Page 45 of Proposal Play
“You would,” she says.
“It was a compliment,” I say, preening. Fucking preening.
She’s quiet for a beat, sighs, then says, “It wasn’t just your dick. It was your kissing, if you must know.”
King Asher rules the world. I park my hands behind my head and don’t bother fighting off a grin. “My lips and my dick are both extraordinary, you’re saying?”
“Oh shut up.”
“But you like my mouth,” I tease.
“You’re the worst.”
“That’s not what you said fifteen minutes ago.”
“What did I say then?” she asks.
I meet her eyes. “It was sort of like…oh, oh, oh.”
“You’re mocking me for having an orgasm? Real nice, Asher.”
“You can climb on me and have another,” I say.
“That won’t be awkward at all.”
I drop the teasing, then return to what she said earlier. “What were you going to tell me before? You said you had something to tell me.” I pause, since I’ve got a feeling what it is, and maybe I want to beat her to it. The words taste like sand, but they need to be said. “Were you going to say that it can’t happen again?”
She grimaces. “No, that wasn’t what I was going to say. But that probably shouldn’t happen again.”
My chest aches, like I’ve been punched. She’s right, and I can’t stand that she’s right, even though I was the one who suggested that the moment on the couch is best not repeated. “It shouldn’t,” I say.
“I don’t want to screw things up with us. Our friendship. My brother. It would be too messy,” she says, her tone sad.
“It would,” I say evenly. “It definitely would.”
“Sex and stuff complicate everything,” she adds, like she needs to sell me on the one-time only aspect of tonight.
I don’t want her to think I’m anything but on board. “Sex is the most complicated. Well, not if you’re dry-humping me,” I deadpan.
She swats me again, and I want—oh, how I fucking want—to grab that hand and press kisses all over it. To draw her close. To run my hands through those waves of blonde-brown hair. But I don’t. There will be no encore. “Look, I know it’ll be hard for you to resist me, but I have faith in you,” I say.
She smiles softly, yawning again. “I’ll do my best. Also,what I was going to say is I’m Quick-Draw Maeve at a lot of things,” she says, then ten seconds later, she’s fast asleep.
And I’m wide awake. Like I am most nights for a while. I usually read myself to sleep, but tonight, my thoughts are keeping me company.
I’m thinking about how she felt in my arms. At the beginning and during the middle, and then, yeah, at the end. I turn and watch my wife as she slides deeper into slumber while the lights of Vegas flicker in the distance. Something tugs on my heart, and I wish I could stop time and just experience this moment with her again and again.
Which is a whole new problem entirely, and much more complicated than a box of condoms.
17
DOUBLE CONGRATULATIONS
Asher
Not only do Vegas hotels pump something into the air to hold you hostage in the casinos longer, but they must also lace the water in the rooms with sleeping potion. Because when I finally bust out of dreamland, I’m blinking, bleary-eyed, and—I check the time—totally fucking late.
We missed our eleven a.m. flight.