Page 29 of The Hookup
I yelped and shot all over my stomach, and Ryder muttered, “Oh fuck.” I was vaguely aware that he came a few seconds after I did, but I was too far gone to focus on the screen.
Afterwards, as we both caught our breath, he said, “That yelp would definitely draw a crowd.”
“True.” I grinned and reached for some tissues. “I wasn’t expecting story time with our fap session, but I liked it. I could totally picture all of that.”
“Me, too.” He shifted his laptop and said, “I’m going to get cleaned up. Let’s meet back here in a few minutes.”
I rushed to the bathroom, rinsed off in the shower, and got ready for bed. Once I was dressed in a pair of cozy pajamas, I climbed under the covers and waited for Ryder to return.
A minute later, I heard him open his bedroom door, followed by what sounded like a whole herd of dogs barreling into the room. I caught a glimpse of fur and a wet nose before one of the dogs knocked the laptop onto the floor. Now I had a sideways view of the dust bunnies under the bed.
It took him a few moments, but he managed to get all the dogs to calm down. Then he picked up the laptop and climbed into bed with it as he said, “Sorry about that. The wolf pack gets a little wound up when they’re locked out of the room.” I noticed he’d put on a clean, white T-shirt and a pair of plaid pajama pants.
“Do they all sleep in your bed?”
“Three of them do. Sally prefers the couch across the room.” He stretched out on his side with his hand propping up his head. “So, when I was planning this date, I thought it might be fun to sync up a movie on Netflix and watch it together.”
“I’d rather talk to you.”
“Good. Me, too. There’s actually something I want to ask you.”
“Okay.”
He paused before saying, “Over the last two months, I tried to keep this strictly platonic. I thought that would make it easier to cope with the distance between us. But there’s nothingplatonic about all these thoughts, and dreams, and fantasies we’ve been having about each other, so I guess I’m wondering what you want to do. Do you want us to be friends with benefits, or something more?”
“You mean so much to me, Ryder. You’ve become an important part of my life, and I think we’re already more than friends with benefits. I’d say I want us to start dating, but is that really a possibility when we’re living so far apart?”
“I think we just proved it is.”
A huge smile spread across my face. “Yeah, I guess we did.”
8
Ryder
“You’re getting carried away,” Tank told me. “I know you want everything to be nice for Hal’s visit, but he’s not going to look under your fridge. There’s no reason to clean under there.”
“Help me move it anyway.”
My friend frowned, but he got up from my kitchen table and did as I asked. Between the two of us, we were able to step it forward a few feet. The fridge was a solidly built behemoth that was an unfortunate dark yellow color called “goldenrod.” It was two decades older than me, and I was convinced it would outlive us all.
As I swept up the dust bunnies and dog hair we’d revealed, Tank asked, “What exactly are you hoping for here, that Hal decides to stay forever when he sees how sparkling clean this place is?”
I went to the sink to fill my mop bucket. “Of course not. I always clean before I have company. If I’m doing extra, that’s just because this place needed a good spring cleaning.”
“It’s more than that. You seem nervous.”
“Maybe I am, a little. I really want him to be happy and comfortable here, and I want him to have a good time. Hedesperately needs a break, because he’s been so busy. Now that he finally has a week off, he’s chosen to spend it here, with me. I don’t want him to regret that decision.”
“Yeah, I get all of that,” Tank said, as I ran my mop over the patch of linoleum. “But is some part of you looking at this as a test run? You and Hal can’t keep the long-distance thing going forever, and you and your menagerie aren’t moving to San Francisco any time soon. So, the only way you two can be together is if he becomes so enamored of this place that he decides to move in.”
“There’s no way he’d ever do that. Even if he claimed he wanted to, I’d talk him out of it. He’d be throwing away the career he’s working really hard for, not to mention leaving behind all of his friends, who are like a family to him.”
“You’re making excuses.”
I stuck the mop in the bucket and turned to him with a frown. “I’m being realistic.”
Tank ignored that and said, “Here’s what I find confusing. We both know you really care about Hal, which is why you couldn’t leave it as a Vegas fling. Then you couldn’t just leave it as a friendship. Now you two have been long-distance dating for the last couple of months, but that’s got to evolve, too.”
