Page 14 of Made Over by Meredith

“Tickles?” I repeated with a slow-growing smile. “What’s that mean?”

She dragged her fingernails up and down my forearm, raising the tiny hairs all over my body. The sensation arrowed straight to my balls. “Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “Good tickles.”

She grinned, satisfied, and sat taller. “So, unit three: sexting. Let’s get to it.”

“You’re going to make me sext Celeste?”

“I’m not gonna make you do anything. You can do whatever you want, but we’re not going to jump right into the ‘I want to feel you come around my fingers’ texts quite yet.”

“Christ,” I mumbled, rubbing at my forehead. She was here to help me get Celeste on a date, and yet all I could think about was her goddamn fingernails raking across my scalp and my fingers in her pussy.

“We have to ease in,” she went on, unaware of the explicit thoughts ransacking my brain. My new favorite porno, apparently. “Get your phone out. I need to read through the conversation so far.”

I happily handed it over, ready to move on from the image of Meredith on her back in my bed, dead bugging while she called out to God because of my tongue on her.

She bobbed around her in seat, absently dancing to the Beastie Boys. “What you have here is fine. Nice guy Aiden, but you need her to know you’re thinking about her. You want her, yeah? So…”

When she started typing, I reached across the table and wrapped my hand around her wrist. “What are you doing?”

“Sending poop emojis. What do you think?”

I shook my head at her like she was a misbehaving child. She smirked impishly in return. Then she read aloud, “Been thinking about you every day, lovely. Can’t wait to take you out, and I get to experience your smile in person again.”

“Wow.”

“What?” She flipped my cell phone around so I could see she didn’t send the message. “You don’t like it.”

“No, I do. I always get so in my head about texts, but you literally wrote what was in my head.”

“Why do you look upset about that?”

“I’m not upset.” I placed my elbows on the table, my palms on my temples as I glowered at the table. “I just never thought girls wanted to know what was in our heads.”

She laughed outright. “Of course we do.”

“Ryan says you can’t be a simp,” I said, referring to one of my twin brothers.

“Ryan’s a douche, and the only reason he gets laid so much is because he’s a hot baseball player.” She set my cell phone on the table, sliding it so it was right under me, my gaze still focused down as I digested this information.

Ryan was younger, but he had an inch and a few pounds on me. He lived in Cleveland with his twin Tristan and our older sister, Rosie. He played for an exhibition baseball team, but we were all still pretty close. Unless we were arguing, which Ryan seemed to do a lot. With the entire family.

“So you want a simp?” I asked, meeting Meredith’s gaze, and she lifted a shoulder.

“Do women want a guy to simp for them? Yeah, who wouldn’t want to be loved by someone with their whole heart? Me, personally? I think it could be nice, although I’ve got a lot of hard edges, and I wouldn’t want to hurt them.”

“So you don’t want a guy to know your favorite drink is whiskey soda and have it waiting for you when you arrive?”

“No,” she started, briefly dipping her gaze to her glass. “I’d like that.”

“What about texting you, telling you that they couldn’t stop thinking about your laugh? How it fills the room. How they’d be able to find you anywhere because of it.”

She nodded slowly, her throat bobbing on a swallow.

“How about texting you before bed, telling you that they want to know what your skin feels like, what the slope of your neck tastes like?”

Her mouth opened on a breath, and she nodded a few times, eyes glazed over. “Yeah, you…” She laughed, tucking her hair behind her ears, then sipped her drink. “You don’t even need my help. You’re an expert already.”

I guess I was. I just didn’t know it until Meredith.

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