Page 19 of The Hopelessly Bromantic Duet

The sentence dies unfinished.This setup won’t work for me because I planned to fuck my roommatemakes me sound as douchey as I did in the coffee shop.

But the idea’s about the same.I wanted my roomie to purge my steam wand with his mouth.

I offer a sanitized version. “I can’t go back to 24News and say I need a new place because I want to date my roommate,” I say, and I squirm a little inside from the discomfort of that honesty. I wanted to sleep with him, and I wanted to date him.

But doing either of those while we’re living together would be a huge mistake. What if we bang once, and it’s terrible? Or, what if it’s great and we don’t stop? Until we do stop—because eventually, we will.

That’s just how things go.

They end.

Then, our daily lives would be comprised of awkward tiptoeing around each other while he sees someone else, and it would mean kicking myself for getting involved in the first place.

Thank fuck we didn’t even really kiss.

“Right. We can’t live together and go out,” he says. I wonder if he just went through the same thought process. If he saw the exact ending I watched play out in my head.

“Right,” I repeat.

Jude pats the couch. “So, it’s just you and me, living here. Just reprogramming my brain,” he adds, tapping his temple. “Roomie, roomie, roomie. Not hottie, hottie, hottie.”

I give a small smile that disappears in a second. “Guess we aren’t meeting for that drink.”

“Or that presuming.”

“There will be no presuming.”

“Shame, that,” he says, but he’s not cheeky Jude now. He sounds resigned to our new reality.

The sex genie is going back in the bottle. I’m not sure how to rank this on the bad-news scale, but on the bummer scale, it’s damn high.

We’re both quiet for a minute, then Jude breaks the silence. “So, the T is really for Terry?”

I sink to the floor in despair, then wrap my arms around my knees. “Yes,” I say dully. “But don’t call me that, please. No one does. I hate it.”

“You made that quite clear. But what does the J stand for?”

I meet his gaze head-on. Gorgeous blue eyes twinkle with mischief like they did when I met him.

“Doesn’t matter,” I say, waving a hand dismissively. “I’ve been TJ for a long time. TJ Ashford. I do everything I can to avoid my given name.”

Especially after I was incessantly mocked for it when I was younger. Kids can be such jackasses.

Jude nods. “I’ll stop pressing you.”

That’s another thing that won’t happen—Jude using his ways to get my name out of me. I was looking forward to learning how long it’d take for his tongue to get me to break. With those lips? Probably a minute, tops.

“Thanks,” I say.

“Though, I’d be a lot happier if I could introduce you as Terry, the guy I’m shagging, not TJ, my new roomie because fate decided to fuck me without lube.”

I level a steely stare his way. “Jude, I would never fuck you without lube.”

We both crack up, breaking into peals ofyou’ve got to be kidding melaughter.

Eventually, we catch our breaths. “I guess we’ll have to be friends,” I say, then I stand and extend a hand.

Jude rises and shakes. “To friendship. But I do have one question. What if I like Led Zeppelin?”