not sure what had just happened. Were they actually talking about embryonic chickens, or me? Was Dylan being polite, or was he backing off because of Will’s stupid macho display? Or maybe he was warning me that my friend had been a player?
Jesus, if I was going to read into everything, I should have just stayed in my room and done my damn homework.
A stool scraped along the floor, rattling my nerves further as Will pulled it up to eat his salad.
“Can you clean up the rest, Cassie?” Dylan grabbed his coat and backpack. “I’ll, uh, see you tomorrow.”
Will just grunted, stabbing his salad with his fork as the door closed behind our TA, who had taken time out of his weekend to help me. I was mortified and furious, and a whole lot of confused.
“What the hell are you doing?”
He paused mid-bite, his eyes big in his handsome face. “Muh?”
“We were working! I didn’t tell you to show up with a picnic basket like Little Red Riding Hood!”
Will put his container down and grinned at me. I loved and hated that stupid, charming, confident, disarming smile. “Oh Granny, what big—”
I lurched forward to slap my hand over his mouth. “Don’t even think about finishing that sentence.”
But pressing my palm against his soft lips wasn’t exactly calming me down. When I looked in his eyes, I saw something hot and secret flash there. His expression was mournful and sly at the same time.
“Mmphry,” he mumbled against my hand. I moved it from his mouth to his cheek, threatening him with a little smack. “Sorry,” he repeated.
Hunched on the stool with his knees splayed out and his heels hooked on the metal rung around the bottom, he wasn’t that much taller than me. I stood facing him, my arms crossed over my chest—mostly so I wouldn’t use them. Never before had I been so tempted to both hug and hit a man at the same time.
I sighed heavily. I just didn’t get it. I needed to pass this freaking class, not get sabotaged by my lab partner and friend slash fuck buddy slash whatever we were. After his little “it’s not me, it’s about you” speech on Friday, why was he getting possessive now?
Will’s feet slipped off the stool and he hooked his legs around the backs of my knees, pulling me off-balance until I fell against him. He cupped my face tenderly, touching his nose to mine. My hand slid back to curve around the nape of his neck, his short hair tickling my palm. I closed my eyes, feeling his breath on me.
“Oh, Will.”
He kissed me, and I let him. I even helped a little.
It wasn’t a passionate, grasping, possessive kiss—instead it was an… apology? There we stood, practically eye to eye, nose to nose, mouth to mouth, in the very room in which we’d met. All in all, I felt further away from him than I had a week prior, and it made something in my stomach twist.
“I’m sorry, Cass.”
My eyes were still closed, as though my brain knew I didn’t want to be an eyewitness to the word vomit I was about to spew. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
“You’re sorry about this, or about what you said on Friday?”
Bleccchhh! I wanted to slap my hand over my own traitorous mouth. I didn’t need to remind him how humiliated I was at the gym. I’d spent the previous day watching Buffy as a reminder that there were worse ways to lose a guy.
“I blame you for Friday,” he said.
My eyes popped open. Now he was shaming me? “I’m sorry?”
“You should be. You lured me there under false pretenses. I don’t want to admit how much pain I was in yesterday.” He dropped his gaze meaningfully to his crotch, grimacing.
“What?”
I’d practically thrown myself at him and was flat out rejected. De-nied. Now he was putting his blue balls on me? When, really, he didn’t want me anywhere near his balls on Friday? Were all men this stupid?
My face grew hot and my body trembled, all in a bad way. Impulsively, I grabbed a two-day egg out of the warmer still on the lab bench and threw it at him.
Will was too shocked to duck, and it exploded on his chest before dripping to the floor. His lips quirked as though he was trying not to laugh out loud, which further incensed me.
“Throwing other chicks at me won’t help,” he joked.
Maybe Dylan was on to something, and Will had played me. Was I just a challenge to him? But then if I was just a stupid bet, then I should at least get the thousand fucking bucks. Christmas was coming up, and I could think of at least one friend I didn’t need to shop for!
I clawed for another egg, but he shot forward and grabbed my wrist to stop me. We both looked down as his foot skidded on the remains of the first embryonic egg.
“Dear god, think of the children!” he exclaimed. “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”
Even in the depths of blinding fury, the man could make me laugh. I hated that. My shoulders sagged as I winced. “Goddammit, Will.”
I didn’t know what to say. My heart was more scrambled than the egg on the floor. Did he even want me anymore? My eyes watered. Maybe I needed therapy or medication. Or a transfer.
Was I supposed to pretend that we’d never happened? Could we go back to being buddies without the fucking? If I was honest with myself, I would be able to admit that in my heart, it wasn’t just a bet. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have opened myself up to the possibility of humiliation and shame and guilt—or the intimacy.
“I need to get changed,” Will said while holding his hand out. “Want to get out of here? Go back to my place?”
I shook my head as I turned my back on him. “No.”
Fuck me once, shame on you. Fuck me twice, shame on me.
Chapter Five
Will
After I finished cleaning up the lab, because someone left in a hurry, I spiked the diner debris into the trashcan in the corner and headed back to my apartment. The cold chafed my legs through my jeans as I sped up.
Not to mention that my legs were still stiff from that fucking yoga class. Delayed onset muscle soreness was nothing to sneeze at. The day before had been spent lying on my couch with ice packs taking up alternate spaces on my body.
It took another three days for the pain to subside, but in that time, new aches were pinging through me. Cass had shown up for lab on Monday, but barely spoke to me. She talked to Dylan, though. Of course, she’d talked to Dylan—even staying after lab and laughing with him while I reluctantly left the room in slo-mo.
It seemed to me that she was still pissed off about Friday. Or maybe Sunday, when I’d brought her dinner. Didn’t she understand how much effort it took to resist her? Did I get no fucking points for trying to be a gentleman?
She didn’t respond to my texts, and when we came back after Thanksgiving, I basically hadn’t talked to her for more than a week. Even though it had been less than a month since we’d hooked up, being out of touch with her that long felt like a lifetime.
A wiser man would have said that I deserved Cassie’s rejection. Never in my short fucking life have I claimed to be such a man.
So when I waited for her at her dorm one day, feeling like a stalker as the security guard eyed me, something buoyed inside me when she reflexively smiled when she spotted me. Thank fucking god; I hadn’t been frozen out completely.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” My smile widened for the simple reason that her smile had stayed on her face. “How was your Thanksgiving?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “Same old, same old. I did a lot of studying. I’ve been, uh, distracted lately.”
“We need to talk, Cass.”
“I know,” she said glumly. “C’mon up.”
She signed me in wordlessly, and our elevator ride was equally silent. It felt like déjà vu all over again, like that first night after finding each other at the bar. Was that only a few weeks ago? We both watched the lights flashing above the elevator doors as we passed each floor, but stood closer together than necessary.
As she pulled off her scarf, I smelled her perfume. It smelled sweet, like waffle cones baking in an ice cream store. When she unbuttoned her coat, I couldn’t help but notice she was only wearing a t-shirt with her slim jeans and high boots. My body reacted automatically, and I made sure to walk behind her down the corridor to her room.
“What perfume do you wear?” I asked.
She halted, her key scraping against the door as she missed her target. “Well, that’s a non sequitur.”
I shrugged. “Just curious.”
“I don’t wear any.”
Oh. But her scent was so addictive, so warm and sugary. Maybe I was having a stroke. Or maybe I was like Daredevil, and not talking to her or seeing her for nearly a week had elevated my other senses where she was concerned. It wasn’t a bad theory.
The feeling of déjà vu only intensified when we entered her room. It was the first time I’d been in it since we’d had sex for the first time. My gaze went straight to her narrow bed as I remembered it all—the taste of her pussy, the high helpless moans she uttered, the feel of her skin and the way she clamped onto my dick. Again, my elevator problem was resurrected.