“You know I am going to be merciless about this, right?”
“Yes, and I’m dreading it. I know better than to give you the upper hand in anything.”
“And yet here my hand is, so,somuch higher than yours.” He actually waves it in the air, two feet above my head. He clocks the expression on my face, somewhere between amusement and embarrassment, and gives me a little punch on the arm. “Come on, let me buy you brunch. It’s the only polite thing to do after a one-night stand.”
I roll my eyes but take him up on the offer.
—
After four days of relentless teasing, Lachlan seems to have had enough. When we spend an entire evening cooking together and he doesn’t once waggle his eyebrows at me while rubbing his hands up and down a comically large pepper grinder, I think I’m in the clear. At least from his taunts—my own mind has not yet tired of replaying the dream on a loop.
I’m in bed on a depressing Tinder-swiping marathon when there’s a soft knock at my door. I toss the phone aside and pick up my book, opening it to a random place and quickly checking it’s the right side up.
Lachlan swings the door open and hangs there like a sitcom sidekick waiting for his applause.
“Can I help you?” I ask.
He strolls in and flops onto the bed, stretched out and leonine. You’d think that spending most of my waking hours with extremely fit men would inure me to it, but I can never stop admiring his body. The gentle curves of his arms, the veins that snake down to his surprisingly long fingers, the little sliver of skin between the hem of his T-shirt and the top of his shorts. He’s poetry in motion; more specifically, a limerick: clever, concise, bawdy.
“Have you come for some more gloating?” I ask.
“Actually, I’ve come to confess.”
My heart does a funny little flutter as I contemplate all the things this could mean. I take a quick deep breath and steady my voice. “Youarea serial killer. I knew it.”
He laughs. “I’m afraid it’s even more serious than that. And more topical.”
“Youhavehad a sex dream about me?”
He turns his head to face me, sheepish grin on his face.
I want to throw a pillow at him. Idothrow a pillow at him. “I knew it! You’re such a liar! Days and days of unrelenting torment, you sick, twisted bastard.”
His body is shaking with laughter, his enlaced fingers jiggling on top of his abs. “Now, calm down there, Stripes. I have had a dream about you—plenty of dreams, actually—but they’ve never been sex dreams.”
“Okay, well…cool confession? Glad we got this settled.”
Lachlan turns on his side, propping his head on his hand. His eyes narrow on a loose thread of the duvet cover and he devotes his full attention to picking at it, not meeting my eyes. “Well…”
“Oh my God, who’s been in the Mykonos sun now? You’re beet-red.” I nudge him with my feet under the duvet, connecting with his hip. “Tell me, tell me, tell me. Come on, I told you.”
“It wasn’t a sex dream. Or maybe it was but I don’t rememberthe sex part, alas.” He cuts his eyes to me and looks away again. The tips of his ears are bright red. “It was a couple of weeks ago. We were in bed together, holding each other, and it was, I don’t know, really tender. Intimate. You reached over and stroked my hair and kind of tugged on my earlobe and I knew it was a thing you always did and it was lovely and wonderful and I couldn’t speak to you in real life for, like, three days afterward.”
I rack my brain to see if I can remember this silent treatment, and it dawns on me. “Was it around the Chelsea game?”
He nods, eyes still fixated on the thread, on his fingernails, on anything but me.
“I absolutely remember that. I thought you were mad at me and I had no idea why.”
“Nope. Just couldn’t quite look at you with that image…thatfeelingfloating around in my head.”
“Wow. Well.” It’s so awkward in here now, deliciously tense and terrifying. “Tenderness—definitely not how Vogler would do it.”
I can see some of the stress leave his shoulders as he rolls back onto the bed. “No, indeed.”
A long pause stretches between us; neither of us has a hand on the wheel and I have no idea where we’re going to go.
I clear my throat. “So are you, like, in love with me? Is it going to be really awkward now?”
