My skin roasts with shame. I cringe at my own deception. I knew my reasons for pretending to climax that first time— making him feel good. I can only imagine Meegan’s. When I’d done it, had it reminded him of her? Of that pressure, how miserable and guilty he must have felt when the truth came out? How less than he must have felt, as a man?
No wonder he’d turned around and started sleeping with every girl in sight. As if he had something to prove. To his ex. To himself.
“All that time… Everything I did for her, to please her,” Spencer says. “It wasn’t enough. And when I wanted to know why, to talk to her about it… she didn’t want to talk. All she wanted to do was yell. I just… got tired of all the yelling. So I ended it.”
“What she did, Spencer,” I cup his jaw in my hands so he has to look at me. “You didn’t deserve that. You tried to communicate, to work on it.” I need him to understand that. He’s not at fault. That his ex is unhinged. That she’d punished him for some slight because she’d been insecure and selfish and determined to work against him, instead of with him.
“You did the right damn thing,” I whisper. His eyes drop to my mouth, dark and deep with feeling as my lips form the word. Under the blanket, he moves his arms, until he cradles my head. Tilts it back. Brushes his mouth over mine, barely enough to register a kiss.
I feel that light touch through every fiber of my being.
“Kennedy Fucking Walsh,” he sighs.
I kiss him, fully. Insistently. Until my body melts into his, and we stay like that for a long, long time.
23
Kennedy
By Friday, I’m done watching basketball. Probably because Rylie’s team defeated mine earlier in the week, and with each tournament match, it looks more and more like Grayson will, indeed, win the group pool. So I put my foot down, and Spencer concedes to binging my kind of television.
I don’t realize my mistake until ten minutes into the first rom-com, when he asks, “Wait, why are they mad at each other?”
I pause the movie to explain the main couple’s families’ own competing speciality yarn stores. Fifteen minutes later, he’s confused again. “Why are they getting married if they hate each other?”
And after that, halfway through the movie, comes, “The fuck is with the slow-mo crocheting montage?”
Turns out, other than Mean Girls, Spencer is not a fan of chick flicks. More so, he doesn’t understand them. Which is why, there’s a certain point near the end of each movie, I get fed up with all his questions and shut him up the only way I know how.
Spencer chuckles when I capture his lips in mine. “You’re going to miss them saving the arugula farm.”
“It’s an asparagus farm,” I correct, dragging his mouth back to mine. He needs no more incentive, and he shifts so I settle deeper on his lap, running his tongue over my throat, to the spot under my earlobe that makes me shiver.
Nurse Spencer plied me full of all the meds I could possibly ever need, and my cold’s been over for days. So after our embrace in the kitchen, it’s been fair game for kissing. As Spencer would say, a shit ton of kissing. Like we need to make up for all the minutes we hadn’t spent doing it while I hadn’t felt well.
He grips handfuls of my hair, tongue teasing my lips. I brush my hands under his shirt, over his chest hair. Pet the taut ridges of his abs. I slip a finger in the waistband of his sweats. Skirt it over the line of muscle at his hip, drawing down, down, down…
Spencer lifts me off his lap, placing me on the opposite side of the couch. “Movie’s done.”
I huff a disappointed sigh. As well as I feel, I keep forgetting there’s a third person in the room with us. A pesky aunt by the name of Flo. And not only has she continuously stabbed me in the uterus all week with a dull spoon, but she’s effectively blocked me from, well, Spencer’s penis.
I’ve never loved and loathed being a woman more than having Spencer Armstrong’s attentions all to myself and not being able to do anything more with them than kissing.
“What’s next?” Spencer asks with a deep exhale of his own.
I pout at his rumpled shirt and finger-combed hair. How enticingly comfortable he looks on my couch. We spent the morning taking down the blanket fort and putting my bed back in my room, since Natalie and Rylie are due home tomorrow. Most of the St. Patty’s Day decor had gone in a garbage bag, but I kept the shamrock lights. Put them above my bed with the other string lights, since they’re innocuous enough neither of my roommates would comment on them. But I’d know. I’d lay down in bed, look up at them, and remember. This week we had together. Him, staring at me across the couch with hungry brown eyes and an unmistakable bulge in his pants.
The same one I felt every morning waking up in his arms. The one he’d rub against me, swearing softly, before getting up and taking care of himself in the bathroom. I’d offered, once I started feeling better, to help. Told him I have hands and a mouth and an insatiable urge to see him climax. But he denied me. Demanded me, really, to keep resting.
I’m so tired of resting.
Spencer, unfortunately, is stubborn. Especially on this matter, for whatever reason. So I turn
