Page 1 of Unbossly Manners

one

Chip Hanson’s head was in my crotch.

He’d been lost down there for ten minutes. I knew this because I’d been staring at the analog clock on the wall behind him almost the entire time. My roommate, Winona, found it last week on the curb with our neighbor’s trash. She cleaned it with bleach wipes, and now it was ticking away while her brother’s face was adrift below my navel.

He’d been working diligently but his efforts were doing nothing for me or my clit. Unless mild irritation counted as something.

I know what my best friend Selena would say. You’re too fucking polite, Peyton. If you don’t like it, get a vibrator and do it yourself.

She wasn’t wrong.

I shifted positions on the second-hand sofa, trying not to think about what the previous owners may have done on it. Almost everything in the apartment was second or third-hand. I couldn’t complain. None of it belonged to me. I was an interloper and Winona had been kind enough to let me stay in her spare room until I found a place.

“Eep!” My ass hit the pointy end of a pencil lodged between two cushions.

Chip glanced up with a smirk on his sweaty face, mistaking my yelp of pain for satisfaction. I smiled faintly and he dipped his face back under my skirt.

Oh God, when will this be over?

That was my first thought. The second, and more worrying one was:

What is wrong with me?

Sex and I were not friends. I’d go as far as to say, we were mortal enemies.

I’ve never had good sex. My high school boyfriend had been awkward and had no idea what he was doing. To be fair, neither did I. No shocker there. We were sixteen. It had been in his drafty basement on a bean bag chair, his French bulldog’s wet nose and sour breath an inch from my face.

That was eight years ago and things had not progressed.

In college, I fooled around with a few guys. I’d been drunk and curious; the guys, horny and eager. It never lasted long—the sex or the relationships.

In my junior year, I had a boyfriend. James O’Reilly. He was sweet. Shy. And less experienced than me. He had a funny thing against oral sex. He’d grown up Catholic, so I think that had something to do with it. I never dug too deep.

My senior year I dated a girl to see if my lack of enthusiasm was about dicks, and not the sex. The vag was even worse. I barely knew how to work my own lady bits. Bringing another one into the mix gave me a migraine.

Plus, I fantasized about guys, mainly hot actors with lots of muscles, more superheroes than real-life men. Safe men. Unattainable men.

In my last year of college, I met a Persian guy named Ari. He was sweet. But he could only have sex with the lights off. I don’t know if that was about him or me. When I asked him about it, he freaked out and pushed me off him in the middle of sex. I lost my balance, reached out, and grabbed the first hard thing—his penis. I broke it. He spent the night in the emergency room and weeks in rehab. Not sure how you rehab a broken penis.

I heard it got better, but he ghosted me after that—shocker—so I can only hope that’s true and I don’t have some weird karma thing out there and that’s why my vag is non-functioning.

Chip’s head popped up, his blond hair matted to his forehead. “Are you almost there?”

My cheeks burned hot. “Uh, yep.”

He rolled his eyes and tucked back between my legs.

Asshole.

My eyes scanned the small living room, falling on the peeling cream paint, the pipe that ran up the corner and provided heat in the winter, the dining table with the broken leg that I shoved books under to keep food from crashing to the floor. It was a far cry from the spacious house next to the Hudson in upstate New York I’d grown up in with my mom.

It was temporary and it was free and I was twenty-four and broke. It was good enough for the moment.

During our date, Chip had been funny and charming. We went rollerblading in Central Park. He thought it would be funny and retro. He’d clipped a small Bluetooth speaker to his backpack and put on a 90s playlist. He’d been patient and kind as I flailed on the road, desperate to avoid tourists on bikes, parents pushing strollers, joggers, and distracted pedestrians.

In hindsight, I wondered if he purposely suggested an activity where he would shine and I’d flounder. It certainly shifted the power dynamic toward him.

I glanced at the clock again.

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