Page 63 of Drowning Erin

I change clothes after work and head to him, clad in running shorts, T-shirt, and ponytail. No matter how I feel, I don't want to look like a girl who's spent the last 36 hours obsessing over the things he can do with his tongue.

I bring over some of the cupcakes I made the night before, because that's the kind of thing Friend-Erin-Who-Doesn't-Necessarily-Want-To-Sleep-With-You would do, but when I walk into his apartment I completely abandon who I was pretending to be. He looks the way he always does: frayed khaki shorts, gray T-shirt, muscular thighs, hard jaw, and clear blue eyes. The problem is that’s enough. It's too much, actually. The sight of him alone is hormonal overload.

I inhale and thrust the cupcakes toward him. "I brought snacks."

Fuck. My voice sounds all breathy, like I just ran ten flights of stairs.

He hears it and holds my eye for a second, calm as ever. I wish I were calm the way he is. Right now I'm a chaotic mess of worry and lust, and he's as still, as cool and impenetrable, as a steel beam.

He takes the box from me, his fingers brushing my hands, staying there a moment too long. Acting normal is almost impossible. I stare at his unshaved jaw and remember how it felt against my lips, the delicious scrape of it against my skin.

"What's going on, Erin?" he asks, setting the box on the counter behind him. His voice is low, smooth, leading.

"Nothing,” I reply.

“You bite your lip when you’re nervous,” he says. He pulls me against him. Slowly his lips trail down my neck, tugging at the soft skin just beneath my jaw, and for a single, delicious moment I let myself have it—his size and his smell of soap and coffee, the feel of his smooth skin under my hands, the prickle of shaved hair at the back of his neck, how ridiculously muscular he is. If I wanted to push him away, it would be like pushing a brick wall.

His hands are sliding inside my T-shirt when I come to my senses. "We can't do this," I say. But even I hear the pleading note in my voice saying Brendan, convince me, convince me.

His hands spread over my rib cage. "If you want me to stop,” he whispers, his breath next to my ear, “say so now. Because otherwise I’ve got about 15 things I plan to do to you."

I know there is a logical and well-reasoned argument against this somewhere inside me, but mostly I want to know what 15 things he has in mind, and I want him to have already gotten them underway.

"Condom," I demand.

"Not yet," he says. He slides my shorts past my hips and lifts me, depositing my bare ass on his counter. “And by the way,” he adds, pulling me to the very edge and pushing my legs apart, “I’m in charge tonight.”

* * *

It’s late when I finally climb from the bed. He watches as I start hunting for my clothes. “Why did you try to stop me when you came over tonight?” he asks.

“You know why.” My throat feels closed over with guilt. Sleeping with Brendan one time was an anomaly. One time was the kind of thing we could forgive ourselves for. But three times is something else entirely. It’s intentional.

He sits up. “You’re seriously worried about being loyal to Rob after what he did?”

“Not exactly. I just don’t see how you and Rob are going to get past this. And if Rob and I get back together, we’d never be able to hang out, the three of us. You’d be his best man—” I trail off, swallowing hard. Just envisioning it makes me sick.

"Erin, I’m not going to be his best man, and you and me and Rob are never going to be hanging out. I’m not going to tell him about it, obviously, but I’m also not going to spend the rest of my life lying.”

I sit at the end of his bed, clutching my shirt and bra to my chest. “I don’t get what you’re saying.”

“I made a choice when I slept with you. I can’t continue pretending to be his friend after that.”

My stomach drops. What I’ve done is bad enough, but for me to be the cause of their friendship’s demise is worse. “Brendan, he’s been your best friend for years. You can’t do that.”

He shakes his head. “I like Rob, or at least I did until he cheated on you, but we haven’t lived in the same place for over a decade, and we’ve both changed. You saw how it was when I got back—we have nothing in common anymore. He’s obsessed with making money. Status matters more to him than anything else. And any respect I still had for him was lost when I heard what he did with Christina.”

I understand his answer, but I don’t like it, for many reasons.

“I don’t know that anything happened with her,” I argue.

His mouth flattens. “You want to believe he’s innocent so badly you won’t even look at the facts.”

I keep my disagreement to myself, though in fact I think the opposite is true. At this point I hope Rob cheated on me. Because if he didn’t, it makes what I’ve done with Brendan ten times worse.

“Come here,” he says softly. He cups my chin and kisses me. He kisses me until I forget what we were discussing entirely.

I even forget that I’d planned to leave.