Page 62 of Sleepover

Chapter 29

Sawyer

“You’re fucking her,” Brooks says mildly.

The party’s over; the guests have gone home. Lucy’s parents have left, and my parents are tucking Jonah in upstairs while Brooks and I clean up the kitchen.

“What are you talking about?”

“That woman. Ellie.”

“Elle.”

“You’re fucking her.” He gestures with the frosting-covered fork he’s holding.

“I’m not fucking her.”

Okay, that’s a technicality. I did fuck her. And if all goes according to plan, I will fuck her. But presently Elle and I are post-fucking and pre-fucking, and thus not fucking.

“You want to fuck her,” Brooks says. “You’re going to fuck her.”

The man can read minds. It is his best and his worst trait.

He crosses his arms and glowers at me. “Don’t do it. She isn’t that kind of woman. You can tell just by looking at her. The kind of woman you can fuck and walk away from is like dark chocolate. You know that cracking noise dark chocolate makes when you bite it or break it? That’s called snap. Dark chocolate has snap. It has a strong backbone. It knows what it is. Ellie—”

“Elle,” I correct involuntarily, and he gives me another look: Oh, Jesus, man, you are a mess.

“—Elle has a soft-and-chewy center. She’s a caramel.” He jams the fork into the dishwasher, following it up with another handful of silverware.

“You’re a lunatic.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Tell me you don’t know what I mean.”

I close my eyes, briefly.

“Sawyer, she’s your neighbor. Bad idea. Don’t do it.”

“I think it might be too late.”

Brooks stares at me.

I tell him about the wedding and the agreement Elle and I made. I give him a quick rundown of the foreplay situation, details omitted, just enough so he grasps the lay of the land. No pun intended.

“We both totally know what we’re getting ourselves into,” I say in conclusion.

“No one ever knows what they’re getting themselves into,” Brooks says. “Sex is like a giant black hole. You think you’re in charge, but there’s all this gravitational pull and antimatter, and before you know it you’ve been sucked into something that even the world’s best scientists don’t know shit about.”

I eye him. “Does this have anything to do with that woman you said you shouldn’t have slept with? Your friend’s girlfriend’s friend?”

“We’re talking about you, not me,” Brooks says.

“Sure we are.”

“Don’t try to change the subject.”

I grab a handful of paper plates and shove them en masse into the kitchen garbage. He’s wrong. He’s wrong about Elle, and I need him to know it.

“She’s strong,” I say. “Her asshole ex-husband cheated on her in the worst way, and she didn’t fall apart. She’s raising her kid on her own. She stands up for herself and her people. Give her some credit, okay? She’s not a caramel. She knows her own mind, and she knows where she and I stand, so mind your own black hole of sex nothingness and let me mind mine.”

---