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She came. Loudly.

I did too, my vision whiting out as the orgasm rushed down my spine and grabbed hold, gripping me so hard I didn’t know if I was even breathing anymore. I clamped my bottom lip between my teeth and muffled my noises with my arm so she wouldn’t hear me.

And then I raised my fist and slammed it against the wall.

She had to stop. We had to stop.

I could almost hear her gasp after I pounded on the wall and then the vibrator went silent. So did she.

Shit. Post-orgasm clarity was kicking in and I knew I’d made a mistake. If I couldn’t stop listening to her, the least I could have done was to let her finish and not draw attention to the fact that I could hear her.

Now she knew that I knew and the next time we saw each other, it was going to be weird.

Why couldn’t I have left well enough alone? I should have stayed at work.

As tired as I’d been when I’d walked into my apartment, it took me a long time to fall asleep that night. I couldn’t stop replaying what had happened earlier. Couldn’t stop thinking about the sounds she’d made that I’d heard even over the rumbling of the vibrator.

She sounded beautiful. Loud and so sweet at the same time. Her noises had plucked at something deep inside me. Better than any porn I’d ever listened to, if I was honest. I’d come harder than I had in a while. A long while.

Lately my climaxes had been lackluster. I’d chalked the change up to being tired from work and a lack of imagination with my fantasies. My tried and true scenarios weren’t working for me anymore. I needed new material, but it wasn’t a priority.

The next morning, I woke up horny again. Shit.

My clit throbbed between my legs, bringing me into consciousness better than an alarm clock. When was the last time that had happened? I didn’t even know.

A sleepy moan escaped my mouth as I put my hand on my pussy that was already wet. Like it had been doing its own thing while I slept and just waiting for me to wake up again.

“Fuckkkkkk.” I was so damn close already.

With just a few swipes of my hand, a quick hard orgasm shot through me, making me shake and tremble and gasp.

“Holy crap,” I said, my chest heaving. That was one way to wake up. I stared at my ceiling and enjoyed the post-climax tingles.

Most days I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into wakefulness but not today. I was all the way up now.

I had a shift that night, but my morning masturbation session had me feeling like I’d woken up on the right side of the bed for the first time in years. I caught myself humming as I made breakfast from scratch instead of being lazy and ordering something or walking to the closest coffee shop.

This pancake mix had been sitting in my cupboards for so long, and since I was feeling so damn good, I added both milk and white chocolate chips to the batter. I also sliced up some potatoes before tossing them in spices and lining them on a tray in the air fryer. Some bacon got tossed into a pan and I even got out my milk frother and made myself a dreamy latte with caramel syrup.

I ate on the couch with the sun pouring through the curtains and decided that I should definitely take advantage of the weather and go outside. I could hit the library and get some new books and maybe even hit that weird bookstore that Stace had told me about ages ago. I’d gone a few times and it was the most disorganized place I’d ever been in, but it had the most eclectic collection of books I’d ever seen in my life. If you wanted to learn how to marry a ghost, they had it. If you wanted a book about fixing model trains, they had many. Whatever niche topic you wanted to know about, they probably had a book for it. The adventure was in finding it.

That early climax had set the tone for the rest of my day and I found myself smiling at people on the street. Like I’d had a personality transplant.

As I practically skipped down the sidewalk, I tried to think of what I should say to Sophie when I saw her again. The best course of action, I thought, was to agree to pretend that it hadn’t happened. Just forget about it. Or at least tell her that I was going to forget about it.

I absolutely wasn’t going to forget about it. That would be completely impossible. All of those sounds were burned in my brain for eternity.

She was probably embarrassed, which was why it would be good to drop it and move forward.

A little voice in the back of my mind that sounded like my meanest third grade teacher admonished me for thinking about Sophie that way. She was my ex’s younger sister. I didn’t play by those “off limits” rules, but she was off limits for different reasons.

Her older sister had broken my heart and I wasn’t going to let another member of the Love family (oh the irony of their last name) get another chance.

The likelihood that she was even interested in me was slim. Very slim.

This was just a thing that we’d laugh about at some point. No big deal.

I arrived back at my apartment with too many books. I’d been smart and brought my tote bag for the library, and the bookstore had given me a recycled shopping bag for my purchases.