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Across from her, there was a painting on the wall of a naked woman smoking a cigarette and looking at her phone. Lola hadn’t noticed it before in her delirious nap state. The woman’s eyes were unfocused, as though she’d recently gotten railed. Her breasts hung low over her stomach. A dog was curled by her feet. The scene looked intimate, asthough maybe the artist had been the one doing the railing. Giancarlo had good taste in art.

Lying on her back, Lola took stock of her body. She was slick with sweat. Her foot hurt like all hell. Her headache threatened to blossom into a migraine. Her bones were tired.

And most of all, she was still completely riled up from the fight with Aly, a low thrum of anger left pulsing through her.

Which probably explained why her vagina was throbbing too. Mixed signals from her brain to her groin.

Plus, Lola always got horny when she was hungover.

Her hand wandered down her stomach and slipped underneath the waistband of her bikini bottoms. It didn’t take long before she was completely wet, her clit stiff, standing at attention. She cupped her other hand onto her breast as she started to rub herself furiously, not so much for the pleasure of it but so she could get the orgasm over with and move on with her day.

The door to the bedroom was wide open, but she couldn’t stop to close it. Didn’t want to.

She heard a distant door slam—Aly was back outside. Lola’s skin hummed.

She heard Aly’s voice command her:Hold still.

She felt the cool pressure of Aly’s hands on her arm, her ankle, her foot.

She saw the absolute concentration on Aly’s face as she pulled glass out of her cut. Grasped her heel in her palm. She watched Aly fold her arms across her chest, heard her voice as she raised it. She felt the fury rising in her chest at Aly’s pretention, at how condescending she was.

Lola took her hand away, panting, trying to slow herself down. She tried to remind herself what Aly had taken from her. How cruelher writing had been. How hurt Lola was that after all the chemistry between them, Aly only had horrible things to report on her.

But she couldn’t focus on any of that. Instead, she remembered Aly’s knees cracking when she stood. Her familiar, musky smell, so intoxicating up close.

Maybe this was the equivalent of a hate-fuck, she thought as she resumed touching herself. That would be reasonable.

It didn’t take long until the feeling was building again, almost too intense to bear.

She didn’t even realize how loudly she moaned when she came. Briefly, she lost all senses. The room turned spotty, and her ears rang. The only thing that existed was the blood in her body as it rushed to her clit.

Her heart was pounding loudly in her chest, bringing her back to earth. She held her hand over her throbbing labia, afraid of moving.

What the fuck was that?

She tried to catch her breath.It is totally normal to masturbate after conflict. This is fine. I’m fine.

The bed beneath her was damp from her sweat.

This was just my way of releasing tension.

With her free hand, she tugged her nipple absent-mindedly.

I do not actually want to fuck Aly Ray Carter.

On the contrary, it was less like an orgasm and more like a purge.

That was it.She’d binged on conflict with Aly, and now it was leaving her body.

Anything else—anything more than that—she simply did not have the capacity to examine further, not right now. She was nursing a heartbreak, mourning the death of her career. To have an actual physical attraction to the person who had wrought all that was unthinkable.There was nothing greater than her love for Justin, nothing bigger than the hole he’d left in her heart.

Besides, if it really came down to it, she wouldn’t even know what to do with Aly’s body. She reminded herself that she was, at the end of the day, straight. She always had been.

And straight women jerk off to thoughts of other women all the time. The first woman she ever masturbated to was her high school volleyball coach, with her long, blond ponytail, muscular calves, and a whistle that she blew with abandon when the girls weren’t making their digs. Lola used to love imagining Coach Lisa standing behind her, teaching her how to serve, guiding her hands into position. It wasn’t a fantasy about sex. She was aroused by the thought of Coach Lisa helping her. She wanted Coach Lisa’s approval, and sometimes, under the covers in her childhood bedroom, she made herself come just thinking about Coach Lisa saying, “Good girl, Lola.”

What would it sound like for Aly to saygood girlto her?

She heard the Jeep pull into the driveway, Charli XCX blasting from the speakers. Ryan. Finally. She wondered how long it took to go to the grocery store in this town. It felt like he’d been gone for years. Long enough for a whole side plot to come in and hijack her summer before it even started.