Alex stared at it, silent and unblinking. He hates it.
“It’s nothing special,” I said.
“It’s stunning.”
Oh.
“Your lips are just...” His gaze traveled from the face on my phone to my face in the flesh. “They’re perfect.”
Instinctively, my fingertips went to my lips. Alex looked hungry. Like he’d been starving for days and my body was a satisfying meal.
He moved closer, eyes still fixed on my quivering lips. Then his mouth was on mine and my hands were in his hair and we were wrestling frantically out of our clothes. We barely even made it to his bed.
When we were finished, he kissed me hard, then said, “Total fucking right-swipe.”
I giggled, still dizzy from the sex. But as the world steadied itself around me, I tuned back into my surroundings—including the acrid smell emanating from the kitchen. “Is something burning?”
“Oh, shit. The rice!” Alex launched his naked body out of bed and yanked the smoking pan of arroz con gandules from the stovetop. One peek under the lid and his disgusted face said it all. “Maybe we should order in.”
While he summoned a delivery from Adrienne’s Pizza Bar, I threw on my bra and panties and went to the bathroom to freshen up. When I emerged, Alex was sitting on the couch in his boxers, already engrossed in his phone.
“Greg still bugging you?” I asked, settling in next to him.
“Nah. I wasn’t responding to him while you and I were...you know.” He glanced up and flashed a mischievous smile. “So eventually he stopped texting me.”
“Maybe he finally figured out how to use Google.”
“Miracles do happen,” he said, adding, “It’s Café con Leche, by the way.”
“What?”
“The music. You asked for the name of the Spotify playlist before.”
“Oh, right. Thanks.”
Tossing his phone aside, he looked up at me, eyes shimmering in the dim light. No one had ever looked at me that way before, like I was adored. In that moment, I wanted to believe every word that ever came out of his mouth.
“Wanna watch something?” He pulled me close beside him, wrapping his arm around me as he turned on the TV and started scrolling through Netflix. Whether or not Alex was sweet-talking me, I still reveled in the tenderness of his touch, his affection, his lingering gaze. Having someone to cuddle with, someone so complimentary and kind, was a long-wished-for comfort. So I tried my best to lose myself in the moment, watching an Ali Wong stand-up routine and stealing kisses between sips of wine.
About twenty minutes later, the buzzer rang, and my stomach grumbled at the thought of artisanal pizza. I paused the show while Alex squirmed into his T-shirt, and the buzzer rang again. “Coming!” he yelled, as he ran to the door.
But there was no piping-hot pizza waiting on the other side. There was only Greg, standing in the hallway with that signature slack-jawed look on his face.
“S’up, man?”
In a flash, I yanked a cushion from the back of the couch and held it before me like a shield. Then I froze, thinking if I stayed perfectly still, Greg wouldn’t notice me sitting there in my underwear.
“S’up, Melanie.”
Too late.
Alex whipped his head around, panic in his eyes, before turning back to Greg. “What are you doing here?”
“You stopped answering my texts.”
“Right. Because you said you had this upgrade covered tonight.”
“Yeah, but all I thought I had to do was watch it. I didn’t think anything was gonna, like, happen.”
“Are you—” Alex stopped himself midsentence, then scrubbed a hand over his face and took a deep, cleansing breath. When he spoke again, his voice was calm. “Okay. What’s wrong now?”
Greg barreled his way into the apartment, sliding his laptop out of his messenger bag and popping it open on the kitchen counter. “It keeps saying it can’t connect.”
“What can’t connect?”
“The database.”
“Did you run a traceroute?”
“A what?”
Alex raked his hands through his hair, clearly exasperated with his partner’s ineptitude. After a moment of tense silence, he said, “Let me take a look.”
Tapping furiously at the keyboard, Alex cursed under his breath. Seconds passed, then minutes, and eventually the two of them were so absorbed in whatever crisis was unfolding on the computer screen, it was like I had ceased to exist. So I took the opportunity to escape to the bathroom, holding the couch cushion in front of me with one hand and plucking my clothes up off the floor with the other.
Once I was safely behind the closed door, I buried my face in the cushion and bit back a scream. Why was this guy always showing up at the most inconvenient times? If he weren’t so painfully stupid, I’d have thought Greg was intentionally trying to sabotage whatever Alex and I had going on. But clearly, he was totally incompetent. He couldn’t even fix a simple networking issue without Alex holding his hand the whole way through.
Poor Alex. Stuck in a failing business partnership with the world’s most useless start-up bro.
I got dressed and fixed my hair, allowing my blood pressure to return to a reasonable rate. As the sound of my pulse pounding in my ears began to subside, I tuned into the voices in the kitchen, so easily discernible through the cheap drywall of an overpriced Manhattan apartment.
“You’re the king, man,” Greg said. “Fucking Rico Suave!”
Alex shushed him. “Keep it down.”
“Dude, you’re so fucking smooth. I didn’t believe you when you said she was coming over. But you did it. You won, man!”
You won?
I picked up the couch cushion, hugging it to my chest, waiting for Alex to respond. Surely, he would jump to my defense and tell Greg to get bent. Because I was more than some bragworthy sexual conquest. I was not just some trophy to be won.
But all he said was, “Yup.”
Yup?
What the hell was that supposed to mean?
Apparently, Alex didn’t have a problem with Hatch’s frat house culture, after all. Sure, he criticized it to my face, but when he was alone with the boys, he was more than happy to play along.
I pushed open the bathroom door and returned the cushion to its rightful place on the back of the couch. In my peripheral vision, I could see Alex watching me, but I couldn’t bring myself to meet his gaze.
“Everything okay?” he asked.