Page 4 of Fun Together (Make Romance #1)

Faye

One good thing about Friday nights is the undeniable bliss of having an entire weekend ahead of you to do whatever you want.

Tonight, it’s just me, my couch, and the reliable presence of Jeff Probst in his little khaki shorts on my television.

When I hear him say the words, “Last time on Survivor,” all my worries fall away.

I’m watching him explain the rules of tonight’s immunity challenge when Rett breezes into my apartment in swirl of copper hair, black skirts, jangling bottles, and a waft of that mysterious perfume she refuses to name.

Her freckled face flushes from the effort it takes to haul her giant black leather purse onto my kitchen counter.

She then proceeds to pull things out of the bag like some kind of fairy goth-mother.

Two bottles of red wine, a bag of salt and vinegar chips, red nail polish, and what looks to be some sort of knife sheathed in leather.

I don’t even want to know that’s intended purpose.

Then she takes out a lighter and a small bundle of herbs with tiny branches wrapped in twine.

“Are you about to sage my apartment?”

“Grandma told me to do this. She said it’ll help rid your spirit of bad vibes or . . . w.”

Honestly, I’ll take all the help I can get. “Alright, go for it.” I rummage around my kitchen drawers to find a corkscrew.

“I got the twist-top kind,” Rett says over her shoulder. “Assumed you didn’t have an opener.”

“Hey, I could have one.” I close the drawer I was sifting through. “Theoretically.”

I grab a couple of jam jars I use for water glasses and pour some wine for us. I watch Rett glide along the perimeter of my apartment and hand her a glass.

“I’ve been thinking,” she says after taking a sip.

I flop on the couch. “Oh no.”

“It’s time for you start dating again.”

I turn the volume up. “Is it?”

She waves her hand in a circular motion over me. “This ennui thing you have going on is getting old.”

“I don’t have ennui.”

“Really? Because it doesn’t look like you’ve cleaned this place in weeks and earlier, I caught you staring off into the distance for five minutes, looking like you were in the middle of a factory reset.”

I look around my apartment. The pile of cereal bowls stacked in the sink need to be washed.

The dust bunnies that have become my quiet companions in the corner of the living room beneath my front window.

Maybe I don’t keep it as clean as I should, but it’s not that bad.

It’s hard to feel motivated to pick up after myself when it’s just me having to answer for my own filth.

I wouldn’t call it ennui, though. I think it’s just that part of me wants to live amongst the rubble for a bit to make up for hurting Andrew the way I did.

“You’re doing it again.”

“It’s just—I think I might be a terrible person. Do you think he hates me?” She doesn’t have to ask who I’m talking about.

“Terrible people don’t worry about being terrible people. Relationships end every day, and you did nothing wrong.”

I appreciate the loyalty that only a best friend can provide, but she kind of has to say that, doesn’t she?

“What if my decision was wrong?” There are worse things in life than marrying someone you aren’t in love with anymore. Like death. Or being yelled at by a TSA agent.

“You and Andrew didn’t have a real relationship. What you had was a safety net.” She polishes off her wine and pours more into the jar. “Didn’t you say y’all were barely having sex?”

I lay back on the couch and cover my face with a pillow, vowing to never tell her anything about my sex life, or lack thereof, ever again.

“Don’t lie to yourself and pretend you had something with him that you didn’t.”

Is that what I’m doing—lying to myself? Hating to come home to this empty apartment, more specifically my empty bed, every night is not a lie.

That’s a truth I avoid by sleeping on the couch.

If I pretend hard enough, the back cushions feel a lot like a supportive chest at my back.

It’s hard not to miss having someone there next to you, even if you don’t touch anymore.

Even if they roll over before you have a chance to touch them.

She continues, “He’s off on his healing journey to do drugs and go to sex clubs. Let him be free. And you’re free, too!”

I sit back up and finish my glass. “You know Andrew would never go to sex clubs. He’s way too worried about disease.”

She refills my wine. “Still, you get what I’m saying. You deserve some good old-fashioned debauchery.”

“I just don’t know how.”

“How to what?”

“How to be fun!” I point to a beautiful woman in a commercial for some kind of heart medication. She is laughing on top of a mountain with her hands placed triumphantly on her hips. “Like her. I bet she’s fun.”

“I’m sure she is, but so are you. You just need to get out of whatever funk you’re in right now.”

“And you think that starts with dating someone new?”

“Among other things,” she says.

“What other things?”

“I see it kind of like this.” She goes over to her bag and pulls out a notebook and pen. I watch her draw a pyramid divided into five sections. She writes the word social in one of the sections.

“Are you doing like a hierarchy of needs thing?” I briefly majored in psychology in college, so this is something I vaguely remember.

“Exactly. Except more like a Hierarchy of Fun . This can be your guide.” She fills in the rest of the sections. I see the words sex and career and I’m already regretting asking for Rett’s help with this. She’s drunk on more than the bottle of wine we’ve downed. I’ve made her way too powerful.

“Does that say ‘environmental?’ What does that even mean?”

“It means your apartment. Your car. It means you need to stop living like you don’t understand the concept of a nightstand.” She holds her arms out wide. “You have your own place, which is fucking amazing. You can do whatever you want with it.”

She writes hobby , and I really start to squirm.

“It seems like a lot, though.”

“This is just my suggestion. You can change these if you want, but I think you should try to do something to get out of your comfort zone a little.”

I look at the pyramid, and part of me knows she’s right. I can’t wallow forever. “Let’s say I agree, where do I begin?”

“I think you should start with this one.” She points to the sex section. “Let’s go out next weekend.”

I groan.

“It’s that, or I make you join a dating app.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“You need to stop punishing yourself and go home with a guy with stick-and-poke tattoos who you meet in a shitty bar with cheap well drinks and a questionable sanitation score.”

“And that’s fun?”

“If they know what they’re doing, it is.”

Drunken sex with a stranger you meet in a bar does seem like a post-breakup rite of passage, but how cliché can I be? I haven’t slept with anyone new in six years. Am I really going to waltz into a bar with the sole purpose of finding someone to go home with?

“I feel like I’m too old for that kind of thing.”

“You’re twenty-six, not ninety.”

“Okay, but you’ll have to help me. I haven’t had to make come-hither eyes at someone from across the bar since . . . well, ever.”

I met Andrew when I was twenty years old. He was my first real relationship, unless you count my two-month-long courtship with Tanner Davis in tenth grade. I have no idea how to even begin seducing someone.

“Saying ‘come-hither eyes’ does make you sound elderly.”

“Fine, we’ll go out next weekend. But I’m making no promises.”

“I told Minnie about your breakup, and she said that you’ve already been in—” She holds up air quotes.

“—good vibration with another man.” She shakes her head.

“Although, she told me I was going to marry my high school boyfriend’s older brother, which is definitely not happening, so take it for what it’s worth. ”

Her Grandma Minnie’s mild clairvoyance has always been one of those things Rett and I joke about—but nine times out of ten, she’s been spot on.

Last year, she told Rett that she was going to come into an influx of cash, and two weeks later, Rett found an old wallet that had a twenty-dollar bill in it.

She opens the bag of chips and grabs a handful. “Had any good vibrations with anyone lately?”

My eyes automatically move to my tote bag hanging on the back of a dining chair. I can almost see the vibrator through the package in glowing neon x-ray vision. “Well, technically. . .”

She sits up. “Okay. Spill.”

I tell her about my conversation with Eli after running into him in the elevator. And then about the whole vibrator situation.

“You’ve been sitting on this information all night?”

I swat her away. “It’s not really anything. He’s Andrew’s best friend.”

“Is he hot?”

“He’s Andrew’s best friend,” I repeat.

“So, he is hot.”

I roll my eyes and refuse to neither confirm nor deny Eli’s attractiveness. I’ve been willing my own brain to stop thinking about him since I drove home earlier.

“Maybe Minnie’s right. Seems like you’ve been given a gift from the fun gods.” She wiggles her eyebrows suggestively. “Why squander their blessing?”

I’ve been having a face-off with the vibrator on my coffee table since Rett left.

What could it hurt, really? Sure, it was given to me by my boss, but I’m still not convinced it wasn’t all some big mistake. But what if Alexis asks me to report on it on Monday?

I try to get my wine-fogged brain to rationalize the wild idea that Alexis will ask me to give her my opinion on how this product might be good for our employees. I need to be able to be honest about its capabilities, right?

I tear it from the plastic packaging and hold it in my hand. It looks a little bigger than it did before when Eli was holding it. This is easily the nicest one I’ve ever owned. My last one sputtered out its last dying buzz over a year ago.

I lay back on my couch, settling a pillow comfortably behind my back. Phone in one hand and vibrator in the other, I pull up Pornhub. An alert pops up asking for my name and address because of some law that requires that information to enter the site.

There’s no way I’m putting my information in there, so I decide to do this the old-fashioned way. Surely, I can conjure up a good fantasy all on my own.

I close my eyes and try to think of something that turns me on. But my mind is blank, nothing but pure static.

Come on, Faye .

What do I like? Why is my brain not allowing this to happen easily? My god, I’ve had so much wine, this should be easy.

Oh, hands! I really like hands.

But then all I manage to come up with are some detached hands floating in a blank space. That’s horrifying.

The hands need to be connected to a body. But who? I need a fantasy man.

I settle into the cushions as I expand the image, adding a nice pair of forearms with a sprinkling of hair.

This fantasy man is pretty tall, probably at least six feet, and when I reach up to touch his shoulders, I discover that they are wide and strong.

I move my hands up to his neck and can feel his pulse beneath my fingertips.

“Can I touch you?” he asks. Nice voice. The kind of voice you’d want giving you directions on Google maps, or to reading you a bedtime story. It’s warm, a little raspy, and vaguely familiar.

Since things are getting good now, I place the vibrator against me and put it on the lowest setting.

“Yes,” I whisper, adding a background to the fantasy. Looks like I’ve placed us in . . . a barn? There’s hay beneath us, but it isn’t itchy at all. It’s soft as linen, smelling of lavender and sunshine. I look down to see I’m wearing a purple plaid dress with ruffled sleeves.

He lifts the hem of my dress and runs his hand up my calf to the back of my thigh. His palms are rough and calloused, and I like the sensation of them brushing up against my soft skin. My skin is always soft here in this fantasy land. I wake up every morning glowing, radiant, and velvety smooth.

“You’re so soft,” he says. “But I bet you never even have to moisturize.”

“I do wear lotion,” I tell him. “But it’s from our magical goats with magical goat milk that leaves your skin glowing for years on end.”

He moves his hand up higher. “Can I touch you here?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say, moving the vibrator up a level.

His fingers are deft, and I imagine he is one of those men who can effortlessly hop a fence or chop wood blindfolded. “I could touch you for hours,” he whispers into my ear.

I hear a rooster crow in the distance. “We have to leave soon,” I say. “No one can catch us up here.”

“A man can dream,” he says, adjusting the pressure of his fingers and leaning down to kiss my neck.

“I’m so close,” I moan.

“You can do this, you’ve got it,” he encourages.

I come with a gasp as I finally look to see the face of this fantasy wild west man I’ve created.

And there are Eli’s pretty, smiling eyes looking down at me.