Page 21

Astrid

This is ridiculous.

I sit on the edge of the hotel bed, tapping my fingers against my thighs. When my hands get itchy from that, I turn them, running the damp palms over my jeans until they start to stick and skid.

It’s been a week and a half since that night at Grayson’s house, getting Callie out of the bathroom. Ten days since I told him I’d be his personal sex tutor . Ten whole days that I could have used to call this thing off. And I knew I should have, but each time I picked my phone up, there was some reason I just couldn’t do it.

Grayson isn’t here yet—but he texted me the second he left the practice facility. The room was booked under his name, but he listed me as a guest so I could check in. The check-in desk was covered in construction paper bats and pumpkins—likely the work of a Halloween-obsessed hotel manager. It’s barely even October.

After the attendant took my ID and passed the cards over to me, I felt like she was staring me down. Like she knew exactly what the room was booked for and would be telling every employee of the hotel so they could all give us nasty looks.

I wanted to tell her that while it might be a weird situation, no money is exchanging hands, which makes it perfectly legal. I made sure to Google that beforehand. Then, as I was walking to the elevator, I realized that both Googling the legality of my actions and defending my actions to a stranger in my head were not great signs.

So far, nothing points toward this being a good idea.

The girls are at school. I’m off for the day. Grayson will have a window of time between practice and after-school pickup, just a few hours we’ve allocated for this purpose.

In these ten days, he’s had two more pre-season games. I don’t normally watch hockey, but Sloane left the sports channel on when she and Callum left, so I’d just happened to catch it.

Which meant I caught Grayson getting pulled both times, replaced with Martinez, the backup goalie. Grayson had kept it together, but a quick Google search told me that getting replaced as the goalie isn’t normal—he should have been playing the entire game.

I think back to the time I came to a Frost game, and Sloane had told me she was calling his condition the pre-yips . Maybe the real name is just anxiety—the compounding pressure of his situation making it far too difficult for him to perform without proper coping mechanisms.

Pushing up from the bed, I pace back and forth, mind racing.

I’m five seconds from calling this whole thing off.

Clearly, Grayson is in a weird place right now. This arrangement could jeopardize the results of my case study. It could jeopardize the tenuous friendship Grayson and I have started to build.

So why am I doing this? Because Grayson is gorgeous? Because I like being around him? Because I like the idea of teaching him? Being in charge?

Before I can dig too far into it, I shake my head, using physical motion to push the thoughts away.

I can just be a woman who wants sex without it being more than that—in fact, sex has usually been the only positive part of my past relationships. I’ll mess around with Grayson, ease a bit of my tension, and teach him something in the process.

Everyone wins.

While I’m waiting, I stand, pace the floor, open the curtains, look out over the Milwaukee skyline, then close them again, realizing it will be weird to have the curtains open. Then I realize that makes the room really dark and I circle around, turning on various lamps.

I sit back down on the bed, realize it’s too bright, and turn half the lamps off again.

I’m almost back to my spot on the bed when Grayson finally knocks on the door, and it makes me jump so hard I actually laugh at myself, pressing my palm to my chest and sucking in a deep breath.

When I swing the door open, I find Grayson standing in the hallway, looking just as nervous as I feel. He’s wearing a pair of gray sweatpants and a loose Frost T-shirt that drapes over his chest but hugs his biceps.

“This is weird, right?” he asks, sounding a little husky.

His hair is damp. His hair is always damp when he’s coming from practice or a game, and I realize I recognize the smell of him, the scent of his soap. Spicy, fresh. When he raises a hand and runs it through his hair, I put my own hand against the wall, sucking in a breath.

Maybe this is why Grayson never learned how to be good in bed—he’s so fucking handsome, so disarming, that women didn’t mind giving him a fake orgasm for the experience of being with him.

“Come in,” I say, realizing too late that he asked a question, and I didn’t answer it. As he steps past me and into the room, I think about his ex-girlfriends, the women who’ve been lucky enough to wake up next to him each morning. A knot forms in my throat when I think about what it would be like to open my eyes, see him snuggling in next to me.

But that’s not what we’re here for. Mentally, I berate myself, trying to eject those thoughts from my head. It’s like cheating on the premise—I should not be thinking anything mushy about him right now.

“Astrid?” Grayson laughs, pulling me from my thoughts. I blink, turning and looking at him, and he’s smiling, his hand on the back of his head, shaking out those calico-colored curls. “You know that you can take it back, right? You don’t have to go through with this. It’s…I know you were tired, and it was a long night—”

It’s corny, but I step forward and press my finger to his lips, which makes me laugh.

“Sorry,” I whisper, eyes moving back and forth between his. “But if you want to do this, I want to. So don’t try and talk me out of it. Unless you changed your mind.”

When he whispers, his lips move against my finger, and it sends a shiver through my entire body. “Okay.”

“Okay,” I parrot, then take a step back from him. “Okay, so…I’m just going to be brutally honest with you, okay? That’s what we want, right?”

He runs his hand through his hair again. “Yes. That’s what we want. Hit me with it, Dr. Foster.”

I pace back over to the bed, take a seat at the end. “Alright. So, I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I think the first problem with… us , that night, was foreplay.”

“Foreplay,” he repeats, toeing off his shoes and walking over to me slowly. There’s something about seeing him in his socks that makes my throat dry. Intimate. Domestic, almost.

“Yeah. That’s what I think. So, if we, like, approach the thing from beginning to end, we’ll focus on foreplay first.” I raise my eyes to him, trying to remind myself to be an adult here. “Foreplay is all about the long game. And it started out strong enough—the whole will-they-won’t-they thing during the wedding was hot.”

He raises an eyebrow. “It was?”

I ignore the flush on my cheeks, pick at something on my jeans. “Yes. And then, finding you outside my room—that was a risky move that could have been bad if I wasn’t interested. But I was, and confidence is sexy.”

“All that was foreplay?”

“Yes. Think about it—God, this is weird to say, but like, it’s all the story, right? It helps to build it up. It was…nice to know that you wanted me.” I think back to the research I did earlier, and say, “Foreplay ends the second you start doing anything that could make someone orgasm. So, touching a woman.” I pause, clear my throat, and again force myself to maintain eye contact. “ Pleasuring a woman in any way ends the foreplay.”

He swallows again. “Okay. So you liked it when I showed up at your door.”

“Yes, that was good.”

“But I’m sensing that’s when things started going downhill?”

“Like I said before, the kissing was good—really good, actually—but it was over way too fast.”

“Okay. Stupid question, probably, but is there like…a standard goal? A threshold to try and hit?”

Forcing a laugh, I pat the bed next to me. “Come here and sit down. I can’t keep looking up at you like this.”

Grayson sits next to me, the mattress dipping under his weight. We’re quiet for a moment, nothing but the sound of the hotel room’s humming air conditioner in the background.

I realize I want to keep going, to tell him what I think about this, so I turn to him, bringing one of my legs up onto the bed.

“Do you enjoy kissing?” I ask.

“Well—yeah, of course.”

His eyes focus on my mouth, and my lips buzz like I can feel his gaze on me physically, tracing the movement when I lick my lips. The heightened sense of awareness is making everything feel ridiculously saturated—the pink on his cheeks, the blue of the curtains behind him.

“So, it wouldn’t bother you to kiss for a while?” I ask.

“No.”

I shift, think about it, then say, “Well, I think it’s important to acknowledge that every woman is different—every person is different in what turns them on. So the most important thing is asking, learning what they like. But it’s pretty across-the-board that if you have to choose too much foreplay, or not enough, it’s better to go with more rather than less.”

“So, more kissing.”

“Yeah. More kissing. You should…” I suck in a breath, meet his eyes, find them dark and intent, his cheeks flushed. This is, by far, the strangest and most sexually taut moment I’ve shared with another person. “You should wait until she’s asking for more. Draw it out as long as you can. Wait until she’s tugging on your clothes, touching you, or just verbally…begging.”

The last word comes out as a whisper, and Grayson lets out a sharp breath. “Alright.”

Time stretches out, languid and strange, and I shift again, repositioning myself, knowing I have to be the one to move this forward.

“Okay,” I manage. “If you were going to kiss me right now, how would you do it?”

“You want me to tell you, or…?”

His eyes are firmly on my lips, so I’m not sure whether he more hears or sees it, but when I say, “Show me,” he’s already moving, leaning forward, sliding one hand into my hair, planting the other on my thigh, and kissing me.