Happily Never After

Max: I’m bored.

I smiled as I sat in the chair, waiting. My flight didn’t board for forty-five more minutes, and Max had twice as long before his did. He offered to change my flight so I could fly direct into Omaha with him instead of going through Chicago all by myself, but something about that felt weird.

Relationshippy.

We were just friends, and friends said goodbye and went on the separate flights they’d booked separately before the trip. I told him exactly that, which made him frown but quietly agree.

I was mildly obsessed with the way our friendship had changed recently. It’d happened slowly, but Max had become my favorite person. Not only did I look forward to anytime I could hang out with him, but we’d just had mind-blowingly good sex and everything was still exactly the same with us.

Who needed a relationship when you could have friendship like this?

I texted: I just left you five minutes ago. How can you be bored already? Have you even reached your gate yet?

I’d given him a see ya later when we’d exited security and had to report to two separate terminals, but that had felt weird, too—for the opposite reason. It felt very strange to be all see ya later with the man I’d watched doing me in a hotel mirror two hours before.

My stomach flipped over at the memory. I’d been absolutely lost in what Max was doing to my body on his king-size bed—the man was like a gifted sexual overachiever—but then I’d opened my eyes.

Watched him.

I wouldn’t normally consider myself a visual person when it came to sex. I didn’t watch porn, wasn’t into naughty pictures, and had never—God, please no—wanted to see myself on camera.

But witnessing him like that, looking like some sort of mythological sex god as he towered behind me, grimacing as if holding on to his control was the most difficult thing he’d ever had to do, had ended me.

It was, hands down, the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.

In my entire life.

Max: I’m at my gate and bored. There is a man next to me who really wants me to ask about the book he’s reading and making noises about it. I refuse, btw.

Me: Maybe just say I HATED THAT BOOK.

Max: I will not engage. Also . . . I miss your body.

I literally gasped. It was small and quiet, so no one around me appeared to have heard, but I hadn’t expected him to bring up the sex. After the kisses by his truck and at the diner, he’d seemed shocked that I’d dared to mention them.

So now he was bringing up my body, which he’d meticulously explored with all of his important parts?

Me: And it misses you. So . . . what do we think about friends with benefits? Still bad?

Max: Yes.

Wow, he hadn’t paused for a second. No lingering conversation bubbles at all. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed. I knew friends with benefits never worked and society generally considered it to be a terrible idea.

But we were different. We were both absolutely uninterested in anything other than what we had right now. So for us it could be different, right? Logically I knew I had to be wrong, because if it was possible, more people would do it, but as a person who was incredibly interested in more sex with Max, I thought it had merit.

I texted: Even though we both know it’s purely physical?

Max: Even though. It’s a colossally bad idea that I would never consider.

I bit down on my lip and felt a little wounded, to be honest. It couldn’t have been as good for him as it’d been for me, because if it had, he would be struggling with the idea.

I texted: Fine. In the infamous words of Callie the Redneck Bride, I only wanted your penis.

Max: It’s love.

“What?” I said to myself, under my breath, then noticed the man across from me looking at me like I was strange. But what the hell did Max mean? It’s love?

Max: Callie said she only LOVED his penis.

Oh.

Okay.

So he wasn’t tossing around the word love, he was correcting me on the quote.

Okay. That made sense.