Page 67 of The Friendship Study

“On our date,” she says. That feels like a million years ago. I’m a different person now. She feels different to me, too. “I wondered how many people you’d fucked in this truck,” she whispers. She looks excited by my answering blush.

“I want you,” I say.

“What does that mean?”

“It means I don’t want to be just friends anymore.”

“What about...?”

“I don’t care about the study. I care about you, Lulu. And if you don’t want...this.” I gesture between us. “I get it. That’s OK. But I need you to know that I’m falling for you.”

Lulu is still for a moment, her gaze bouncing back and forth between my eyes and my mouth.

“Say something,” I whisper, because I can’t catch my breath.

She lunges, swinging her leg over my lap, taking my face in her hands. She kisses me, and we haven’t kissed in so long. Not since our first kiss. She laughs into my mouth, and I swallow the sound, get full on it. “What are you doing, baby?” I ask as her hands roam under my shirt.

“Trying to get you to fuck me in your truck.”

I pull back. “The first time we fuck like that, it’s going to be in my bed.” I wipe at my mouth as I flip through all the things I want to do to her and ask her to do to me, now that we can touch without pretense or rules.

She nips at my lower lip. “Let’s go, then.”

“Yeah?”

She pops open the door in response, hops down onto the gravel path to my front steps. I take a second to readjust myself. I haven’t had much sex since my accident, a few dates and hookups with men and women who wanted me to talk too much or share more. Not with someone who knows me the way Lulu does, who will be here in the morning.

“For the record,” I say as I put my key into my front door lock. “I want to take your clothes off and my clothes off and I want to wear a condom. I want to fuck you,” I say. “With my dick. I don’t want to just watch. I don’t want those old rules. Not this time.”

She holds me by the back of my shirt as she follows me inside. I keep the lights off. Betty makes a quietprrwowfrom somewhere in the living room.

“Yes,” she says. “That’s what I want, too.”

“OK.” Then we stare at each other in my entryway. Apparently, I’m all talk because now I don’t know what to do with her. But Lulu does, she always knows.

She pushes me against the wall, lifting up on her toes to kiss me again, her tongue a soft brush against mine. My hands ache to be filled with her and I realize, slowly, that they can be. I start in her hair, feeling the long strands between my fingertips. Her back is strong, her shoulders broad. Her blouse soft, the skin underneath softer. She huffs into my mouth, her kiss turning into a smile, all teeth as my fingers run down her rib cage. Finally, my hands land on her ass. Her cutoff jeans, the same ones she wore the first day of the study, make it easy to grip her. To pull her up into me, cup her ass. My hands on her border on frantic. I’m still not sure this is real, that she is real, and I want to hold on to her so that she doesn’t float away. Her lips taste smoky and sweet like the whiskey she shot earlier. I want to know what she tastes like everywhere else.

I pull away from her lips. “Bedroom?”

She nods, pulling me with her, kicking off her Keds, letting go of my hand to unbutton her shirt. I turn the light on in the bedroom so that she’s cast in the warmest, golden glow. I almost can’t hear from the blood rushing through my ears. My skin is numb and sensitive at the same time. The tips of my fingers tingle. My dick throbs, painfully so.

I’ve never felt better. I’m thinking too slowly but everything happens so fast. My shirt is off, my skin pebbling in the cold. She’s pulling my shirt over my head, popping the button on my jeans, sliding between clothing and skin.

I press my mouth to her collarbone, her chest, as her fingers tense around my length, follow the lace of her bra over the swell of her breast. I want to remember this, the freckle she has on her right breast, the sound she made when I brushed my thumb over her panties, her hair spread around her like a haze. “Can I...”

“Can you what?” she asks, her tongue between her teeth. Her lashes seem to grow longer with each purposeful blink.

“Are you...are you trying to make me say it?”

“If you want to do the crime you have to do the time, Jesse Logan.”

“I don’t think that’s how that saying goes.”

She laughs and I want to rememberthis. The way she tips her chin up, her smile spilling over her face, her back arching, the sound of her happiness as it sends goose bumps along my skin. If I remember nothing else from this night, I want to remember Lulu’s laugh. The way it fills me up so that if we stopped right here, I’d be happier than I’ve ever been. I kneel at the edge of the bed, pressing her thighs apart. “Lulu?”

“Yes?” Her voice giggly and golden.

“Can I eat you out?”

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