We Both Paid the Same Stranger to Sublet the Same One-Bedroom, and Neither of Us Would Move Out novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: On His Side

With no money and one full-size bed, Tina orders him in on his side, and the dark ends with his fingers making her come and his refusal to go further while they are angry at someone else.

The building manager turned out to be a small woman in a cardigan with her pockets full of keys.

She came up the last flight with a pair of reading glasses swinging on a beaded chain.

She looked at Randy's hand on my shoulder, and she beamed.

"Gloria Hurd," she said. "I've been waiting a year to put the right people in this unit."

"We're not," I started.

"Tired," Randy said. "We drove all day."

"Of course you did." Gloria patted my arm. "Go on in. I won't keep you. The stairs are steep and the neighbors are nosy, and I'll bring the paperwork tomorrow."

She went back down, humming.

I turned on Randy.

"Inside," he said. "Please."

The apartment was one room smaller than I'd hoped and one piece of furniture short of a plan.

It had a galley kitchen and a bathroom with a lock hanging off the door by one screw.

The living room held a velvet loveseat four feet wide.

Corey's listing had called it a couch.

It was not a couch.

The bedroom held a dresser, a window onto a fire escape, and one full-size bed with a blue quilt on it.

Randy stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at the bed.

We sat on the floor of the living room and traded proof of payment.

His wire had gone through at 11:52 on Tuesday.

Mine had gone through at 11:40.

"You paid first," he said. "You get seniority."

"I get the bed."

"You get the bed."

"Why did you say 'that's us'?"

He rubbed his beard with the back of his wrist.

"Because Gloria's the building manager, and Corey's name is on that lease, and the second she finds out we're two strangers, she calls the police and locks the door with us on the wrong side of it." He looked up. "You've got two hundred dollars."

"I could have said that."

"You were still holding your mouth open."

I closed it.

He was right, and I hated it a little, and I also noticed his eyelashes were stupidly long.

"Rules," I said.

"Okay."

"We find Corey. We get our money. We leave."

"Okay."

"Nobody touches anybody."

He glanced at my hand, which had been on his three minutes earlier.

"Okay," he said, a lot more slowly.

He took the loveseat.

He lasted ten minutes, and then he stood in the bedroom doorway in a T-shirt and sweatpants, holding a pillow.

"My feet are in the kitchen," he said.

I was lying on my side of the bed in my tank top and shorts, staring at the ceiling.

"Your side's the right one," I said. "Stay on it."

He got in.

The mattress dipped.

I lay with my back to him and every nerve I owned aimed at the five inches between us.

I could feel the heat coming off him through the quilt.

He smelled like soap and sawdust and the inside of a truck.

"You're taking up the whole bed," I said.

"I'm on the edge."

"You're breathing loud."

"I'm breathing normal. You're listening hard."

I turned over.

His face was right there, a hand's width from mine, lit by the streetlight through the blinds.

He wasn't smiling.

"I haven't been touched since March," I said.

I don't know why I said it.

I think I wanted to see what his face did.

It went very still.

"That's a long time," he said.

"It's a very long time."

"I was just told nobody touches anybody."

"I made that rule."

"You did."

"I'd like to unmake it."

He gave a sound that was almost a laugh.

I put my hand flat on his chest, over the T-shirt, and felt his heart going hard under it.

"Tina."

"Say yes or say go to sleep."

"Yes," he said.

I kissed him.

I meant it to be a short one, to prove something.

He opened his mouth under mine, slow and warm, and every plan I had went out of my head.

He kissed me.

His beard scratched my chin and I liked it more than I should have.

My hand slid under his shirt and found the hard heat of his stomach, and he groaned into my mouth.

"Your hands," I said against his lips. "Put them on me."

He did.

One big palm spread across my back and pulled me against him, and the other slid down my side to the waistband of my shorts.

"Here?" he said.

"Lower."

His fingers slid under the cotton and over my panties, and he stopped there, and breathed.

"You're soaked."

"I've been soaked since the landing."

He made a rough noise and pushed the fabric aside.

He touched me so lightly at first that I hissed.

Then he found my clit and circled it, slow, with the pad of one thick finger.

My hips moved on their own.

"Look at me," he said.

I looked.

His blue eyes were dark and fixed on my face.

He slid two fingers inside me, and the stretch of them made me gasp.

He curled them up against the spot I'd forgotten I had.

"God. Right there."

"Like that?"

"Don't you dare stop."

"I'm not stopping."

He rubbed my clit with his thumb in tight, steady circles.

He fucked me with his fingers, deep and unhurried, and the pleasure climbed my spine in hot bright waves.

"Good girl," he muttered into my hair. "That's it. Let me hear you."

I bit his shoulder to keep from screaming.

I came hard, shaking, with my face in his neck and his fingers still moving inside me, drawing it out until my toes curled.

When I could breathe again, I rolled him onto his back and straddled his thigh.

I could feel him through the sweatpants, thick and hot against my hip.

I slid my hand down and wrapped it around him over the cotton.

He swore, low and long, and his hips jerked up into my grip.

"Tina."

"You're huge," I said. "Don't tell me you aren't dying."

"I'm dying."

I got my fingers under his waistband.

He caught my wrist.

"No," he said, very gently.

I stared at him.

His cock was hard against my thigh, and I could feel exactly how much he wanted this, and he was holding my wrist anyway.

"Not tonight," he said. "Not while we're both mad at someone else."

"I'm not mad at you."

"You're mad at Corey. I'm mad at Corey. If this happens, I want it to be about you."

I should have been furious.

Instead I lay there with my pulse slowing and my skin still ringing and thought, with great clarity, that I was in so much trouble.

"Fine," I said. "Ask me again in the morning."

"I will."

Something slid across the floor of the living room, with a dry whisper.

Randy sat up.

I got my phone and lit the screen, and we crept out to find an envelope on the mat inside the door.

The handwriting was round and confident.

"Welcome Supper for our new couples is a week from Saturday, in the courtyard," I read. "Forty people. I've put you down for a toast. Corey says you're shy. Don't be. G."

Randy took the card out of my hand and read it twice.

"A toast," he said.

"To what?"

"To us."

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