I can’t fall asleep.
Brain. Will. Not. Shut. Off.
I need to turn on a meditation app or something, but I don’t want to hear about it from Theo.
I pop one eye open.
Aim it in his direction.
Crap.
It’s just bright enough in here thanks to the moonlight streaming in the window that I can see him. And he is totally staring at me.
I roll onto my side and face the wall.
Tell yourself a story, Laney. Tell yourself a story.
As if that’s going to work.
This is going to be a very, very, very long night.
6
Theo
So this is unexpected.
Thought I’d wake up on the floor. Tied up so I can’t go anywhere. Possibly under a pile of clothes, since while most women would toss you out in nothing but your underwear when you annoy them, Laney is not that kind of woman. She’d want me to put my clothesonbefore she forcibly removed me from her presence.
Instead, I’m waking up with her hand wrapped around my cock.
She’s curled up right next to me, breathing on my shoulder, with a limp grip under my briefs and on my very hard dick.
Any other woman, I’d be leaning into this opportunity.
But Laney?
Pretty quick she’s gonna figure out she’s making my balls sweat.
And that’s not a good sign for today getting back on the right track.
I don’t know if Emma knows she made the worst possible choice in asking Laney to be mybufferfrom Chandler. Probably does.
And that stings.
No, it more than stings. It fuckingsucks.
Sometime between freshman and senior years, I noticed that Laney’s a girl. A know-it-all, straight-A, silver-spooned pain-in-the-ass, but still a girl.
And a girl who made me feel warm inside every time I looked at her, watched her laughing with my sister, saw her talking to my dad anytime she’d come visit Emma like it wasn’t weird that he was always surrounded by taxidermy animals that he sometimes talked to more than he talked to Em and me.
And then, after being so nice to everyone else, Laney would make me feel like the world’s biggest fuckup whenever I talked to her.
I didn’t want to like her. Why would I? To her, I was her best friend’s lazy, C-average, going-nowhere, waste-of-oxygen brother.
She was always polite. Of course she was. Even in a small town like Snaggletooth Creek, we have folks ofgood breeding, and the richer her parents got, the moregood breedingthey insisted they had.
But back then, I was beneath her and I knew it.
