Happily Never After

FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS would never be an option.

Not that I don’t want more sex with Sophie, I thought as the man beside me made yet another mewling noise in response to whatever he was reading.

Since the minute she’d climbed out of my bed that morning, my brain had been compiling an exhaustive list of everything I still wanted to do with her. Take a shower together, have sex in the shower, have sex in the elevator, take a bath together, wash her hair, spend an entire night together, have sex on my kitchen counter, have sex on my kitchen table, have sex on my balcony, take her to dinner—I could literally go on all day.

(Side note: She’d had the same idea about the shower, so we’d already taken care of that one.)

But there was no way we were going to add sex to our strategic friendship, because I couldn’t handle it. We were friends who accidentally fell into sex, but I refused to be friends who casually had sex to scratch an itch. She might be absolutely emotionally unaffected by our intimacy, but I was anything but.

The truth was that I half suspected I was in love with her already.

I still thought love was for suckers and relationships were an outlandish risk too treacherous to be worth the reward, but in spite of that, she was all I could think about.

All the time.

I’d even had the fleeting thought, while wrapped around her sleeping body at five thirty this morning post-shower, that it might not be so bad to explore a hybrid situation. Not a relationship per se, but friendship with a side helping of something more. Not romance, but sex that meant something.

And monogamy.

But I knew this made zero fucking sense. If I said those words to her, she would point out that I’d described a traditional romantic relationship.

Which I had.

And she would be gone so fast.

Regardless, I was just going to have to suck it up and ignore those feelings.

Easy peasy, right?

Sophie: Are you trying to get me to say that I love your penis?

I coughed out a laugh, which made Book Guy look up and smile at me like we were kindred spirits. I texted: You don’t have to say it. I could tell.

Sophie: I won’t commit to the L-word, MR. ARROGANT, even if it’s only in regard to genitalia, but I WILL openly admit to being obsessed with every single thing we did in that bed.

I scratched my eyebrow and felt her words in my chest. Texted: Hard same.

And then I wondered.

Could physical desire, and being denied what your body wanted, have the power to change—actually change—your emotions? To make you explore them a little more deeply? I thought about Soph’s interest in friends with benefits. I thought about the way she kissed me at Shirley’s and in the hotel stairwell.

There was no question that we wanted each other physically.

So if we shut that down completely, would Sophie be forced to recognize that she had emotions for me outside of sex?