Page 6 of The Couch Where It Happens

“It’s fine. I mean, I’m sorry too because I—that thing happened—I couldn’t help—”

He waved a hand vaguely in the air between them, and she focused on the movement so she didn’t have to look at his blushing sweet face and feel like crap because she’d tried to take advantage of him. He was a man, and no apology was going to change the fact that sometimes things happened to their cocks. Big things.

Yeah, it was a real big thing,that damn voice said before she could shut it up.

“I should go.” He sounded as reluctant and weird as she felt. When he reached for the door handle, he couldn’t seem to remember how to depress the lever on the top and pull at the same time, even though he must have opened the mechanism a hundred times.

“Of course.” If she moved closer to help him escape, she might throw herself on him, smash her lips onto his, and beg him to stay. While they might be able to fabricate excuses and wall off what had happened upstairs, putting her mouth on his lips wouldn’t be an accident.

She stayed five feet away, but she could still feel him pressing behind her, even though her eyes saw him in front of her. She could even, she thought, catch the scent of that heated deodorant and Hank-ness that was going to haunt her evening as soon as he left.

“Goodbye, Emma.”

“Bye, Hank.”

After she’d closed the door behind him, she realized neither of them had said see you later.

Chapter 3

The male of the domestic fowl

The forty-five minutes afterHank fled felt to Emma like a hangover morning, even though it was night and she was slowly drinking her first bottle of pale ale and making dinner for one. The tasks of boiling the remainder of a box of penne, topping it with the scrapings from a previously opened jar of red sauce, and microwaving frozen peas didn’t require concentration.

The peas spilled on the kitchen floor and rolled under the fridge, little round fuckers.

While she ate, she searched websites for potential end tables, sighed over prices, and then over her phone’s low battery. Leaving it charging in the kitchen, she wandered through the house with no interruptions to distract her from the topic of the evening: the erection that had definitely, absolutely, no question, been under Hank’s shorts. And her matching wet panties.

One minute, they’d been moving a couch and having cold drinks; the next, they’d been like the couple inDirty Dancing, and then he’d sprinted away.

Her feet took her upstairs, even though her brain told her to tackle a chore. She sat on the couch they had carried together. Maybe he would return, and they could sit here and laugh about the absurdity of the two of them, best friends, being hot for each other.

Funny. Haha.

It wasn’t absurd, though. Being with Hank wasn’t at all absurd.

It might be kind of perfect.

She rested her head on the cushions she had gripped earlier. He’d probably never climb the stairs again. Her plans for a bed and breakfast and all the work to realize this midcentury modern theme were a mistake. A fucking expensive mistake, according to her bank balance. Although not as big of a mistake as thrusting herself at Hank’s cock. That was borderline psycho. The fact of his erection didn’t mean she was free to rub on it, not when they’d always been Donkey and Shrek.

Punching the couch didn’t make her churning thoughts magically organize into orderly sparkling ideas. It merely dented the cushion. She lifted the orange rectangle to fluff it back into shape.

There was a bunch of paper stuck between the padding and the frame. A partially crumpled magazine, so obnoxiously colorful and simultaneously suffused with a yellow-green hue that it must have been vintage, had been stuffed under the cushion. She smoothed the crinkled cover.Hot Shortzwas the name of this magazine she’d never heard of, and smaller print below the title proclaimed the contents to be shocking true confessions. While she doubted that anything from the eighties could shock in thisinternet century, all these exclamation points were exactly what she needed tonight.

The edition was dated September 1984 and showed a woman with long, dark hair wearing tiny white denim shorts and an unbuttoned pink oxford shirt tied at her waist, apparently without a bra. The photo managed to conceal the parts that weren’t supposed to show on grocery store racks. “My Hot Summer Break” one of the bigger headlines read, with a smaller type underneath that asked, “How can I find that Princeton guy?”

A mindless trashy magazine was a mediocre distraction, but since her phone was still in the kitchen and she was on the balcony, she might as well flip through it. At the spot where the partially crushed pages ended and the smooth, undamaged ones began, a half-page photo showed the same woman from the cover, this time spread on her back across a rumpled bed with a shirtless man facedown beside her. Her pink shirt had come untied, and the man’s hand caressed her stomach. Fucking sexy photo, even if his eighties khakis were far too loose.

Emma glanced at the article below the picture. The headline proclaimed it to be a special triple-length bonus letter.

Dear Editor,

I need advice about whether I should try to find last night’s guy or let fate handle it for me.

But first, I should tell the Readers what happened. I spend summers as a live-in house manager in Sag Harbor, part of the Hamptons, for owners who come out from Manhattan on weekends. Lovely people, as long as you pretend the dribble you get from their trickle-down Reaganomics is Dom Perignon rather than flat Mello Yello.

During the week, I supervise the pool cleaners, housekeepers, and landscapers, schedule maintenance visits, and keep the cars, boats, and bar gassed and ready. On Fridays, I set up the kitchens with drinks and food for a weekend of Wall Street entertaining.

That would be the difference between running her own bed and breakfast and being a house manager, Emma thought. She would be the house cleaner, the landscaper, the linen changer, all of it. No hiring out.

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