Page 10 of Use Me Up

“Fake date,” he repeats.

“Like one of those romantic comedy movies or any number of trashy romance novels,” I say, although I don’t think the plot of any of those is to fake date to make a married woman jealous and get back at her husband by fucking his little sister. My stomach turns over. I feel a little queasy. This is fucked up.

“No, not like that,” he says. “I mean, this, with us, I’m never going to…” He gestures back and forth with us. “You get that.”

“Obviously,” I say.

“And is that a problem?” He leans against the breakfast bar from the other side, still just gloriously shirtless.

I stare at his bare skin, and I cannot breathe.

“Should I put on a shirt?” he says, very amused. “Having trouble concentrating there, Hannah?”

“Fuck you,” I breathe, and I flounce back over to the couch.

He ducks into my bedroom. When he comes back, he’s putting his shirt on, and it’s kind of stiff, like cotton shirts get after being in the rain. He shrugs into it, and it looks uncomfortable, and I start to tell him he doesn’t have to do that, and then I feel like that’s going to go over in a totally embarrassing way, so I don’t say that.

I pick up one of my legs and hug my knee to my chest. “For how long?”

He thinks about this as he sits down on the couch next to me. “I don’t know.”

“I mean, what do you want from this?” I say.

He clears his throat. “You know what I want.”

“What?” I say. “Her to suffer? Andrew to suffer?”

“Basically,” he says.

“That’s…” I don’t even know what to say. “That’s very fucked up.”

He shrugs, not arguing with me about that.

“So, for how long?” I say.

“A while,” he says. “I want us to be, you know, embarrassingly public. I want to take you to family functions and have you draped all over me, and I want to make out with you pointedly in front of both of them, and I want to do that… for a while.”

I swallow.

“If you don’t want to be part of it…” He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I mean, I can’t see what would really be in it for you. Except, uh, if you liked it when I touched you.”

I make one of those whimper noises that sounds exactly like the noise I made when his cock was slamming all the way into that inner, deep part of me, and my face explodes in heat, and he jerks, looking up to meet my gaze. There’s some oddly destroyed and regretful look on his face.

We’re stuck like that for a minute.

Then he scoots over on the couch. “Shit,” he breathes.

I try to shy away from him.

But he cups my face again with one of his hands, holding me still, forcing me to look into his eyes. He searches my expression. “Are you all right, Hannah?” He’s very serious.

“Not really, no,” I say, and I don’t know why I say that.

He nods. “Of course you aren’t. Well, I’ll do better, okay? It won’t be like that again. I promise.”

So, what will it be like? Less? More? Nicer? More detached? I tug myself out of his grasp and get up off the couch and go over to look at the mini-quiche, even though they’ve barely even been in the oven for any time at all.

“We shouldn’t,” he says. “We shouldn’t do this.”