Chapter 3: Look, But Don’t Touch

It was my turn to disappear into the kitchen for drinks. Margaritas were the order of the hour, and I took my job seriously.

“What happened to you?”

It was Lisa’s voice, coming from behind me. I spun to face her, once again drinking in the sight of those incredible long legs and top-heavy torso. A few drinks in, and her skimpy macrame bikini was starting to slip a bit, getting dangerously close to showing the few precious inches of skin she’d thus far succeeded in covering.

God, she’s practically naked, I thought for the millionth time that hour.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s just, who’d have thought Tristan from high school would grow up to have an honest-to-god six-pack? I mean, you were always cute, but DAMN.”

She tapped a finger to my stomach, as if checking that it was real. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like the attention from such a beautiful girl.

“Annie and I went kind of fitness-crazy during COVID to deal with all the stress. I found out I actually like weightlifting,” I shrugged. “I can’t catch a ball to save my life, but when you break everything down into reps, weight, and macros, it’s basically math and science-”

Lisa laughed, musical.

“Which, now that I say it out loud,” I continued, “I realize is the nerdiest possible answer to your compliment.”

“You really grew into yourself,” she said. “In a good way. And not just your muscles! Confidence is a good look on you, too.”

Lisa took some of the drinks from me to bring into the other room, and I very pointedly watched her leave, admiring the way my friend’s barely covered ass cheeks clenched softly with each step.

A short while later, it was Erik’s turn in the kitchen, refilling the ice chest. As soon as he’d gone, his wife mewed sensually and made an exaggerated show of lying face-down and closing her eyes.

“What a beautiful, sunny beach,” Mina said. “I’d better put on some sunscreen so I don’t get burned. But, I’m too tired to do it myself.”

“Ooh! I got you, babe!” Erik called excitedly from the other room.

“Mmm, that’s okay, honey. You’re all the way in the kitchen. I’ll just have Tristan do it.”

All conversation in the room went quiet.

Annie and I exchanged a quick look. My eyes silently asked, Would you be okay with that?

My wife gave me a secretive smile, then she also rolled over onto her stomach, coquettishly wiggling her toes in the air. She closed her eyes and jokingly lamented, “But then, who’ll do MY back?”

Lisa glanced over at Chris. His eyes were laser-focused on Annie’s bikini-clad butt.

“I volunteer my husband!” Lisa called out. “And, since he’ll be busy with Annie, Erik has to do me when he gets back from the kitchen.”

Then Lisa, too, lay down and closed her eyes with a naughty smile.

Erik peeked his head back into the living room, not sure he’d heard right.

“What, uh,” I stammered, “what happened to ‘look, but don’t touch?’”

Mina gave an innocent shrug. “It’s just sunscreen. Maybe ‘touch, but don’t grope’ is a little more reasonable.”

Neither Annie nor Lisa offered a word of discouragement at Mina’s suggestion.

Erik, Chris, and I stared at each other for a single, awkward moment –

Then the three of us spontaneously broke out into dopey grins and ran off to grab the sunscreen.

I knelt beside Mina’s ample body, spread out before me in that little black bikini. Pulse racing, I squirted a dollop of sunscreen into my palms –

“No, wait,” Mina said.

I froze, worried Mina was going to change her mind. Instead, she reached around her back and untied her bikini top.

“Don’t want to get tan lines,” she clarified.

The straps of her top fell away, baring her naked back to me. The twin swells of Mina’s breasts spilled generously into view on either side of her body. Following suit, Annie and Lisa both reached back and undid their own tops.

Reminiscing about this now, the moment still sounds pretty innocent. It wasn’t unusual for us to playfully flirt with each other’s spouses, and the women were only exposing their bare backs to us. It barely merited a PG-13.

Every single previous time I’d rubbed sunscreen into Mina’s supple skin, however, it had been because there was an actual sun in the sky. A massive ball of radioactive fire, threatening skin cancer and unpleasant redness.

I’d enjoyed touching my friend’s body, I admit (and I suspect she enjoyed it, too), but we’d always had plausible deniability about that part of the scenario. I’d merely been protecting her from that gosh-darn motherfucker the sun, like any good buddy would.

Today? That excuse went out the window. Our wives were inviting other men to rub our hands all over their nearly-naked bodies, and there was no use pretending there was anything unsexual about any of it.

Again, it wasn’t exactly cheating. Maybe more of that micro-cheating. Whatever, I was too turned on to care.

Nearby, Chris went to work on my wife, absent-mindedly rubbing lotion on her back while his eyes remained glued to her athletic ass. Chris wasted no time guiding his hands to her upper thighs, gently massaging while looking guiltily up at me. I flashed him an encouraging thumbs-up and Chris grinned like a kid on Christmas.

Across the room, Chris’s wife let out a happy sigh as Erik’s lotion-covered hands moved up and down her bare back. “Such strong fingers,” Lisa cooed. He whispered something in her ear that turned her cheeks red.

The four of them didn’t hold my attention for long though, not with the lovely Mina spread out before me, awaiting my touch. I pressed my fingertips firmly against her back, more focused on giving her a deep-tissue massage than I was on applying sunscreen. Mina whimpered as my hands stroked up and down her soft skin.

“Ooh, free massage. NOW it’s a vacation,” Mina sighed.

The other wives moaned their approval. This felt more like foreplay than flirting.

I was seriously tempted to let my probing fingertips wander just a bit too far, across the soft swells of those world-class breasts. I had seen and touched Mina’s naked tits exactly and one time, way back when I was nineteen, and now my inner monologue was doing Olympic-level gymnastics trying to justify an “accidental” grope:

Come on, just move your fingers ONE INCH too far in the wrong direction. It isn’t gonna raise any red flags.

Shut up, brain.

How about this: You’re rubbing lotion up her sides, and your fingers just “happen” to bump up against those tits?

Brain! I’m married, remember?

But she waaaaaants it. And Annie wants it, too...

I felt like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, mentally debating my evil split personality.

With Mina’s back, arms, and shoulders now thoroughly covered with lotion, I switched my attention to her legs. I took extra care to squeeze and caress the pliant muscles of her inner thighs, stopping just short of touching anything that could be deemed inappropriate.

Her tits usually got all the attention, but Mina’s ass was incredible, too. Not athletic like Annie’s or perfectly rounded like Lisa’s, but soft and voluptuous - the kind of butt that would be the perfect cushion for any guy lucky enough to slam his cock into her from behind.

That ass was staring me in the face, a little black triangle of fabric cutting across those smooth cheeks...

My brain was once again screaming at me to grab and squeeze. No! No, “Touch but don’t grope,” remember?

I would have killed to know what thoughts were going through Mina’s mind at that moment.

Nearby, Lisa called out from beneath Erik’s hands, “Hey guys? This is really fun!”

We all laughed and agreed.

“Speaking of fun,” Mina teased, “Tristan still needs to do my front.”

And with that, she cupped her hands over her breasts and rolled over onto her back, looking me right in the eye to watch my reaction. My eyes practically popped out of my head as those massive, naked tits swung into view, nipples barely concealed beneath Mina’s tiny hands.

“I ... uh...”

“I’m just fucking with you, buddy!” she laughed. Then she glanced quickly down at the obvious tent in my swim trunks, smirked, and turned away from me—again flashing the sides of those glorious breasts—as she put her bikini top back on.

I sighed, half-relieved and half-disappointed as the laughter around the room broke the spell. The other women put their tops back on, too, and everyone returned to the laps of their respective husbands.

Mina’s eyes, however, kept sneaking my way.

MINA’S BEDROOM, SIX YEARS EARLIER...

I’m twenty years old.

Mina sits between Annie and me on the bed, ugly crying, face buried in her hands.

“I can’t go there without a date! I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!” Mina says it over and over again. “You don’t know my family; they’re gonna torture me about it. I’m gonna spend the entire weekend listening to, ‘Mina, your sister is already married, why can’t you find a nice boy to date?’”

When she’s around strangers, Mina is confident, vivacious, larger than life. When she’s around her family, she shrinks down to nothing. She sees herself only through the prism of how much “worse” she is than her sister, Sascha.

Sascha has always been the golden child in the family. Straight A’s, Ivy League, marrying a pediatric cardiologist from a good family. Two inches taller and ten pounds thinner.

Mina has lived her whole life in this woman’s shadow.

Annie looks over at me and smiles. She whispers something in Mina’s ear. Mina looks up, suddenly confused.

“Yeah, but don’t you think that would be weird?” Mina whispers back.

“Nah,” Annie says.

“But it’s a wedding! It’s romantic! What if people are expecting us to, like, kiss?”

Annie looks at me with those big, adorable eyes. “I trust you guys.”

Now it’s a month later, and I’m living out the plot of some cheesy romcom. I’m pretending to be Mina’s boyfriend for Sascha’s wedding, so that her overbearing relatives and “perfect” sister won’t shame her for being single.

It’s not very hard to maintain the ruse that I’m crazy about this girl. Mina and I have been close friends for nearly two years now. We know everything there is to know about each other, we genuinely like each other, we have our own inside jokes, and...

And...

And she’s so goddamn fucking gorgeous, it would be harder NOT to look like I’m infatuated with her. Mina is positively radiant tonight in her bridesmaid gown. Her chestnut hair hangs luxuriously across feminine shoulders.

I’m a big hit with her family. I catch the garter belt. Mina catches the bouquet. We pose for photos that immortalize our fake relationship. She is beaming throughout the whole reception.

“Thanks so much, Tristan,” she whispers in my ear, her breath close. “You don’t know how much this means to me. I know it’s awkward and weird, but you being here makes me feel like I’m not such a disappointment to my parents. Like I’m not some big failure just because I’m not perfect.”

“But, you ARE perfect, Mina,” I whisper back. Her eyes are smiling at me. “You’re so full of life, and warmth, and personality. Not everything that matters can be measured in your job and your grade point average. For all Sascha’s good qualities, I would never want to be with someone like her.”

“But you’d want to be with someone like me?” Mina whispers.

“Well, yeah,” I say, forgetting myself. There’s a moment of awkward silence.

“Can you do me a favor?” she asks, at last. “Can you please kiss me? I think it might bring home the deception for everyone else.”

It’s not cheating, I remind myself. Annie gave us the all-clear before we left. She said it was ok for us to kiss at the reception. All a part of the show. It would be weird if we didn’t. We’re all grownups, after all.

And yet, my heart’s in my throat. I’ve fantasized about kissing those full, soft lips for two long years.

“Of course,” I say.

I can taste the vanilla in her lip gloss. I’m lost in the warmth and the sweetness of the moment.

At the next table over, people are cheering for us.

“How soon until I have some grandkids?!” her mother calls out.

It’s hours later, and we’re turning in for the night. Mina’s hotel room is obnoxiously luxurious, bigger than the size of my whole apartment. Her family is fucking loaded, and they spared no expense for this wedding.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Mina keeps whispering, kissing my cheek each time.

“Hey, I’m not exactly getting dragged across hot coals here,” I laugh.

She offers me the first shower but I decline, eager to just put my feet up after a long night of dancing. I’m sitting on the enormous bed, head still spinning from all the alcohol, when I see the bathroom door slowly creak open.

Must be a faulty door latch. It certainly wasn’t anything Mina did; she’s busy rinsing off in the shower.

The shower...

Through the crack in the now-open door, I see her like a steamy mirage. A shapely wet body, hidden behind beveled glass. I should look away. I’m going to look away. Really.

But, it’s not like I’m actually seeing anything, right? Not clearly, anyway. Just tantalizingly blurry curves. Plus, Mina’s an exhibitionist. This is totally the kind of thing she’d do on ‘accident’ to get a rise out of me.

Well, mission accomplished, if that’s the case. Part of me has definitely risen.

Oh fuck, those are the dark spots of her nipples. Still blurry, but unmistakably bouncing and swaying on her enormous tits as she scrubs down.

That does it! This isn’t who I am. This is my fiancé’s best friend. I get up and close the bathroom door, securely this time.

Mina gives a little shriek at the sound.

I hurriedly call out, “It’s okay, the door just came open! Figured you deserved a little privacy.”

“Aw, such a gentleman!” she shouts back. “I thought you were coming in here to join me!”

“Yeah, not sure Annie would appreciate that,” I laugh.

Mina emerges from the bathroom a few minutes later, dressed in stretchy shorts and a black micro-tee shirt. No bra for sleeping, of course. Wavy chestnut hair clings to her neck, still damp.

Her chest bounces with every step—might as well be in slow motion—as she strides barefoot to join me in bed. I’m treated to one more epic bounce as she leaps and flops down onto the mattress beside me with a deep groan of relief. Then she rolls on top of me, pressing all those agonizingly sweet curves against my body as she runs her fingers across my cheek.

“Annie’s a lucky girl,” she whispers.

Then we’re kissing again, slow and sensual, this time for an audience of nobody. Her mouth is hot on mine. Burning. Marshmallow lips. Heady fumes of honey lavender shampoo and vanilla body wash.

My cock is screaming against the confines of my boxers, stabbing up into her bare thigh.

We break apart, reflexively scooting a safe distance away from one another.

“Thanks again,” Mina sighs through a sleepy, horny smile. “For that final taste of pretend.”

PRESENT DAY

As much as I’d been enjoying the opportunity to get my hands on Mina, I’d only ever been truly intimate with one woman, and this was starting to feel a bit overwhelming.

Annie climbed onto my lap and sloppily kissed me, setting my blood on fire. I don’t know if it was jealousy or something else, but an instant later I pulled my wife’s body against mine, and we mashed our lips together in full view of everyone.

We weren’t the only couple in the room that had trouble keeping our hands to ourselves. A moment later, I could hear the smacking of hungry kisses and heavy breathing coming from the others. Annie and I broke apart to glance over at our friends:

Chris and Lisa were in a similar position to ours, sitting on the floor with her straddling his lap, crushing her chest to his. Their fingers erotically caressed each other’s backs, and a moan of pleasure escaped Chris’s lips as Lisa kissed her way down his neck to his bare shoulder.

Beside them, Erik was lying down on his back, with his wife’s voluptuous form draped across him. She arched her back, teasingly rubbing her big, bikini-clad tits back and forth across his pecs while his muscular arms wrapped around her like a python. Their kisses were wet and messy, mouths urgently melting against each other.

Annie’s eyes found mine, flashing with arousal—always so maddeningly cute—and a second later we were kissing again. Panting like animals. Tongues and heat.

To our right, Chris started getting friskier. He slid his hands down beneath Lisa’s macrame bottoms, to her beautiful, bubbly ass, and squeezed. Lisa reflexively ground her crotch against his.

To our left, Erik craned his neck forward, pressing his face into his wife’s bulging cleavage, planting soft kisses along the tops of her breasts. She cooed sexily, and her fingers pulled at his hair.

Then, out of nowhere, I felt Annie’s arm stab down between our bodies and grab hold of my cock through the fabric of my suit. I gasped in surprise, suddenly feeling weirdly exposed. She didn’t stroke me; she didn’t try to get me off. She just gripped my shaft and squeezed, thrilling in the pulsing hardness between her fingers.

I lost track of how long we all sat there on the floor, making out like horny teenagers at a basement party. Something had been unlocked deep inside of me, a desire I’d obediently kept in check ever since I’d first fallen in love with my wife. A desire for something new. Something different. Unknown and exciting.

Given the way Annie was writhing uncontrollably in my lap, I wasn’t the only one who felt it. Her breathing quickened, and she pressed her wet crotch down against my leg, rubbing fiercely. The feeble piece of fabric that had been covering her down there was brushed aside, and I felt slick, hot nectar smearing across my thigh.

“Aah!” she moaned.

Then, her body trembling uncontrollably, Annie let go of my cock and grabbed hold of my shoulders for better leverage, grinding away on me with abandon. Her jaw froze open, muscles tense, and she suddenly looked past me—to the other two men in the room—both of them fixated on her crescendoing pleasure.

“Ah-ah-ah-Ahhhh!!!” Annie exploded into writhing, chaotic bliss and collapsed limply in my arms.

The room went quiet. The other couples had stopped what they were doing. All their attention was focused on Annie’s post-orgasmic shaking and mewing. Finally, she looked up with a weak smile, felt everyone’s eyes on her, and the bliss on her face immediately transformed into utter, crushing embarrassment as she realized her best and oldest friends in the world had just seen her climax on my lap.

Like a scared cat, Annie bolted away into our bedroom.

“Annie, no!” Mina called after, but Annie just shut the door.

“I’ll go talk to her,” I said.

The mood was instantly broken. With an awkward wave to the others, and a still-straining erection in my trunks, I followed my wife into the bedroom.

I found her sitting on the bed, facing the wall. Refusing to look at me.

“I can’t believe I just did that!” she cursed. “Everyone was looking at me!”

“It’s okay, honey,” I started.

“No, it’s embarrassing! And it’s weird, and it’s awkward, and why did I wear this stupid, slutty swimsuit in the first place?!”

She balled up her striped bikini and threw it angrily against the bed. Now naked, she collapsed face-first into the pillows and groaned in frustration. I sat down beside her and gently massaged her scalp, a little trick I’d mastered over the years for calming her anxiety.

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of. If we’d kept going, I’m pretty sure everyone out there would have come to the same, um, conclusion.”

“But they didn’t! It was just me, and then everyone stopped! Now I’m the weird one!”

Much as I was sympathetic to my wife’s feelings of humiliation in that moment, it was hard not to smile at the cute, comical way her words came out muffled through the pillow.

“How am I supposed to go back out there now? They’re all talking about me. Either talking about how weird it is that I just came in front of everyone, or talking about how weird it is that I ran away right after, or—I don’t know!”

“Annie? Sweetie? These people have been our best friends for years. I can’t promise that this won’t be a funny story they bring up to get a rise out of you from time to time, but I can guarantee you that they aren’t out there judging you. If anything, they’re just concerned that you got upset.”

As if on cue, there was a subtle knock at the bedroom door. “Annie, is everything okay?” Lisa called from the other side.

Annie sat up and sighed, “Yeah. Sorry! I, uh, I’m feeling really embarrassed right now.”

“Nothing to be embarrassed about!” Mina called after.

“Yeah, you were hot!” Erik cheered. Then we heard him grunt in pain as his wife elbowed him for failing to read the room.

“Hey, I get it,” I whispered to Annie. “We’ve kept things pretty safe in the bedroom since we got married. That was kind of overwhelming for me, too. Touching other people, watching other people, other people watching us...”

Annie buried her face in her hands. “God, I just want to stay in this room the rest of this stupid trip. How am I supposed to ever look Chris in the eye again after that? Or Lisa? Or ... or you?”

I draped a reassuring arm across her bare shoulders and said, “Sweetie, you don’t need to get so upset about this. It was just a bit of harmless fun. Everyone was playing along, doing the exact same thing. You didn’t do anything wrong. It wasn’t even your idea!”

Annie was quiet for a long time. Then, with the tiniest voice I’d ever heard, Annie whispered, “Actually, it WAS my idea. I’m the one who suggested it to the other girls while we were getting changed into our bikinis. I thought it would be kind of sexy for the husbands to swap us around.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“With the sunscreen!” she clarified. “Obviously, not like, SWAPPING, swapping. But I didn’t have the guts to say it out loud, so Mina offered to take the lead.”

“Oh,” I blinked.

“And, also,” she muttered, her words suddenly coming out in an uninterrupted string of awkwardness, “I lied last night.”

“When?”

“When I said that I didn’t regret meeting you before I got to have sex with other men.”

“Oh,” I said again, brilliantly articulate as ever.

She hurriedly added, “Not that I regret meeting you! I love you! I just, you know, wish I’d had a chance to see what it was like having a few... experiences before I found ‘the one.’ It’s like I skipped all the way to the very last level without ever getting to play the game. I have all these horny fantasies, just wondering what it would have been like, and I feel guilty never telling you about them.”

I sighed, rolling her onto her back so I could look into those big, adorable blue eyes.

“Annie, if I’m being totally, 100% honest, then I lied last night, too. I never planned on finding the woman of my dreams when I was eighteen. If I could go back and plan out every moment of my love life, then yes, I would have added another notch or two to my bedpost before I met you. But that doesn’t mean I love you any less. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Annie blushed. I brushed some errant strands of hair off her beautiful face and leaned down to kiss her sweetly on the lips.

“I don’t know why I’m being so stupid about this,” she sighed. “I just like to daydream about other men sometimes.”

“Maybe you’d feel better if you just came right out and told me some of these recurring fantasies that get you so worked up. Who are these lucky guys that you dream about?” I asked.

“Ohh, you know, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Chris Pine...” She paused, then looked up at me with those big eyes. She whispered, “Pretty much everyone named Chris.”

“As in, our friend, Chris?” I asked. “Lisa’s Chris?”

“Uh-huh,” she shivered, not meeting my eyes.

“And Erik?”

“Erik even more so, yeah,” she whispered. “Oh gosh, I’m horrible. Is it weird for me to say this out loud? I mean, they’re our friends! They’re my friends’ husbands!”

I just shook my head and grinned.

“Annie, it’s not exactly a secret that we all find each other’s spouses attractive. I’m not jealous if you check those guys out from time to time.”

“But ... it’s not just that,” her voice was now so quiet I could hardly hear her. “I also like how they look at me. How it feels to have their eyes on my body. I don’t just fantasize about THEM. I fantasize about them fantasizing about ME, you know? Getting some attention from Chris and Erik is the closest I’ll ever get to experiencing what it’s like to be with another man. Is that wrong?”

“No, it’s not wrong. Maybe a little bit naughty, but all in good fun. Like with the sunscreen just now. I say, let them have their horny little fantasies about this perfect body of yours. Show it off. Tease the fuck out of those guys. I know you love me.”

She giggled nervously.

I whispered into her ear, “You know, after getting to rub that lotion all over your naked back, Chris is gonna spend the whole week dreaming about squeezing these beautiful tits.” I groped my wife’s firm, naked breasts for emphasis.

She whimpered.

“And at night, when he’s fucking his wife,” I added, “he’ll be imagining this is the ass in his hands.” I reached around the curve of her lovely, heart-shaped butt.

“Oh...” she cooed.

I caressed her face. “He’ll dream about these big, innocent eyes looking up at him while Lisa sucks on his dick.”

She playfully slurped my thumb into her mouth, licking the tip. Damn if she wasn’t sexy when she was horny, even if it was over another man...

Something snapped in me and I grabbed her wrists, forcing them above her head and down into the mattress. Annie let out a surprised gasp as my face dropped to her exposed breasts, tongue swirling across peaked ruby nipples.

“Ahh, holy shit, Tristan!” she wheezed through clenched teeth.

I felt impatient, greedy, hungry to reclaim her body for my own. A second later my hands worked their way down Annie’s slender body, past her hips, and I pushed those athletic thighs apart and pressed my mouth to her core.

Annie’s jaw clenched, and she arched her back in a sudden shock of pleasure. Her own fingers found her tits and squeezed, tugging at her nipples while my tongue went to work down below. The firm muscles of her gorgeous legs clenched in my hands, spasming reflexively from shocks of pleasure.

She was boiling liquid honey beneath my lips. I swiped my tongue up through her slit, playfully sucking and stretching the soft lips as I worked my way towards her clit.

This was my woman. My wife. My everything. After seven years, I could play her body like Jimmy Hendrix could pluck a guitar. The rhythm, the cues - all right on time. All perfect as ever. The way her hips started thrusting against my face. The upshift in her breathing as her pulse quickened. The urgency in her impatient, incoherent whispers.

I was hard as a rock again, my wife’s building arousal pouring into me like fuel. The swim trunks were painfully tight, so I slipped them off and set my cock free, careful to never stop worshipping Annie with my mouth.

I slipped two fingers inside her below my tongue, curling and twisting them for added sensation.

“Oh Tristan ... I need - mmm! I neeeeed it...” she whispered. Annie grabbed hold of my scalp and pulled my head upwards, away from her cunt—my tongue dragging heavily from her clit, across her navel, and over her breasts and neck—until my body weight was pressing her down into the mattress and our mouths were mashing hungrily together, once again.

She gave no resistance at all as the thick head of my cock parted her folds and pushed blissfully inside. Annie stretched and squeezed those intimate muscles around me in slippery, wet heat. Tongues dancing, the hard buds of her nipples scraping my chest...

I started thrusting. A wet clapping sound filled the room as Annie’s big, adorable eyes found mine and she raised a hand to stroke my cheek. Suddenly, it was as if her climax was holding its breath, frozen in place, giving Annie a single, powerful moment of total clarity on the precipice of oblivion.

“I ... love ... you ... I ... love ... you...” she whimpered between thrusts.

Then time ramped back up and overtook her. The world came crashing down on Annie, and she filled the air with agonizing moans of ecstacy.

“Mmm! Oh yes! Oh, Tristan!”

She arched her back in a spasm of release, thrusting her tits, red hair tossing like flames. Her boiling cunt soaking me in its greedy grip. So good... So goddamn, unbearably good...

I burst inside her, shaking like a leaf as I filled her up again and again with my seed.

We collapsed onto the bed in a tangle of naked limbs. Her fingertips grazed appreciatively across the muscles of my arms and shoulders.

“They totally heard that, didn’t they?” Annie whispered.

“Sweetie, I’d be offended if we didn’t give them a little inspiration to have some fun of their own.”

I couldn’t remember the last time sex felt so good.

TRISTAN AND ANNIE’S APARTMENT, SIX YEARS EARLIER...

I’m twenty years old.

Lisa’s a gross, sweaty mess. She’s just consumed a preposterous amount of alcohol, and I’m sitting in a chair beside her as she sleeps, making sure she doesn’t asphyxiate on her own sick during the night.

This isn’t how I’d planned to spend my first week after moving in with Annie. I’d been expecting a honeymoon, of sorts. Every night, a date night. Nonstop sex on every available surface. Finally living alone with the woman I loved.

It was supposed to be the same story for Lisa, moving in with her boyfriend this summer.

Then he dumped her. Asshole. Now, Lisa’s free-falling through her heartbreak. She’s got no place else to crash. Of course, Annie and I told her she could stay with us. We’ve got a comfy couch; it’s no trouble at all. I wish I could make her feel better, but I’ve got zero experience with this. So I just sit there and watch my childhood friend toss and turn, knowing the hell her stomach is going through must be nothing compared to the pain in her heart.

It’s the next day.

Annie’s left town for the weekend, part of her off-campus work-study position, and Lisa has returned to the land of the living. She’s sitting on the floor next to the coffee table, nursing a bowl of ice cream and staring off into space.

“You doing any better?” I ask.

“I feel guilty,” she says.

“For what? He’s the idiot.”

“I know, but deep down, it still feels like I’m dating him. When I try to tell myself that we aren’t together anymore, that I’m supposed to move on and find somebody else, it feels like I’m betraying him. Like I’m giving up on us.”

I sit down next to her and place a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

“Sometimes, things happen that change the shape of the world. It just takes a while for our insides to realize what our eyes can already see.”

She sighs.

“I heard you and Annie making love the other night. I hate myself for it, but I’m so jealous of you guys! I’m mad at you for being happy, even though you’re both being so nice to me, letting me stay here like some gloomy third wheel. I’ll make it up to you someday.”

“That’s not how friendship works, Leese. We don’t keep score.”

She looks at me with a wry grin, “As soon as I finish this ice cream, I’m gonna hug the shit out of you.”

“I am told I give good hugs.”

She laughs for the first time in a while.

As promised, once the ice cream is gone, Lisa launches herself into my arms, hugging on for dear life. I don’t say anything. Don’t need to. She just needs to be held right now. Needs to know her friends are here for her.

I hold onto her for so long, my right arm falls asleep beneath the weight of her, shooting angry pins and needles through the muscle. But whatever, she’s hurting a lot more than I am right now. I don’t move until she finally gets up. The tears on her cheeks have dried.

Hours pass. It’s one thirty in the morning.

Lisa and I are staying up watching the goriest, most fucked-up slasher movie I own (Lisa’s request: “I just wanna see some assholes get their shit wrecked”). This girl loves horror movies, they’re her comfort food.

Her eyelids droop and her head lulls to the side, resting comfortably in the crook of my neck.

“Hey Tristan? I’m sorry about high school.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that, back then, you were always all shy, and nervous, and awkward.”

“You’re sorry that I was shy and awkward?”

“No! I’m sorry because I was your friend, and I wasn’t able to help you realize what an amazing person you were. Even though I saw it every day.”

Lisa closes her eyes, sleeping now. Her hand on my chest. My hand on her tiny waist. Her breasts pushing against my side. I wonder how they’d taste.

She mews sleepily. My lizard brain decides it sounds sexual.

It’s all too much: the intimacy, the sweetness, the closeness, the softness of her body—I'm hard. Pitching a tent for all the world to see. Good thing Lisa’s asleep.

“Is that my fault?” she whispers.

Shit! Guess she’s not so sleepy, after all.

“Uh, ‘fraid so. You triggered my ‘beautiful woman’ proximity alarm.”

With a naughty little smirk, she gently squeezes my inner thigh, shooting a fresh surge of arousal all the way to the tip of my penis. Her eyes flash as my cock twitches visibly beneath my boxers.

“Well, at least somebody still thinks I’m pretty,” she sighs.

“Come on, Leese, you know you’re beautiful. Like, impossibly, agonizingly gorgeous.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m serious! You’re the kind of beautiful that just feels unfair to the rest of the world. No woman should be this pretty. And, as somebody who had to go through puberty in your general vicinity, I consider myself basically an expert.”

“An expert on how pretty I am?”

“Yes!”

Shit, maybe I shouldn’t have said it quite that way. I toss a pillow onto my lap to cover up my vulnerable condition.

Why won’t this stupid boner go away?

Lisa quietly resettles herself so that she’s curled up like a cat at my side, her head resting on the pillow that we both know is covering my erection. Through the cushion, I feel the subtle weight of her cheek pressing down on me. There’s no way she doesn’t feel me, too, poking up from the other side.

“How come you never asked me out?” she whispers.

“You know why. Because you’re my friend and it would have been weird. And because I didn’t think much of myself back in high school. And because I fell in love with Annie.”

“You ever wonder what it would have been like if we’d tried to date?”

“Sometimes, yeah,” I sigh.

“Me too,” she whispers.

She chews on her lip for a moment before speaking again. “It wouldn’t have worked out between us, obviously. We’re too different. And you and Annie would have still met and wound up together anyway. Just a little bit later.”

“But at least we’d know for sure.”

“Yeah,” she whispers, “at least we’d know.”