So, of course, I keep going. “He’s amazing with his tongue,” I continue. “He’s got all those muscles and is very flexible.” Caroline is staring at James. I drop my voice and say right by her ear. “And he’s got that huge cock. You remember, don’t you, Caro?”
She swallows hard.
“Jesus, Cas,” James mutters.
“None of that is a lie,” I say. “And you do remember, don’t you, Caroline?”
To my delight, she nods. “I do. Of course.” Then slowly she smiles. “And with the years of practice you’ve had, I can only imagine how much better you are with it,” she tells James.
James coughs in surprise as I grin.
“Oh, honey, you have no idea,” I tell her.
And then she giggles. “I might have a bit of an idea. I have a pretty good imagination and I read really dirty books.”
The tension—the ‘I-hope-I’m-not-pushing-too-hard’ tension—evaporates. All that’s left is the sexual tension.
“Can I tell you about one of my favorite dates with James?” I ask her.
“I’d love to hear it.”
James gives me another of those looks but this one isn’t ‘what the hell are you doing?’This one is ‘are you sure this is a good idea?’
But it is. I’m sure of it.
“We’d been going out for about three months. It was getting serious. But there was one thing we both really liked that would have been missing if we became committed and monogamous. We’d talked about it a little but hadn’t really come up with a solution,” I tell her.
“What was it?” she asks.
I squeeze her knee. “Patience. I’m getting there.”
She presses her lips together.
I grin. “One night, I had planned the whole date for us. All James had to do was be ready at six. I had taken care of everything else. We were going to go to see one of his favorite classic movies in the park. I had the blanket, this amazing picnic with all his favorites, everything all set.
But it started to rain. A huge, unexpected thunderstorm. Ruined the whole thing. I was so bummed. Then James decided he was going to salvage the night. He drove us to a bookstore, said we had ten minutes to find our perfect idea for how to spend the rainy evening in front of the fireplace, and then we’d meet at the front door. Whatever we showed up with was what we were going to do.
We’re both bookworms and we both like board games, so I spent my ten minutes searching for a great book to read together—I was thinking a mystery or thriller. Rainy night, lights off, fireplace only. That’d be cool, right?”
Caroline is watching me raptly. She nods at my question. “Very cool.”
“I thought maybe he’d come back with a game or maybe a puzzle or something. We can be nerds sometimes.” I give her a self-deprecating smile.
James shifts on the couch. He’s not stopping me from telling the story, but he’s clearly a little nervous about Caroline’s reaction.
Yeah, me too. Not nervous, but curious.
We need to see how she responds to this.
“So I pick out a book and I go up front to meet James with what he picked out.”
I stop. Caroline looks from me to James, then back. “What did he pick out?”
“Come on now,” James said. “She wasn’t a ‘what’, Hannah was a who.”
Caroline’s eyes widen. “What?”
“Right,” I chuckle. “She was a who. Hannah. This cute, sweet little brunette who worked at the bookstore and who James had met there a month prior. And who was finishing work ten minutes later.”
