I sigh. “Do we need to talk about this right now?”
“If this is all the time I get with you, I want to know.”
I tense. “Want to know what?”
“Why we have to stop this?”
I pull away, sitting up. “What are you implying?” I panic, even though I just had the same thought a few minutes ago.
She glares at me with X-ray eyes. “Why do we have to stop this?” she repeats.
I take several heart palpitations to blink at her. “What happened to ‘just giving you lessons’? On how to flirt, date, fuck, whatever?” My heart is going to beat out of its chest. “I told you, this ends today,” I tell her firmly. “I’m not ruining thirty-two years of friendship with Leo over this?—”
“So you’d rather fuck up twenty-nine years of friendship with me?” she asks me quietly, slowly sitting up too.
“Youpushedme, Mia. Youbeggedme?—”
“Did you think you could just fuck me, add me to your Blonde Brigade, and it would all be okay afterwards?” she asks bitterly.
I stare at her blankly, my heart crawling up my throat.What is happening?!I ask myself, for what seems like the ninth time this week.
“Fuck,” she says, after seeing whatever look is on my face. “Sorry,” she says, putting her face in her hands. “Wow. Sorry. That was really needy and cruel.”
I can’t really say anything.
“Sorry. I don’t know why… I just thought… with all the ‘mine’ and the ‘only you’ and the touching… I’m sorry. I misunderstood. You probably say that to everyone. It’s all a part of the game,” she mumbles.
I make myself numb. I refuse to address this. “Mia,” I attempt slowly, clearly, like I am explaining this to a child, while trying to keep the condescension out of my voice. “We agreed. This was just sex. For the weekend. And it was going to end today.”
She takes a deep breath. “Okay.” Another breath. “Right,” she says sadly. “Sorry. That was it. It’s done. I’ll go… I have one more workshop to go to, anyway.”
Neither of us moves, eyes roaming across skin and memorizing every inch of the other’s body. My fists are clenched so hard that I think my nails are breaking the skin, all so I don’t touch her face, her collarbone, her waist.
“Okay,” she says, but it’s not. She stands up and starts rummaging through her bag, and I map all the marks I’ve made all over her body. She goes to the bathroom and shuts the door to get dressed.
I throw on clothes, grab my wallet, and walk out the door.
The next time I see her is in the lobby of the hotel, and I fucking hate the way she’s smiling at me. It’s empty, fake.
“Ready to go?” she asks brightly, and it makes me want to scream. “I called us our Uber. It’ll be here in a sec.”
“We’re back to this again?” I murmur.
She frowns. She’s a good actress, but she forgets that I’ve known her for her entire life. “Back to what?”
I raise an eyebrow at her instead.
There’s a flicker of anger behind her eyes.There. “This is me trying to act like our twenty-nine years offriendship,” she sneers, “isn’t all fucked now that you’ve had your dick inside me about a thousand times in the last twenty-four hours.” She looks away, whispering hysterically, maybe to me, maybe to herself. “Do you see my fucking neck right now?”
I glance down at the mosaic of bruises and bites I’ve left, and I feel nothing but satisfaction.
She turns and looks at me straight on, blue eyes on fire. “We’ve grossly miscalculated this. You realize you have to be inches away from me while we travel home for the next like six hours? Do you not remember that welive together? That wefucking work together?Commuteto work together? We’re always fucking together, Elias, and you’re annoyed at me for trying to pretend that everything is okay and that this isn’t really fucking weird?!” It’s safe to say she’s hysterical at this point.
So am I.
I walk away from her, running my hands through my hair. She’s right. This is so fucked. How did we not think about this?
“Our Uber is here,” she says with false cheer, brushing by me. “Excuse me while I continue to pretend that this weekend never happened.”
