Page 15 of Catching Sparkles

Please don’t leave a mark on my neck, I silently begged, cringing as I resisted the urge to push her away. After a bit of that, along with her pressing the length of her body up against mine, I felt her hand wedge between us and go straight for my crotch. Her fingers pressed into the front of my jeans, searching.

“Did you drink too much?” She asked, the words hitting my ear in an accusatory way that I really didn’t like. I’d knocked back a few beers for sure. But too much felt overdramatic.

“No? I had a few beers. That’s it.”

“Well… You’re not getting hard, so I just wondered if maybe that was why.”

My initial instinct was to laugh in her face. Of course I was hard. A cool breeze was enough to get me hard these days. My dick had probably spent more time in the past two weeks being hard than the rest of my life combined. But when I realized I actually wasn’t hard, a jolt of nerves and embarrassment shot through me, concentrated in my stomach.

“Yeah, well, I have a lot on my mind, okay?” I retorted, finally giving in to the urge I’d had since she’d started rubbing herself on me and nudging her away. “I’m tired.”

“Rhys, I-I wasn’t-”

“Look, I have to go, okay? Sorry. I’m just not feeling that great.”

She looked stunned and kind of hurt, and under other circumstances I might have felt bad, but the humiliation of coming out here and doing all this just to be told my dick wasn’t hard had my blood pumping through my veins like a fucking deluge.

I scrambled into the driver’s seat of my dad’s car, trying not to whip out of there like a criminal, but I wanted to be as far away from her as I possibly could, like the painful, burning embarrassment was tethered to her and I could escape it.

I thought about my parents, who were probably sitting at the kitchen table, waiting to bombard me with questions about how my date went the second I walked in the door. I didn’t want that.

And I didn’t want to go back home, back to my fucking childhood bed, still a pathetic, touch-starved 28-year-old who couldn’t even go on a normal date without messing it up. What the hell was my problem? Why did it feel so difficult? Sitting with her, talking with her, letting her kiss me, it’d been like a metaphorical root canal. I’d hated almost every second of it. Did she remind me too much of Hailey? But they really weren’t anything alike, in looks or personality. I didn’t think I could use that as an excuse.

So what the hell was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I be more into it? Getting hard was the bare minimum of normalcy when an attractive woman was kissing your neck, and I’d definitely not been experiencing anything adjacent to erectile dysfunction as of late. I’d even gotten hard at the fucking store, talking to Kendall.

Kendall.

My fingers tightened on the steering wheel as another equally jarring jolt of nerves hit me. That’s who I wanted to see. That’s who I wanted to talk to. He wouldn’t have humiliated me by pointing out my soft dick in that accusatory tone. He wouldn’t have complained about my glasses which I needed to fucking see.

He would have sat, blinking his stupidly long eyelashes at me, nodding and listening so obviously intently, making me feel like I was the most interesting person in the world. I wouldn’t have struggled for conversation topics. I knew because it’d been like that with him at the cabin the whole damn time. He was the only person I’d felt truly comfortable with in so long.

He would have told me how amazing I am, and how happy he was to be on a date with me. I was sure of it. Why couldn’t she have done any of that? It should have been obvious that I’d feel weird going out for the first time since breaking it off with my ex-wife. She should have known that I’d need reassurance and comfort and praise. Kendall would have known. Everything was so easy with him.

A groan crawled up from my chest out of my throat as I realized what I was actually considering. The stages of grief flashed through me in a sickening whirl, before I landed at acceptance.

I wasn’t going home.

KENDALL

RESISTING THE URGE to sigh or let my eyes glaze over with boredom, I turned away from the footage of myself I’d filmed. I’d just watched it for what felt like the 20th time, cutting more each go-round to make sure the momentum wasn’t ruined with an awkward pause or anything.

I hadn’t yet ventured into long form content but this video would be a couple minutes of me demonstrating a recipe for a simple apple tart. Stuff like this always got crazy numbers on my socials. People seemed to love watching me in videos. It probably helped that I always made sure to look extra cute when I was going to be on camera, to really play up the whole pastel twink thing a lot of my followers were into. My content wasn’t NSFW by any stretch of the imagination, but my followers were total simps. On top of that, I was always getting comments begging me to start an OnlyFans or another channel dedicated to spicier content.

Honestly, I was starting to get kind of tempted. I didn’t want to be stuck in this tiny apartment kitchen forever.

Picking up my phone, I grinned as I saw Benji had posted a meme in the group chat we shared with Josie. I’d respond to it in the morning, since I knew they were probably both in bed and I didn’t want to risk disturbing Josie’s rest. She had a lot of work to do, developing the baby that I would be an honorary uncle to. I couldn’t wait.

A string of loud and staccato raps at my door startled me out of my thoughts, a shiver of anxiety immediately racing up my spine. The time on the corner of my laptop screen let me know it was nearly midnight. Who the hell would be knocking on my door at a time like this? Cherryvale was probably too small for serial killers, but I didn’t necessarily want to risk it.

“Open up, Sparkles.” A muffled version of a very familiar voice made itself known, before another loud smack on my door echoed through the otherwise silent night.

Scrambling up from the couch and setting my laptop aside, I hurried to the door and swung it open. I didn’t want my neighbors being woken up by the police raid style knocking and getting upset with me.

“Rhys?” I asked, blinking up at him in shock. He looked ridiculously hot, still in the old t-shirt and jeans he’d been wearing when I’d seen him earlier. But he had the kind of sculpted figure that could really pull off anything.

His eyes instantly dipped down to my body. I wasn’t exactly dressed for company, in an old baby tee that was cropped above my navel and a loose pair of pink heart-printed pajama pants that hung low on my hips.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered, almost caustically, his eyes locked on my exposed stomach. I didn’t have anything particularly special or interesting there, just the standard barbell with a silver stud floating in my bellybutton. I had way cuter ones that I sometimes switched in. I wished I was wearing one of those so he’d stare even longer.