She smiled. “There’s a joke in there somewhere.”
“Oh, I’ll wait for you to figure it out, because I can’t wait to hear it.”
“Instead of a joke,” she said, her stomach feeling funny, “why don’t I tell you that I want you without a condom tonight?”
“Fuck,” he said, tapping the brake a little bit too hard as he came to a stop sign. “You have to warn a man before you say things like that.”
“Sorry. But I got my test results back.”
“We don’t… We don’t have to do that, though,” he said.
“I know. I want to.”
It was a complicated feeling. That it mattered, that it felt like a big deal. That she didn’t want to have only had him with a layer of latex between them. She knew that it wasn’t supposed to feel that different, or matter, or anything like that. She knew that safety was supposed to trump everything else, but she wanted… him. All of him.
If this was going to be for just a little while, she didn’t want there to be any intimacy they hadn’t shared.
With the most intense, breathtaking feeling inside of her, that was what she wanted.
“I haven’t done that before,” he said.
Triumph curled in her stomach. “Really?”
“Yes, really. I only have casual sex.”
“I get to be your first? That’sso hot.” She was giddy at the thought, which was maybe ridiculous, but she couldn’t help it. She wanted him. Craved him. Needed him in ways that would scare her if she didn’t also feel stronger and wiser and more complete than she ever had before.
“Now I have to go into the store. With a hard-on, thank you,” he said.
She grinned widely, unrepentant. “The screws that you’re getting in there have nothing on the screw that I’ll be giving you later.”
“Now you have to come with me,” he said. “Because you’re a menace.”
Her smile widened, and he laughed.
Cody’s laughs were like gold dust. They didn’t come easily, and he didn’t give them up without a fight.
When she could earn one, she felt like she was high.
She did go into the hardware store with him, and only mildly harassed him while they were shopping.
“Were you this fun with your husband?”
She stopped walking, confused for a moment. Her husband. Surely there was no husband anywhere. Only Cody. Only this life. Only this moment. But then once she got past that, what stopped her was the question itself.
“Fun?”
“Yeah. Did you tease him?”
She was trying to get to the bottom of what the question actually was. If he wanted to know if he was different for her, or if he was the same, and why he wanted to know it. But she supposed it wasn’t really up to her to determine what the question was about, she just wanted to answer it.
“I’m me,” she said. “Pretty much no matter what’s going on. I don’t know if Aiden would’ve characterized it as fun. I think mainly he would’ve said I was organized.”
“Well, I’ve never had anyone to joke around with. Other than my siblings. So… I guess I didn’t figure…”
“You didn’t think that people in relationships hung out together and had fun?”
He shook his head. “No. I never saw any fun in a relationship like this.”
