After laying a peck on that soft stretch of skin, he said, “Sleep well,” knowing that there was no way that he was going to be able to sleep tonight without a long, cold shower.
CHAPTER NINE
THE CLOSEST TO YOGA that Sasha ever got was SoulCycle, but Hannah’s best friend had a mantra. Since college, whenever Hannah had a wild hair up her ass to do something crazy, which was often, Sasha said, “I’m not judging you, but are you sure that’s a good idea?”
It usually made Hannah pause for at least a moment to reconsider.
As they mounted their stationary bikes at cycling class the next day, Sasha squinted at her as though she were a steely-eyed detective in a procedural drama winding up to interrogate a suspect. Hannah only hoped that she kept the I-just-had-the-best-orgasm-of-my-life glow to a minimum after her fitful night’s sleep.
Luckily, her roommate had already been asleep when she’d arrived home. The debriefing she’d been spared the night before and pre-caffeine was apparently going to happen right before cycling class.
“You had sex with him, didn’t you?” What the hell!? Does Sasha have orgasm radar or something?
Her face heated, and she thanked whatever asshole decided that putting spinning in the dark would make it a whole new, very trendy thing. Her mental gears locked for a moment, as she wondered how she could answer this without revealing how intimate she and Jack had actually gotten.
Finally, after the clock in her head resumed its ticking, she said, “He did not put his penis in my vagina.” She hoped that sounded as confident as she was trying to make it seem.
After looking around to make sure that the other early-morning exercisers were not listening, Sasha quietly asked, “Finger stuff or mouth stuff?”
“Both.” She could not be dishonest with her best friend, as much as it would help her seem more serious about this whole process.
Sasha pursed her lips slightly. “Well, was it at least good?”
Hannah let everything go at that point—the false confidence and the illusion that what had happened with Jack had not affected her. “It was so good that if he ghosts me after last night, and I see him months or years from now, I will give him the roundhouse high five from the homoerotic volleyball scene in Top Gun.”
“That good?” Her best friend’s eyes widened as though she’d never heard of sex that good before.
Hannah nodded.
“Like top and bottom fives?” She mimicked the motion of the high five in question.
“Top and bottom.”
Sasha turned and clipped her shoes into her bike before responding. “Shit.”
“Yeah.”
Luckily, she was saved from spilling her guts further when the instructor walked in. It was “It’s Britney, Bitch” day in class, so she was hoping that she could lose herself in the lyrics and pulsing beats. As many times as she’d replayed the events of the date over in her head, she couldn’t figure out where she’d gone wrong.
As soon as he’d made her come, it was like he hadn’t been able to get her out of his apartment fast enough. She’d been primed and ready to return the favor—her promise to Sasha that she wouldn’t screw him on the first date be damned.
But he hadn’t wanted her. Throughout the warm-up song, that thought rang through her brain, and it elevated her heart rate more than the movement of her legs. For part of last night, she’d thought that it was going to be easy to string him along for two weeks. But her attraction to him, and his reticence, complicated things. She wished she could read his mind and know exactly what he was thinking.
Maybe he’d realized that he really had a problem with pubic hair like midway through the act, and been totally turned off. The bulge in the front of his slacks told her that that wasn’t the case, but what did she know?
Through the first set of hills, she puzzled over whether he had some weird thing about sex. One of Noah’s many, many problems with her had been how much she’d liked sex—how much she’d needed it to feel like they were connecting. Combined with his strict religious upbringing and generally conservative attitudes, her wanting to jump him had been anathema to him.
In most ways, Jack seemed like a totally different kind of guy. But maybe he was suffering from some Catholic shame. She wasn’t going to feel bad about what they’d done last night. He’d offered, after all. Granted, he didn’t know she’d been coming off a long drought, so he may have gotten more than he bargained for. But she’d have been just as eager to take what he was offering regardless.
This all went to why dating Jack was such a bad idea. He was way too smart, and she had the feeling that he saw things about people that people didn’t want him to see. He could probably tell that she had ulterior motives for dating him. And that was what she had to think about instead of how good touching him and kissing him had felt. As soon as “Oops! . . . I Did It Again” came blaring through the speakers, she remembered why she didn’t do this anymore.
On her own, she didn’t have to think about anyone else or worry about what they thought of her. What she needed and wanted was between her and her small but worthy collection of sex toys and porn GIFs. Bringing someone else into it, opening up to him, was a huge mistake. It didn’t matter that he was handsome, or that she liked the way he smelled, and he was a veritable savant at eating pussy.
As she sprinted through “Toxic,” she realized what she needed to do to get through the next few weeks with a fake boyfriend and a promotion. Even though Jack seemed different, she had to remember that he was operating off the same fumes of toxic masculinity that wafted through every bit of this relationship shit. He might appear to be a good guy, but she didn’t really know him. If she allowed for the possibility of his charm—the general sense that he was a lovely human—to be real, she would be lost.
She’d end up locked in her room again, eating cold Pop-Tarts and crying about the fact that she would definitely, for sure, die alone. And that was unacceptable. There was no way that one date—no matter how good—was going to knock her off track. She was going to kick ass, take names, and become the most sought-after event planner in Chicago.
Even if she killed the possibility of a fulfilling relationship with Jack to do it. They could never work out anyway. She just didn’t have what it took to do relationships. And she’d accepted that.
She had.
By the time she climbed off the bike with wobbly legs, she felt . . . not exactly better. But more like herself again. The ache in her chest spread out to her well-used limbs. The echo of pleasure from having Jack between her legs the night before had dissipated.
Sasha must have seen the shift, too. As shitty as she was about seeing how guys were always going to screw her over, her best friend was perceptive. Because Hannah wasn’t always great about sharing how she felt, intuition was an essential quality in her best friend.