Page 57 of The Kiss Principle

But I knew it was the rush of hormones, the release, the fact that I’d gotten off with another human being, a real live honest-to-God person, instead of my hand or a toy.

So, when Zé laughed quietly and said, “God, I needed that,” I knew I’d done that right thing, not saying anything. Maybe he saw something on my face because he said, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Am I okay?” I asked. “You looked like you went into a coma.”

He gave me that slow, beautiful smile. Taking me by the hand, he lay down again, and he pulled me down next to him. Heopened his mouth. Then he closed it again. He opened it again, and the struggle played itself out in his face.

“For fuck’s sake,” I said, giving him a push to roll over. I pulled him to my chest, and we squirmed around until we were settled: his head pillowed on my arm, his legs slotted with mine. Maybe he should have been big spoon, but my last thought, as sleep rolled in, was that he fit right in my arms.

15

Zé, it turned out, was a lot of things. He was sweet, obviously. He was kind. He was patient. He was a world-class doofus. He had that lazy smile that turned me inside out. He was hot, okay? In bed, he was thoughtful, generous, and exciting. And, it turned out, he had moved into my head and was taking up a lot of space.

After getting up to feed Igz, I stayed awake a long time, thinking. A year from now, we’d be...what? I mean, what was this? A onetime thing? A meaningless hookup? Neither of those captured the fact that we lived in the same house and saw each other all day, every day. Fuck buddies? Maybe. I mean, we were friends, certainly. Good friends, actually, especially since we hadn’t known each other for long. But we’d clicked from the beginning: I was an asshole, and he was Zé, and that meant we worked perfectly together. And the best part was that nothing ever felt complicated or messy or difficult. He was so easy to be with. So easy to spend time with. He wasn’t a talker, but when he did, I could listen to him for as long as he wanted to talk, and he could tell me about what Igz had done that day, or something interesting he’d read (I was going to have to get a subscription toThe Atlantic), or something funny he’d seen on a walk. Or we didn’t have to talk at all. We could sit there and watch TV. Or we didn’t even need TV. We could be together in the same space, and I didn’t have to do anything, and every once in a while, I’d look up and think about how his hair was hanging in his eyes again, or he’d be looking up too and he’d smile before he went back to his phone, and he had this way of raising his hips andstraightening his shirt, and sometimes I could see the ridges of his abs—

Well, I thought as I heard my own thoughts, that answers one question: I’m definitely bi.

So, we could do this. We could be together. Fuck buddies who were also amazing friends, two guys who wanted to spend time together, wanted to spend every minute together, who worked together and lived together and were raising a child together, who had mind-blowing sex and shared a bed.

Sure, I thought, and the voice in my head sounded a lot like mine when I was about to drop a particularly devastating truth bomb on Augustus. Or you could nut up and admit that you’re in love with him.

My first reaction was to push it away. And then...not. Because was it so scary? From ten thousand feet up, it probably sounded like a lot—I mean, I’d known him a little more than a month. But we’d been together so much of that time. Gone through so much together. Everything with Igz, the good and the bad. Lou and the job and the interview. Mom and Cannon. He’d even listened to me talk about Chuy and Augustus. He’d seen me lose my shit, and a couple of times, he’d lost his. And instead of going our separate ways, here we were. Together. That meant something, right?

In the other room, Igz began to cry.

Zé stirred, but I pressed him back into the mattress and kissed his nape. “I’ll get her.”

His hand snaked around and caught me as I was trying to rise. He turned and kissed me. Then he flopped back onto the bed and, to judge by his breathing, was asleep again instantly.

“You could have at least pretended to fight me on it,” I whispered as I got up.

He started to snore.

Igz wasn’t happy with me, and she let me know it. I changed her and got her a bottle, and she was a pleasant weight in my arm as I made coffee. Then we sat at the table, and I got out my phone, and I said, “Since you’re a girl, feel free to help me out at any point. And don’t internalize that. And don’t attribute this to casual sexism.”

Fortunately, she was in a milk coma and couldn’t tell me what she thought about me.

What was I supposed to do now? That was the question I was hung up on. I mean, I liked him. Okay, no denying that. The sex had been fantastic. Check that box. We already lived together, so… That was where it got weird. I mean, did I ask him on a date? To our living room? To watchSportsCentertogether?

Igz told me what she thought about that with a loud belch.

“Everyone’s a critic,” I said. “But you haven’t given me a single idea.”

What about flowers? Or breakfast? Or breakfast in bed with flowers? I could call in an order right now, go pick it up, and be back before he got out of bed. That would be some romantical shit, right? I almost called Augustus, and then I slammed on the brakes. First, because it would mean telling him everything I’d kept from him—all the bullshit with Chuy, Igz, Mom and Cannon, all of it. And second, because—

Why?

Because I didn’t want to tell him, not until I knew it was more than a fuck-buddy sleepover.

“Sure,” I told Igz. “That sounded good, right?”

Igz did not agree.

But maybe breakfast in bed and flowers would be way too much? Zé was so cool. So relaxed. Maybe he’d wake up, and his eyes would get a little wider when he saw the food and the flowers and me, the sex-deprived, affection-starved loser who,after a night that had barely gone beyond heavy petting, had fallen head over heels in love.

“I am not pathetic,” I told Igz.

She closed her eyes. The queen could not be bothered with such horseshit.

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