Mostly My Girlfriend

by Doyle, S.

  But then his hands were sliding down my belly and his fingers were teasing my clit, and instead of getting out of bed, I pushed against him.

  “Yes. One more time,” he whispered into my ear. “Our last time.”

  Last time. Because this was just a vacation. A time away from being who we were supposed to be. Only I didn’t know who that was anymore.

  “Yes,” I said because I knew he meant it. He would let us have this night, but then he wouldn’t want anything else to change. He would want things to go back to the way they were, and I would have no choice. Because Ethan had always dictated what our relationship was going to be. From the first day we met.

  He slid inside my pussy and it hurt and felt wonderful all at the same time. Just a slow, gentle rock of his cock inside me. So that I could feel his heartbeat against my back, so that I could feel his dick throb deep inside me.

  He didn’t play with my clit so much as he just pressed his hand against me. Let me feel the pressure in front and inside. The orgasm washed over me so fast it nearly took me by surprise.

  “Ethan,” I whispered, because I had no more energy to scream or cry out.

  “Fuck, fuck, I’m not ready…”

  I didn’t know what he was saying, but I could feel his body getting stiff, could hear the groan of his own orgasm in my ear. One hand he used to hold my hips steady for his fucking, but his other was wrapped around me, pressed between my breasts, fusing me to him. Or him to me.

  I could feel myself drifting off, could feel his body relaxing around me. My last coherent thought was that this time he would remember. This time he wouldn’t forget it was me. At least I would have that.

  But I also had to be the first one to leave the bed.

  * * *

  Later that morning

  Ethan

  It was the most surreal feeling. Waking up and thinking that everything had changed, and nothing had changed. I wasn’t going to regret it. I was just going to put it in the appropriate place it needed to be.

  One night removed from all the others.

  A vacation from reality. That was over.

  I sat up in bed and Jules was sitting on the hotel room desk, back in her strapless dress. Her shoes dangling from her fingers while she must have been waiting for me to wake up.

  I rubbed my face, wondering how the next few minutes were going to go.

  “There is coffee, a glass of water, and two aspirin on the bed stand next to you.”

  I turned my head. Of course there were.

  “You were drunk,” she said in a tone I didn’t recognize. “Do you remember what happened?”

  “Do I remember what happened?” I repeated as if she was insane. I’d been having sex for the last several years of my life pretty actively, and I’d never come close to what had happened last night.

  “You were drunk,” she insisted. “We both were. It started as a game—”

  “I wasn’t so drunk that I don’t remember taking your virgin ass. Is that what you’re suggesting?” I asked, getting angry with her distance, both physical and emotional. Which was wrong of me. She was right to put the wall back up between us. I knew that. I was just pissed it had to go up so damn fast.

  I watched her flush and she turned away from me, but she didn’t say anything.

  “I imagine you’re sore, but don’t ask me to apologize. It was divine,” I said, searching for a casualness I didn’t feel. I reached for the cup of coffee and realized my hand was shaking. I forced myself to relax and took a sip.

  She glared at me like she wanted to slap me, and I thought that was also a good thing. Jules had never been one to tolerate my bullshit and I didn’t want that to change in the face of whatever emotions she was feeling right now.

  I was feeling nothing. Because I would not let myself feel anything. I couldn’t. It was time for Jules to go back into the Jules Box.

  “I think you know I would never hurt you intentionally,” I offered. “I think you know that even though I didn’t use a condom, I would never do so if I didn’t know for a fact I was clean. And I know you’re on birth control so we can spare us both that conversation.”

  “Yep.”

  “It was one night. It happened. We put it where it belongs, and we move on.”

  One sharp nod. “And we agree to never talk about it. Ever. As far as I’m concerned, last night didn’t happen.”

  No, I wasn’t willing to take it that far. I didn’t want it to be something that hadn’t happened. Only something we could keep in its appropriate place, so it didn’t get out of control.

  Like a controlled fire to prevent the inferno.

  “Oh it happened, Jules. It just doesn’t have to mean anything.”

  She looked away from me then and I thought…maybe I shouldn’t have said that. It sounded harsher than I meant it to. I only meant that we could let ourselves have the memory without dwelling on it.

  She hopped off the desk and I saw her wince. I knew what I’d done to her body, to all of her body. She would feel me for days. I tried not to take any satisfaction in that.

  “I’ll see you on Monday,” she said as she bent over to pull on her shoes.

  “You’ll have an update on the Cameron merger or I’ll be pissed. Then you’ll have to deal with my foul mood, which always puts you in a foul mood so…consequences.”

  “Got it…bossman.”

  She knew I hated the nickname, so I sneered at her even as I gave her the finger. She laughed and the next sound I heard was the door closing behind her.

  We did it, I thought. One night, just for us, and it wasn’t going to change a thing.

  I took the two aspirin, sipped on my coffee and thought—overall, I was really very happy about how that had turned out.

  Then why, I wondered, was my hand still shaking?

  3

  Therapy

  Ethan

  Carol looked to the two of us without her normal humming sound.

  “So you both pretended it didn’t mean anything. Can you both acknowledge now that it did?”

  I nodded and when I looked over to Julia, sitting so still in the chair next to me, I could see she was nodding, too.

  “Let me ask you, Julia,” Carol started. “After the wedding, when did you realize Ethan had been with another woman and how did that make you feel?”

  Oh, I thought, silently chuckling. This is going to be hysterical.

  “It would have been…” Jules looked at me and I simply raised my eyebrows. “There would have been someone at the office holiday party…I just can’t think. It was supermodels all the time, for years before that.”

  “Yes, but specifically after Daniel’s wedding is what Carol asking about,” I prompted her. “After we were together that time.”

  She nodded and I could see her reaching for these past few years. Trying to put it together, when I’d been with someone else. Who that person had been.

  “I can’t remember, but I’m sure whoever it was, she was devastatingly beautiful. That’s his type.”

  Carol looked at me, silently asking me to answer.

  “The reason she can’t remember anyone these last few years is because there has been no one.”

  “That’s not possible,” Jules insisted, and the anger surged inside me again.

  “Exactly at what point did you start believing I was a liar? Because between the two of us, I think I’m the only one who has actually been honest around here.”

  “You haven’t been with another woman since the night you were together at your friend’s wedding?” Carol asked me.

  “No. Not since then. I didn’t see the point.”

  “You were always hooking up. Meaningless hookups. That was your thing.” Jules said still clearly in shock over what I’d told her.

  “I don’t suppose I get any credit for growing up? For not finding the satisfaction in those hookups? Or maybe I just didn’t want to hurt your damn feelings! Not that you were paying attention because you were busy getti
ng engaged!”

  “It was…difficult for me,” she said to Carol. “After the wedding. Knowing it was a one-time thing for us. I had to force myself to look outside of our relationship…”

  “Ah! See, we do have a relationship! I win.”

  “This isn’t a competition, Ethan,” Carol said.

  “I know that, but I told this woman yesterday that I loved her, and instead of believing me, she fucking ran away—”

  “We’re here in the first place because you ran away!” Jules shouted at me.

  “And I came back!” I yelled.

  “And I’m here today!”

  Silence descended and Carol smiled. “Okay. We’ve obviously hit upon a sensitive subject. Julia, do you believe that Ethan’s been faithful to you this whole time? Because I think that’s what he was doing. Wasn’t it, Ethan?”

  I shook my head. “To be honest, I wasn’t thinking of it like that…I just…I didn’t want to fuck another stranger. I had no appetite for it, so I didn’t do it.”

  “And you, Julia, you said that it was difficult for you after the wedding. How did you feel that next day?”

  “Like…like all the layers had been peeled off my skin. Like I was naked for the first time in my life. I knew it wasn’t going to be like the first time. There would be no hiding that it happened. I just didn’t realize how easy it would be for him to go back to acting like we were still the same. I wasn’t really sure how drunk you’d been…”

  “I wasn’t that drunk,” I confessed. “Not as drunk as you thought I was. I knew what I was doing, Jules. I wanted you and I thought I could have you once. It was that simple.”

  “You were so cold to me the next day,” she accused me.

  “I was pissed,” I said.

  “At what?” Carol asked me.

  I stood then, not able to sit still when just the memory of that night was enough to get me hard. I walked toward the window like maybe, if I looked hard enough, I could see the future. Our future. Instead, it was just gray Seattle sky.

  What if we don’t make it out of this room together?

  “When I woke up, she was already dressed and…it was over. Like she’d dismissed me first.”

  “You could have said anything. You could have told me anything,” Jules said. “It didn’t have to be just that one night if that’s not what you wanted.”

  “Are you hearing yourself now?” I asked her. “What about what you wanted? Why didn’t you tell me how you felt? Why didn’t you…”

  “Go on,” Carol prompted me.

  “Why didn’t you admit you wanted more from me?”

  “Because that’s not how it works between us,” she hissed at me. “You know that.”

  “Bullshit, Jules. You keep making it out like I’m the one in control of everything, but maybe it’s because that just makes it easier for you to hide. Easier for you to stay tucked behind those thick, heavy walls of yours. You said you were naked for the first time that morning after the wedding. But what I saw when I woke up was you fully dressed and safely behind your fences. That’s why I was pissed.”

  She was shaking her head.

  “Hmm,” Carol interjected. “It does seem curious to me that you both had this intense sexual experience that you were both able to walk away from. For years. But now you can’t walk away. Can I ask what suddenly changed?”

  “Nothing changed,” Jules answered for me. “His relationship with his father was difficult. He wasn’t in his right mind after he passed. What happened between us three months ago was more about…comfort and grief than it was changing our relationship. I understood that when he left for Japan immediately after.”

  “Do you agree, Ethan?”

  I opened my mouth to object, but I couldn’t. Because the next question was—would I have fucked Jules if my father hadn’t died? And the answer was probably no. Not in a way that would have led to us changing the nature of our relationship. She was in a compartment all by herself and I’d worked hard to keep her exactly there. I wouldn’t have deviated from that if I hadn’t needed her so goddamn much.

  I’d left to establish distance between us. To give us time apart so that when we came back together, it wouldn’t be awkward or strange. Looking back, I did something similar after Daniel’s wedding. Only then I’d been able to use work as an excuse.

  I thought I could put the genie back in the bottle, not realizing the genie had been out all along. On the heels of that came the truth—that I couldn’t run from what I was feeling anymore.

  That I didn’t want to run from it anymore.

  “It’s not as simple as that,” I said, hearing the rasp in my voice, feeling a tightness in my chest that might have been worrisome if it wasn’t something that occasionally happened around Jules.

  “Hmm,” Carol said again.

  Right now, that was my least favorite noise.

  “Julia, I wonder if there was ever a time you thought about confronting Ethan regarding your dissatisfaction with the state of your relationship?”

  “I wasn’t dissatisfied. I’d accepted what we were. I was fine with everything.”

  The patented Julia Whitford quick-denial sequence.

  Carol caught on to it because she tilted her head in a way that screamed LIAR without her actually saying it. It worked, too, because Jules started to squirm in her chair.

  “It didn’t suddenly change,” I said, answering Carol’s original question. Having had these last three months to think, to remember… “The truth was, it started to change the night of her accident.”

  “Accident?” Carol prompted.

  “I was in a car accident,” Julia said. “It was barely anything, but Ethan freaked out.”

  “You could have been killed,” I said, turning to face her.

  She rolled her eyes. “It really wasn’t that big of a deal.”

  “It was for me,” I admitted.

  * * *

  Six years ago

  Ethan

  “It was freezing! I mean so cold my nipples were hard the entire time. It practically made every shot indecent. But you know how SI is, they’ll push everything to the extreme.”

  Yes, and I loved that Sports Illustrated did that. At least for the swimsuit edition, which was the only one I ever bothered to pick up. I was more of a science guy than a sports guy.

  However, my date for the evening, Jessica, was going to be on the cover this year and there was a certain satisfaction in saying I’d dated the SI swimsuit cover model. Of course, it would be past tense by then, as the cover wouldn’t come out for a few months and I planned to end things tonight.

  Or more specifically, the next morning. Not that Jessica wasn’t a sweetheart. They were all sweethearts. But there was only so much conversation to be had about cold water and hard nipples, which seemed to make up Jessica’s entire existence.

  We were sitting in one of my favorite restaurants and the sad news was I was thinking more about the meal we were about to be served than the sex we were going to have later that night. Maybe I should break it off before it got that far? There was something that didn’t sit right with me, knowing how blatantly I was using her for sex, because I really had no interest in her outside of bed. Which probably meant I was growing up.

  Then she stopped the waiter who was walking by our table and ordered a thousand-dollar bottle of Cristal.

  “To celebrate!” she exclaimed.

  That’s right. No guilt. We were both using the other.

  My phone buzzed in the pocket of my suit coat. As a rule, I didn’t take calls while on a date. The hour or two I took for myself once or twice a month, I thought, was a way to incorporate balance in my life.

  Only calls from Jules or Daniel, who’d joined the company after completing his law degree and passing the bar, were an exception. But they knew how to play the game. If I didn’t answer, and it wasn’t critical, they knew I would get back to them as soon as possible. If I didn’t answer and it was critical, they would call, hang up,
then call again immediately.

  So when my phone stopped, then started buzzing again, I excused myself as politely as I could and left the table to stand in the lobby of the restaurant.

  The waiter brought Jessica the champagne she’d ordered, and she bounced in her chair like a teenaged girl made happy by a present. Considering she was only twenty-two, I supposed she wasn’t that far removed from here teenage years.

  Wait. Shit. Fuck growing up. Was I getting old?

  Impossible. In reality, I was only a few years older than Jessica. Then why did I feel twenty years older?

  I pulled out my phone and saw that it was Daniel who’d called twice.

  I hit the call-back button and didn’t have to wait for a full ring for Daniel to pick up.

  “Hey, Ethan. Where are you?”

  “On a date, why?”

  “At home?”

  “No, at Luigi’s. Why? What’s going on?”

  “Okay, listen, I need you to be cool right now. Are you going to be able to do that?”

  My gut tightened. I didn’t like the tone of Daniel’s voice. “I’m going to be cool if you tell me what’s going on. Now.”

  “Yeah, she was probably right to call me,” Daniel muttered.

  “Who called you about what? You gave me the bat signal, Daniel, tell me what’s happening.”

  “Okay, but just know she’s okay. Jules was in a car accident…”

  I didn’t hear anything after that. The buzzing in my ears drowned him out. I heard Jules. I heard accident.

  Then I heard hospital.

  “She didn’t want you to freak out, but they’re keeping her overnight for observation, so she won’t be at work tomorrow.”

  “Tell me where she is.”

  “She’s at Virginia Mason. But it’s just a concussion and some bruising around her face. She called and told me to let you know tomorrow because she didn’t want you to overreact, but I figured you would want to know.”

  She’d called Daniel. Who was supposed to tell me tomorrow.

  Good thing she wasn’t too hurt, because when I saw her, I was going to kill her.