Page 92 of Plays Well With Others

What? Hold on. She just asked me something. Fuck. I have no clue what I do or don’t mind. I hate that I drifted off while she was talking to me, even though I drifted to thoughts of her. “What did you say?” I ask, offering a guilty smile that ought to cover my sin.

She smiles warmly. “The olive oil. To your left. Do you mind handing it to me?”

I set down the knife, grab the bottle, and give it to her like a fucking champ of a sous chef who is in the zone all the time.

As she drizzles some in the pan, she asks gently, “Where’d you go? Were you replaying the game again?”

My heart squeezes at the question. Quinn never asked. No one I’ve dated really has. Everyone assumes I’m bored when I drift off. But she asks the question with genuine care and interest, as if she thinks I must have gone someplace important—like at the farmers’ market when I was moody dwelling on the game. Now she’s asked me to open up to her as part of the girlfriend lessons.

No fucking way am I going to blurt out that I was picturing a future I’ll never have with her. So I omit that while still being as open as I can. “Just thinking about some plays we reviewed today. I’m going to do an extra workout tomorrow. Hey, you know what else I wanted to know?” I ask, doing a one-eighty back to our sexperiment. “What about the dildo? When did you buy that?”

She drops the chicken cubes in the sizzling pan and shoots me a playful look. “Last night after I left the sidewalk sale. There was a Good Vibes shop selling their wares, so I grabbed one.”

I need a moment with that image. “Let me get this right. You walked home from the sidewalk sale with a dildo in your purse?”

“I took a Lyft,” she corrects.

“Did you practice last night?”

“And this morning too.”

My brain sticks on that image. Rachel in bed, or on the couch, or here at the counter, sucking on a schlong to get ready for me.

Now, that’s an image I could get lost in, but I’m all focus now, so when she gestures to a drawer and asks, “Can you grab my lucky spatula?” I sayhell yes.

“It’s the red one,” she adds.

I grab it. “Why is this spatula lucky?”

She stops to think. “Hmm. Good question. I think because I used it when my girlfriends came over for my ‘you’re free’dinner.”

I regard the spatula with dirty deeds on my brain. “Want to find other ways to get lucky with it?”

* * *

Later, she’s bent over the kitchen counter and I’m balls-deep in her, smacking her ass with the lucky spatula.

“Yes, mark me, Carter, please,” she cries out.

“You love it when I mark you,” I rasp out.

“I do,” she says, nodding savagely, urging me on.

Another smack. Another moan.

Then a plea. “Harder.”

I give it to her exactly how she wants it, and soon she’s coming, and I’m following her there, my world blinking off for mind-numbing seconds of inimitable bliss inside my woman.

Only she’s not mine.

Not really. She’s only mine for a few more dates.

But I will savor them all. “Can I spend the night again?”

“For easy access?”

“No. Because I want to.”

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