Page 15 of Lovers in Lockdown

Ellie’s in lockdown with her boyfriend, who she’s been with for six months and lived with for two. I’ve never met him and by the way things are going between them, I don’t think I ever will. It says a lot about their relationship that Ellie hasn’t bothered to introduce her boyfriend to her best friend of over twenty years.

I laugh. ‘Trouble in paradise?’

‘Oh, Hon,’ she sighs. ‘I was thinking about breaking up with him before all of this pandemic stuff and now I’ve bloody missed my chance, so I’m stuck with the idiot because of the stupid lockdown rules. And he won’t even give me an orgasm every now and then to make the situation better.’

‘Shitting hell, Ellie. You must be climbing the walls.’

‘I really am, so count yourself lucky that you have Noah’s face to keep you entertained.’

Bless her little horny heart. I’ve never known Ellie to go a week without sex, even when she was single. Her vibrator is probably getting so much use that it won’t be long before it breaks from water damage.

I’ll order her a new one to cheer her up as soon as we get off the phone.

‘Honestly, the fact that he looks like an Avenger is supremely inconvenient. I’ve gone through four pairs of underwear already.’

‘Gross. Be careful, you don’t wanna give yourself a rash. Why don’t you just fuck him? That’d pass the time.’

God, I wish.

‘But Ican’t.It would just make living together awkward and who knows how long we’re going to be stuck here for?’

‘It wouldn’t be awkward if you didn’t catch feelings. You could just bang until the end of lockdown and then go your separate ways when it’s over. It would be the perfect way to kill time and it would save you from developing a yeast infection from your disgustingly wet knickers.’

Girl’s got a point.

‘Look,’ she says, ‘I have to go. But do it. Fuck him. If not for you, then for me, because at least one of us should be having sex.’

I toss the phone onto the bed and bury my head in the pillows.

Ellie’s suggestion is tempting. It really would make lockdown more bearable if Noah was giving me orgasms every night. I bet he knows his way around a woman’s lady garden, no problem.

But I’ve never been a girl who’s good at casual sex. I just can’t trust my heart not to get involved. And, anyway, he probably doesn’t even see me like that.

I groan into my pillow.

Here I am, stuck in a tiny apartment with a walking wet dream for what’s looking to be months on end, and I can’t even make the most of this shitty situation for fear of catching feelings and making things awkward between us.

Sigh.

I guess it will be me who needs the new vibrator after all.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Noah

A week and ten cold showers later, around three in the afternoon, while Honey is napping and snoring surprisingly aggressively for such a small and dainty person, I receive an email from my boss that has my fist twitching to send a punch through my computer screen.

In light of the current global crisis, he wants me to curate an entirely new menu ready for when we reopen. Oh, and I’ll only be on half pay, because he can’t afford to pay me full wages.

Asshole.

I’m not paid enough as it is, let alone on fifty flipping percent. He’s lying, too. He absolutely can afford to pay me; he just doesn’t want to. I’d put all fifty percent on him not taking a pay cut himself. He takes home a seven-figure salary, and pays the rest of us peanuts.

But I don’t have a choice.

The man pays my bills, whether I like it or not. And I guess fifty percent is better than zero percent and the fact of the matter is that I just can’t afford to tell him to go and suck an egg.

That doesn’t mean though that I’m about to drop everything I’m doing, i.e. binge watching the entirety of The Good Place, to bow down to his request. I’ll make a start tomorrow.

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