Chapter 26: The Morning After
Lucy shrugged, unrepentant. "Girl's gotta have a witness."
"You texted about the situation," Rachel said, a smile tugging at her lips. "You had to tell someone."
"I texted everything. Every detail. The spooning, the hands, the erection pressed against my ass. I was sitting on his toilet, shivering, typing with shaking fingers, and I remember thinking 'this is the most unhinged morning text I've ever sent.'"
"And?" Alyssa asked.
"And she wrote back immediately. Obviously. She told me to get a grip, literally, and I nearly dropped my phone laughing." Mia shook her head. "And then I sat there for another ten minutes, alone in that bathroom, trying to decide if I was actually going to do something about it."
"Did you?" Joanna asked, eyes wide.
"No." Mia's voice was rueful. "I chickened out. I sat there with my hand hovering between my legs, so keyed up I thought I might vibrate off the toilet seat, and I couldn't do it. Because every time I closed my eyes, I saw him. Felt him. And it wasn't enough to just touch myself. I wanted him. The real thing. Not a poor imitation in a cold bathroom."
Cassie let out a low whistle. "That's commitment."
"That's cowardice, is what it is," Mia corrected. "But eventually I pulled myself together, washed my face, and walked out of that bathroom like a normal human being who hadn't spent the night grinding against her best friend's erection."
"So what happened next?" Alyssa asked.
"Nothing," Mia said. "That's the thing. Nothing happened. He heated frozen French toast, I poured the syrup, and we sat on the floor watching the snow fall, both of us pretending that the night before had never happened."
"That sounds unbearable," Rachel murmured.
"It was. It was so, so unbearable. We were so careful with each other. So polite. Every sentence was measured, every glance was averted. He asked if I'd slept well and I said yes, and we both knew I was lying, and we both pretended not to know."
"God, the tension," Joanna breathed.
"The tension was thick enough to cut with a knife. We spent the whole morning avoiding each other's eyes, then the whole afternoon, then the evening...."
"the whole time," Cassie said slowly, "you could feel him. What had happened."
"Every second. Every single second. I couldn't stop thinking about his hands. About the weight of him against me. About the sounds he'd made when he was falling asleep, that contented little hum. And I knew he was thinking about it too, because I'd catch him staring at me when he thought I wasn't looking, and he'd look away so fast it made my head spin."
"Did either of you say anything?" Alyssa asked.
"Not a word. Not once. We were both so terrified of ruining what we had that we'd rather choke on the silence than risk saying the wrong thing."
Mia let the silence stretch, feeling the weight of it even now, in the warm locker room, surrounded by her friends.
"And then," she said, "we ran out of things to pretend about."
Mia said, tapping her finger against the trail mix bag. "Because we were both single. We'd established that the night before, in that way you do when you're avoiding the elephant in the room. So when we'd finished the French toast and cleaned up, and the snow was still falling, he looked at me and said, 'Same rules as yesterday?'"