“I won’t ask you to do that. It’s been less than a day . . .”
“Technically it’s been six days,” I say. “And really it’s been three years since I knew I wanted to get to know you better. I was going to say yes to a date with you before you died.” I smirk at him and shove him lightly on the shoulder. “You’d have been the first guy I said yes to out there. But you deprived me of that. So let’s do it now.”
His eyebrows shoot up. “Do what? Have a date? What would you call what we’re doing?”
“A booty call, if I’m being honest. But I know it’s more. Let’s make sure it keeps being more. Let’s try to talk at least as much as we screw.”
“We can talk while we screw . . .” he begins. I give him an incredulous look and he laughs. “You’re right, you aren’t capable of more than primal screams with my dick inside you.”
“Oh my god! Listen to you! Mister ‘I Get Off on Fingerpainting with My Own Semen.’ You know, it occurred to me that becoming a father is probably what turned you into a kinky bastard. You learned your spunk has power, saw it firsthand, and now you want to cover the world in it to exert your dominion. Maybe making a donation at a clinic wasn’t enough to scratch that itch and you’re making up for it by covering my pussy with it every chance you get, even though you know I can’t get pregnant.” I poke him in the chest. “Or maybe that’s it. You always secretly wanted to mark your lovers, but for the first time, you actually have the freedom to do it. How close am I?”
He’s laughing and shaking his head. “Are you done, Miss Psychoanalyst? I knew you operated on brains, but I had no idea you could do it with words as well as a scalpel.”
“I’m really just channeling Nina. She’s the psych in the family. But I’m glad I made you laugh.”
“You might be onto something actually. But I need to clear one thing up: I did make a donation at a clinic, but Zoe was conceived the old-fashioned way.”
My eyebrows shoot up, but then I frown. “So you and your friend’s wife . . . and he was okay with that?”
“It was an unusual night,” he hedges. “There was tequila involved. They’d asked me to get tested and leave a specimen, but when the results came back, they wanted to celebrate. When Rafael was a few shots in, he decided it wasn’t enough to just let Emilia go to a doctor and get artificially inseminated. They knew I had viable sperm, and that he didn’t, but he wanted to create some small seed of uncertainty about the baby’s paternity.” He shrugs as if the whole concept was just a given. “So we both had sex with Emilia that night.”
I realize I’m staring with my mouth hanging open, and I blink and clamp my lips together, nodding in thought to try to play off my shock. “Okay, let me process this for a second, because I obviously had the exact wrong idea about the whole thing. You were close enough with them that this was no big deal? A three-way to get your friend’s wife pregnant?”
He gives me a patient smile as if waiting for my morality to catch up with his. “It was his idea. We were close friends by then, yes, but it wasn’t sexual at all until then. And Emilia was definitely attractive, but she was my buddy’s wife, you know? If a woman’s attached, I just don’t look at her like she’s, ah, on the menu. But once I knew she was into it, I wasn’t about to say no.” He studies me with a bemused look.
“So, did you take turns? How did it work exactly? Did she come?”
One dark eyebrow lifts and his mouth twitches. “She had two dicks inside her, what do you think?”
My mouth flies open again and I’m back to staring. “No shit? That’s actually a thing? And it wasn’t strange for you to have your penis pressed against another man’s inside a woman’s vagina?”
“What’s strange is that you keep asking questions and aren’t at all weirded out by me giving you details about the last time I had sex. Before you, I mean.”
“In case you missed it, I’m a doctor. Sex talk doesn’t weird me out. I’d have more issues if you talked about having the most romantic date ever with someone who wasn’t me.”
“I haven’t dated much, so my most romantic date ever would be tonight. Your morbid curiosity about the three-way I had with two other people notwithstanding.”
“It’s not ‘morbid curiosity,’ ” I scoff. “I’m a scientist; it’s just an honest, healthy thirst for knowledge. So spill already—the double-dicking thing. Was that strange?”
He barks a laugh and can’t seem to stop grinning at me, even as his dick twitches beneath my hip. “You’re relentless. It was new, I guess, but not unpleasant. It wasn’t about either of us, though.” He shrugs and gets a bashful look that makes him seem ten years younger. “I don’t know how to explain it. It was intimate. Personal.”
Suddenly all my clinical curiosity evaporates and my cheeks heat. “Oh . . . Oh, shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I’m such an asshole!” I bury my face in his shoulder. “I get caught up with this itch to know more sometimes. I didn’t mean to be so damn oblivious to what actually happened. It was between you and them, so I shouldn’t have dug in so hard. I’m truly, truly sorry.”
He touches my cheek and nudges at my chin with a finger until I look into his eyes, my face
