Page 56 of Show Me 1
“What’s up with you and Jesse?”
All right, more blunt than I expected.
I scrubbed shampoo through my hair. “How do you mean?”
“Are you close friends?”
“He’s my roommate, obviously, and I suppose I’d say we’ve grown pretty close, yeah.” I wouldn’t mention the part about how the shit that had gone down on the couch last night had effectively reset my barometer on sexual fantasies. I didn’t have a foot fetish, I didn’t think, but I wasn’t sure when I’d last gotten off so hard. No, that was a lie. It’d been with Jesse. Again. Every encounter kept topping the one previous, and my OnlyFans subscribers were growing like kudzu thanks to him.This is insane, he’d said last week, when I’d handed him an envelope with five hundred dollars in it—his half of the profits. He wasn’t wrong, but lately it wasn’t the only reason I wanted to keep going.
“Is he seeing anyone?”
I snorted. “Seems like that’s something you could ask him yourself.”
“I think he’s probably still pissed at me.”
“Do you blame him?”
Reid turned a scrutinizing look upon me, like he was trying to peer behind the guardedness that arose in me anytime Jesse came up lately. “I apologized to him the other day. Like, a heartfelt one. And I meant it.”
“Doesn’t mean he has to accept it.”
Reid narrowed his eyes. “Heisseeing someone.”
“You’re out of control, dude. Let it go.”
He sighed. “All right, fine. But what would you do? How would you get someone back?”
Fuck me.
“I wouldn’t have cheated on someone in the first place.”
“It was more complex than that.”
“Not really,” I argued, frustration creeping into my voice.
“No, it was. He was so damn…sweet. I didn’t know what to do with it after a while. I mean, we were both younger, and he was pretty inexperienced—”
Reid gaped at me as I chortled. I couldn’t help it because, once again, I was thinking back to last night and then to the numerous other encounters Jesse and I had had. A mean little part of me wanted to say Jesse had apparently gained plenty of experience after their breakup.
“What’s he into lately? You live with him, so you probably know, right? What’s he watching on TV? He used to likeTop Chef. Does he still?”
I could tell Reid about how into his job as a sous chef at Fuego he was, that his favorite video game lately was Northern Nights, that he lovedOnce Upon a Time in Hollywood, hatedJoker, and was on the fence aboutLittle Women. That he was completely addicted toBake Off, all of which made me grin becausehuh, I hadn’t realized that I’d picked up on all these things about him over the past couple of months.
What I did realize, though, was that my mean streak ran deeper than I thought, because I said, “He’s not really into that anymore. He’s all aboutHell’s Kitchen.” He hated that show with a passion. “Ask him about that next time. But if you’re really smart, you’ll leave him alone.”
Twisting off the tap, I stepped out of the shower and left him behind, low-key dreading what promised to be an exhausting night ahead of partying with the football team when I would’ve been perfectly happy to go home and lie on the couch again with Jesse.
20
Jesse
Isucked noisily at my mimosa and nudged my shades up my nose. Less than thirty yards from our cheap foldout lawn chairs was a skin feast and hot dude buffet the likes of which I rarely saw outside of a phone or computer screen.
Sam, Mark, and Nate’s fraternity was doing a charity car wash for visitors’ weekend, and I was inwardly berating myself for not having taken advantage of this occasion the last three years.
Seriously, when else was it acceptable to sit in a lawn chair and stare at a bunch of half-naked guys soaping up cars and themselves in the process? Never mind that I seemed to be fixated on one in particular. I watched with undisguised delight as Sam blasted himself with a hose, then shook his wet hair out with a grin. Was that not somehow illegal?
“We should all have restraining orders taken out on us,” I said.