Page 31 of The Kiss Principle

He grinned and pushed tousled hair back. “You’re sure—”

“Go!”

He grabbed his keys and wallet and then came over to where Igz and I were standing. He bent, and for a moment, the way his face came toward me, I had this panicked thought that—what?

But instead, he kissed Igz on the cheek. Then he checked me, frowned, and said, “You can’t even stand up straight.”

“Yeah, but I can still beat your ass. How does that sound?”

“Do you hear the kind of abuse I put up with, Igz?”

“You’ve got until the count of ten. If you’re still dicking around, Igz is going to see me open baby’s first can of whoop-ass.”

“I’ve never heard someone say that in real life before. Only on TV, you know. Old TV.”

“Ten.”

“Maybe I should take Igz with me.”

“Nine.”

“I could go pick up smoothies and come back.”

“José Teixeira, I hope you don’t think I’m going to go easy on you because you’ve got a booboo on your knee.”

Laughing, he backed toward the door, hands raised in surrender. “Call me if you need me.”

“I hope you have a miserable fucking night, you selfish son of a bitch.”

That only made him laugh harder. I could hear him after he shut the door.

Igz was giving me a look.

“What?” I told her. “He likes it.”

Sitting with Igz, with my back screaming at me like this, wasn’t an option, so we hobbled around and pretended to listen to the TV until she fell asleep. I got her in her crib, and then I retreated to my bedroom. I didn’t keep anything stronger than Tylenol in the house because of Chuy, so I popped a couple of those, laid out my heating pad, and stripped down to my boxers. I cracked a window, stuffed a towel under my door, and got into bed. I even managed not to scream, cry, or moan in the process.

The initial injury had been a mountain biking accident, and honestly, it could have been so much worse. For the most part, I was fine, but I carried stress in my back, and since I was almost always stressed—well, you get the idea.

I got a joint out of the nightstand and toked up, which isn’t super easy if you’re lying in bed, to be honest. But, since I’m a pro, I managed. It didn’t take long for the weed to hit me: pulses of cloudy warmth, like a dragon was sitting inside my chest and breathing big, smoky breaths. That image made me giggle. Maybe it was hitting me harder, a distant part of me thought, because I’d been cutting back around Igz. Maybe I was becoming a lightweight.

But maybe not. Because usually, taking a couple of Tylenol and getting blazed would be enough to help me fall asleep, especially with the heating pad. Tonight, though, the pain seemed worse, and I found myself lying there, staring at the ceiling between hits. After a while, I grabbed my phone and started watching porn. I pushed my boxers down and took my dick in my hand. It felt good, every inch of my skin alive with the contact, but most of that was the weed. I watched the girl in the video and pumped myself for a while, but the closest I gotwas a semi, and then even that went away. It was embarrassing to admit, but more often than not, that had been the way of things. I’d read about it online. Stress, of course. Every fucking thing in my universe comes back to stress. Oh, sure, they talked about other things. Recreational drugs like cannabis might make it difficult to sustain an erection. Well, fuck that. And they talked about depression. I’m not depressed, I thought as I looked up at the ceiling. I massively need to nut and can’t get a boner. What’s depressing about that?

The knock at the door made me scramble to pull up my boxers. It took me two tries to stop the video on my phone, and a part of my brain was trying to calculate if someone on the other side of the door would be able to hear the moans of “Oh, Daddy,” and “I’ve been a bad girl.” When the fucking thing finally stopped, my heart was pounding, and sweat covered me, and the weed was about to send me into a panic attack.

“Fernando?” Zé called through the door quietly. “Are you awake?”

“Uh, yeah.” And that weed-soaked part of my brain told me, a moment later, I was an idiot—because why hadn’t I pretended to be asleep? “One sec.”

I managed to lever myself up from the bed. I found a T-shirt, and of course, it was one that Augustus, with his trademark classy humor, had given me: SAFETY FIRST it said, orange letters against black. DON’T STICK YOUR FINGER WHERE YOU WOULDN’T STICK YOUR and then a traffic cone that was clearly supposed to be a dick. It made me giggle as I pulled it on, and I was still laughing when I opened the door. It only took me three tries before I remembered the towel.

Zé stood in the hall, staring at me. I was still giggling, and he seemed to process me in stages before he said, “Good God, Fernando, are you high?”

His eyes were a little wider than I remembered, and I wanted to check, but he caught my hand and said, “My eyes are the same size they always are, Fernando.”

But they looked bigger.

“They’re not,” he said, and I wondered if I was saying everything out loud or if he could read my mind. His eyebrows made little fuzzy mountains. “You’re saying everything out loud.”

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