The Worst Wedding Date

So this is unexpected.

Thought I’d wake up on the floor. Tied up so I can’t go anywhere. Possibly under a pile of clothes, since while most women would toss you out in nothing but your underwear when you annoy them, Laney is not that kind of woman. She’d want me to put my clothes on before she forcibly removed me from her presence.

Instead, I’m waking up with her hand wrapped around my cock.

She’s curled up right next to me, breathing on my shoulder, with a limp grip under my briefs and on my very hard dick.

Any other woman, I’d be leaning into this opportunity.

But Laney?

Pretty quick she’s gonna figure out she’s making my balls sweat.

And that’s not a good sign for today getting back on the right track.

I don’t know if Emma knows she made the worst possible choice in asking Laney to be my buffer from Chandler. Probably does.

And that stings.

No, it more than stings. It fucking sucks.

Sometime between freshman and senior years, I noticed that Laney’s a girl. A know-it-all, straight-A, silver-spooned pain-in-the-ass, but still a girl.

And a girl who made me feel warm inside every time I looked at her, watched her laughing with my sister, saw her talking to my dad anytime she’d come visit Emma like it wasn’t weird that he was always surrounded by taxidermy animals that he sometimes talked to more than he talked to Em and me.

And then, after being so nice to everyone else, Laney would make me feel like the world’s biggest fuckup whenever I talked to her.

I didn’t want to like her. Why would I? To her, I was her best friend’s lazy, C-average, going-nowhere, waste-of-oxygen brother.

She was always polite. Of course she was. Even in a small town like Snaggletooth Creek, we have folks of good breeding, and the richer her parents got, the more good breeding they insisted they had.

But back then, I was beneath her and I knew it.

I might be able to financially take care of myself—and more—now, but I’m still that guy. The guy who’ll call in sick to work when there’s fresh powder for snowboarding. The guy who’ll randomly put potatoes with googly eyes glued onto them on every bench in the park in the middle of the night. The guy who’s never met a dare he wouldn’t take, whose presence somehow inspires bigger bets and bolder fun at the bars, who doesn’t really care what fork is for what course, or why meals have to have courses.

And while having her hand on my raging hard-on is wet dream territory for my inner teenager, she’s still the last person who’ll follow through when she wakes up and realizes what she’s been using as a handlebar in her sleep.

Fuck.

Not just my balls that are sweating now. My dick is too.

She’s gripping my sweating cock. She’s gonna wake up with my sweaty cock in her hands, think I jizzed all over both of us, and it’ll be game over for me.

I don’t get easily embarrassed.

Spent too much time the past decade coming to terms with who I am, what I want, where I’ve fucked up, and where I fit in the world now to worry about little stuff like what judgy people that I’ll never please think about me.

But waking up in this bed with her hands all over me? Getting a feel of everything that teenage me fantasized about for years while pretending I was completely unaffected by her presence, and knowing that she’d reject me all over again?

This is different.

And don’t get me started on what it’s doing to me that she’s sleeping with her face smushed against my shoulder after tossing and turning half the night.

Drooling a little on my skin, even.

Fucking adorable.

No.

No.

Not adorable.

Annoying. I need to wash Delaney drool off me now.

She’s cute, that backstabbing asshole in the back of my head whispers.

Time to move.

I shift a millimeter, and she bolts straight upright, her tank top riding up and showing off the smooth skin on her soft belly.

Higher, an instinctive part of me that I have no control over mentally orders her shirt. Go higher. Give me the thrill of my life and show me a Laney nipple.

“Oh my god, who am I?” she gasps.

“My dick wants to know the answer to that question too.” Jesus. I fucking hate being the grumpy asshole.

Why does she bring this out in me?

Because she makes you feel fifteen again, and fifteen sucks, the rational part of my brain answers for me.

She yanks the sheet up to her chin and stares at me.

While she’s still gripping my cock.

With what’s apparently her third hand.

Wait.

Wait.

“Please leave your unmentionables out of all of our conversations,” she says almost as stiffly as my cock’s standing up under her hand.

But it’s not her hand.

Can’t be her hand.

I can see both of her hands.

Now all of me is sweating.

Who’s gripping my dick? Someone is. Aren’t they?

I give him a little wiggle with my hips.

Oh, yeah. Someone is definitely holding onto my cock.

Her brows furrow. “Theo?”

“Did someone sneak in here and put a fake hand around my woody?” I whisper.

Not outside the realm of possibility here. I’ve seen weirder shit.

I might’ve been involved in doing weirder shit a time or two.

Her lip curls. “What are you talking about?”

“Show me both of your hands.”

She doesn’t break eye contact while she shows me her hands, one at a time so she can keep the sheet covering her breasts. I don’t tell her I can still see all of the exposed skin on her back from her shirt riding up, and it’s making me harder, despite Inner Sex Freak Theo’s disappointment that she’s not laid out like a morning buffet for me to feast on.

Fucking morning hormones.

“Someone’s holding my dick,” I say.

“Very funny.”

“They are.”

She huffs. “Look, I understand men have needs, but can you please not jerk off in the same damn bed as me?”

“I’m not fucking—are we alone?”

“Yes, Theo, we’re alone.”

“Someone is holding my dick.”

“It’s clearly not me, so it must be you.”

“I think I’d know if I was holding my own dick.”

She sucks in a deep breath through her nose, closing her eyes as she does it, and when her entire body lets that breath out, she opens her eyes and stares at me exactly the same way she did every single day in high school.

Like I’m a problem.

And one more time for the peanut gallery, I do not want my hormones to be attracted to this woman.

I had no idea my sister hated me so much. Yet here we are.

“So lift up the sheet,” she grits out, “and look.”

Huh.

Not a bad idea.

Probably should’ve thought of that myself, but I was so flustered at the idea that Laney was gripping me for dear life that my brain short-circuited.

And fine. Gripping me for dear life is probably an exaggeration, but the point is still that she wanted to touch my pee-pee, which she once told me was the most disgusting thing on the planet when she caught me taking a leak behind a tree.

But I’m not holding my dick.

She’s not holding my dick.

So who’s holding my dick?

She lifts her brows. Doesn’t have to say a word, and it doesn’t matter that it’s been years since I voluntarily talked to her before yesterday.

Easy to see what she’s running through her brain.

If you think stalling will make me look under that sheet, you’re dead wrong. I know a setup for a flashing when I see one.

But it’s not a setup.

Someone’s holding my dick.

I snort out a grunt and push back the sheet. And yeah, I’m pushing it back far enough for her to see, no matter where she sits on the bed or in the room, because I’m going to fucking prove to her that someone is in this room with us.

I look down.

And I see—

Oh.

Huh.

Fuck.

That’s my hand.

Unless someone else got tats identical to mine down their forearm and has that same scar under the knuckle on their index finger that I got during that incident involving a marmot, a mountain bike, and a raccoon jawbone.

So that’s my hand holding my dick. Even though it doesn’t feel like my hand is holding my dick.

“Are you kidding me?” she mutters.

“I don’t know how it got there.”

I move it, except it doesn’t work.

Try again.

Nothing.

My gaze flies to Laney. “It won’t move.”

I get a dead-faced stare back. “Very funny, Theo. News flash: exposing yourself to me won’t make me any less effective as your babysitter today.”

“It won’t move. It—”

Oh. Oh, there we go. The tingles. I’m getting the tingles in my fingertips. “It—it fell asleep,” I stutter. “I couldn’t—I didn’t—look.”

I pry my hand off my dick with my other hand, lift the dead arm, and drop it on my stomach. “It fell asleep. I couldn’t feel it. That’s why I thought—”

“So glad we got that sorted out.”

“I wasn’t flashing you—”

“Okay.”

“And I wasn’t choking the chicken—”

“Whatever.”

Yeah, me with my hands down my underwear in my sleep is definitely a point in my favor. “My hand fell asleep.”

“Sure.”

She’s walking out the door, showing off her short, silky pajama bottoms that are giving her a wedgie in that sophisticated ass of hers, and fuck me.

“I don’t do this on purpose,” I call after her while I yank my briefs back up with my awake hand. “Things happen to me. It’s what makes life fun. One day you’re gonna realize just how much joy and fun and laughter you’ve missed out on because of the stick perpetually wedged up your ass.”

Delaney Kingston, snooty proper princess of Snaggletooth Creek, responds with one stiff middle finger.

“Nice job,” I mutter to my hand and my dick.

My left hand responds by tingling a little more.

Fucking hurts.

But not as much as the ego I didn’t realize could still be bruised.