Happily Never After

“LARRY CAN DO it.”

Max gave me a weird look as we approached my door. “You really think he’s going to be up?”

“It’s only like eleven,” I said, pulling my keys out of my clutch. “He’s a total night owl.”

I unlocked the door and pushed it open, relieved that I could hear the TV.

For two reasons.

First, I really wanted Larry to be awake because Max and I were going to ask him to take some photos of us that we could post.

Second, I didn’t trust myself not to attack Max after the kiss at the side of the restaurant. It had been better than the first, if that was even possible, and ever since the word sex had come out of my mouth, I’d been distracted by the thought of having I’m-getting-mine sex with him.

I want your hands on me.

I might never be over that moment.

I dropped my keys on the table beside the door and went in, leaning down to scratch Karen and Joanne, still carrying my pumps by my fingers because I hadn’t wanted to put them back on my feet. I sensed Max following me in, and when we reached the living room (no sign of Larry even though Friends was on), I turned around.

And he lifted his phone and took a picture of me.

“What are you doing?” I asked, letting the shoes fall to the floor.

Max looked down at his phone and smiled. “Oh, I’m posting this one.”

“What?” I walked over, looked down at his phone, and holy shit, he’d taken one hell of a picture. Not of me—I looked like a hot mess. But the shot, me wearing his tuxedo jacket over my dress with my heels dangling from my fingertips, looked very intimate.

Like the photo had been taken by someone who was there with me after the party.

“Wow,” I said, a little embarrassed because the sleepily flirtatious look on my face was apparently what I looked like when I was thinking about sex with Max. Is that my turned-on face? “I look tired.”

He raised his eyes to me. “Or something.”

Or something. I knew he knew somehow, and I could tell he liked it.

Which I really liked, God help me. I cleared my throat and said, “Now let’s do you.”

He didn’t speak, didn’t move a muscle.

“Come here.” I took a step closer and raised my hands to his shirt. “Let’s undo your top button and untie that tie. For the picture.”

I looked at his Adam’s apple as I untied his tie, then unbuttoned the top button.

“Maybe the top two, actually,” I said, undoing the second button as well, feeling a dip in my stomach when I watched him swallow. There was something very sexy about an Adam’s apple at point-blank range.

“You trying to get me naked, Steinbeck?” he asked, his voice a little raspy.

I raised my eyes to his, and heat slid down my spine as he looked at me through heavy-lidded eyes, his jaw hard. My hands rested on the front of his dress shirt, the same place they’d rested when he’d placed them on his chest earlier.

I swallowed.

“No comment?” he inquired quietly, his eyes burning into me.

“Your chest,” I said, blinking fast and feeling off-kilter, “is incredibly solid.”

He raised an eyebrow. “That’s your comment?”

“It’s the only thing I can think of when I’m touching it.” I cleared my throat again and took a step back. “Smile.”

I raised my phone, and he still wasn’t smiling. He was smoldering, at me, and my breath caught in my chest a little as I took the picture.

I brought the phone down and looked at the display, where Max looked like the sexy villain in a very R-rated movie.

“This,” I said, a little breathless as I looked at the photo, “is perfect.”

Suddenly, we heard footsteps approach.

“I thought I heard you,” Larry said, walking into the room with a book in his hand. “Hey, Julian.”

“Hey, Larry,” Max replied, and the fact that he didn’t correct Larry made me want to laugh. “How’s it going?”

I didn’t hear a word that Larry said as he rambled to Max, because I couldn’t stop looking at the picture. It wasn’t until I heard “I’m going to take off” that I snapped back to reality.

“What?” I asked, my cheeks warming as they both looked at me like I was out of my mind.

“I’m going to take off,” Max repeated, a smirk on his face as if he’d known exactly where my mind had been. “Thanks for being my date, Steinbeck.”

“I had fun, Parks,” I said, and realized I actually meant it.

I’d had a great time—when was the last time that had happened?

“Good night,” he said, reaching out a hand to tug his jacket from my shoulders before walking past me, tossing the coat he had just casually removed from my body over his shoulder. I felt frozen, rooted in place, as he left the apartment with his jacket on his finger, the door closing behind him with an audible click.

Dear God, I was literally—literally—light-headed.

“Is he your boyfriend now?” Larry asked, setting down the book and walking into the kitchen. “Because that man is fine.”

“No,” I said, picking up Joanne, following him, and taking a seat on one of the kitchen stools as he put on a kettle for his evening cup of Sleepytime. I took a deep breath to shake out of my lustful haze. “Believe it or not, he’s the guy I paid to stop my wedding.”

“Shut up.” He looked at me with wide eyes. “How in God’s name did you reconnect with him?”

I’d told Larry the story one night but hadn’t really talked about Max, just the way things had gone down with Stu. “He needed a favor.”

I told him all about the weddings we’d stopped and how we were purposely flaunting our fake-but-not-so-fake friendship for our personal gain. It wasn’t until I got to the part about the kiss—I only mentioned the first one—that he got that Larry look on his face.

“You’re a fucking idiot, Soph,” he said, slowly shaking his head.

“What?” I scratched behind Joanne’s ears. “Can you be more specific?”

“You can’t fuck around with chemistry, you silly little asshole. If it were possible to just kiss someone you don’t give a shit about and move on, don’t you think everyone would be doing it all the time? I’d go HAM on Roger in produce at Russ’s Market if that were the case.”

“People don’t say HAM anymore,” I corrected as I heard a mreow and Karen jumped onto my stool. “And it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t normal kissing with feelings involved. It was an experiment that we both signed off on.”

“That you really liked, right?” he asked, waggling his silver eyebrows. “If you both really liked it, you’re gonna do it again. You’re gonna go HAM on making out—I’ll fucking say what I want to say, thank you very much—and you know it.”

“So?” I set my hands on both cats’ backs so they’d sit. “If we’re in agreement about the fact that it doesn’t matter, why not do it again?”

He shook his head like I was an incorrigible child and said, “Because feelings eventually come with chemistry whether you want them to or not.”

“Bullshit,” I argued. “It’s a conscious decision, not an inadvertent reaction.”

“You keep telling yourself that, poopsie.”

“Poopsie?” I put my hand on Joanne’s back as she started doing circles on my lap again. “Really?”

“You’re like the damn language police tonight. Maybe talk to me when you haven’t been out playing ‘taste the tonsil’ with Julian the Hot.”

“Have I told you lately how much I love you?”

“Keep it in your pants, Soph. I’m far too old for you.”