Sharing Is Caring – Chapter 2 – The Convenient Emergency
Lesley’s version of a low-key Tuesday invite was “come over for wine,” which I should have recognized as a threat, given that Lesley’s low-key anything has approximately a forty percent success rate at staying low-key.
“Just us,” she’d said. “And maybe Sam. He might swing by.”
“Might.”
“Probably will.”
“Lesley.”
“It’s casual, Jean. You’re allowed to be in a room with a man without it being a whole production.”
I showed up anyway, because I am, apparently, a person who ignores my own better judgment when sufficiently outnumbered by wine and curiosity, and Sam was already there when I arrived, sitting on Lesley’s couch looking exactly like his photos, which was almost disappointing – I’d half-expected some kind of optical illusion, some angle-dependent trick that made him look better in pictures than in person.
He did not need the trick.
“Jean,” he said, standing to shake my hand like we were closing a business deal, “Lesley talks about you a lot.”
“All good things, I hope.”
“She said you have a vibrator named Kevin.”
“She was not supposed to tell you that.”
“I told him everything,” Lesley called from the kitchen, entirely unrepentant. “We don’t have secrets in this house.”
“We have several secrets in this house. I would like to reinstate at least one of them.”
Sam laughed – easy, unbothered.
Not a brilliant conversationalist, I’d learn, but an excellent audience.
He listened, laughed easily, had the useful habit of looking genuinely interested even when Lesley and I spent ten minutes discussing people he’d never met.
“So,” he said, dropping back onto the couch, “Lesley says you’ve had a rough few months.”
“Lesley has an extremely generous definition of ‘rough.'”
“She said three months.”
“She should mind her own business.”
“I’m sitting right here,” Lesley said, arriving with three glasses and the specific energy of a woman who has already decided how her evening is going to go. “And I mind my own business constantly. This is technically your business now too. I’m just facilitating.”
“You’re not facilitating, you’re managing.“
“Same thing, different job title.”
We drank wine. We talked about nothing important – Sam’s job doing something vaguely athletic-adjacent that involved a gym and several clients who apparently cried during deadlifts, Lesley’s sister’s wedding, a show none of us had finished.
It was easy. Disarmingly easy, and somewhere around the second glass I caught myself forgetting the entire premise of the evening and just having a genuinely good time.
Which is exactly when Lesley’s phone buzzed.
She looked at it. Frowned, theatrically, in a way that would not have fooled a child. “Oh, for God’s sake.”
“Everything okay?”
“Work thing. I need to go handle it.”
“Now?”
“Now.” She was already standing, already reaching for her coat, already moving with the brisk efficiency of a woman executing a plan she’d made several days in advance. “You two stay. Finish the wine. I’ll be – ” she checked an invisible watch ” – a while.”
I looked at Sam.
Sam looked at his own glass, entirely too casual for a man whose best friend’s best friend had just abandoned the room with zero warning.
“There’s no work thing,” I said, once the door had closed.
“There’s no work thing,” he agreed.
“She just left us alone. In her apartment. With wine.”
“She did.”
“That is the least subtle thing I have ever witnessed.”
“She’s not a subtle woman.”
I should have left.
Leaving was an option. A perfectly reasonable one, sitting right there next to staying.
I looked directly at it and chose not to take it.
“I’ve heard,” he said, and something in the way he said it made it very clear he meant it as an invitation rather than a warning.
That landed differently.
“You know,” I said, “for somebody Lesley described as having the conversational range of a golden retriever, you’re doing surprisingly well.”
“She talks more when I’m not talking.”
“Smart man.”
“Occasionally.”
He was closer now. I couldn’t remember which one of us had moved.
“Last chance,” I said. “She’s really okay with this?”
“Jean. This was her idea.”
“I know. That’s somehow making it weirder.”
“Want me to leave?”
There it was. An exit. No joke attached.
I looked at him – the reason Lesley had been insufferably cheerful for most of the summer – and finally admitted curiosity had stopped being the problem about twenty minutes ago.
“No.”
His eyes dropped to my mouth.
“Good.”
Then he kissed me, and, annoyingly, Lesley had undersold him.
He kissed like he had nowhere else to be, unhurried in a way that made the wine buzz in my chest feel like static, one hand finding my jaw like he’d been wanting an excuse to all night.
I made some kind of sound against his mouth that I will be denying under oath for the rest of my life, and he smiled into it, which should have been annoying and was somehow the opposite.
“This is insane,” I said, when I could talk again. “This is objectively the most insane thing my best friend has ever orchestrated.”
“Agreed.”
“I’m going to have so many things to say to her tomorrow.”
“I look forward to hearing about it.”
He kissed me again before I could finish being smug about it, and this time neither of us bothered pulling back to make a joke first.
His hands were sure in a way that matched exactly nothing about his conversational range – deliberate, unhurried, paying attention like it was the one skill he’d decided to master completely.
My back found the couch cushions at some point; I couldn’t tell you when, only that I was suddenly very aware of the exact temperature of the room and the specific weight of him settling over me, patient in a way that made me impatient, which he seemed to find funny.
“You’re smiling,” I said, breathless, “at a time like this.”
“You’re thinking about how you’re going to describe this to Lesley.”
“I absolutely am not.”
“Liar.”
He was right, obviously, and I decided the appropriate response was to stop giving him the satisfaction of being right and pull him back down instead.
He laughed, low against my collarbone, the vibration settling right into my chest, before taking his time trailing kisses down the line of my throat until my fingers buried themselves in his hair to anchor us both.
“The bedroom?” I managed, my voice a fraction rasper than I would have liked. “Or are we really doing this on Lesley’s dry-clean-only velvet couch?”
“Bedroom,” Sam said, without a second’s hesitation. “I know the exact value of this couch. Lesley’s mentioned it six times.”
He stood up, carrying himself with that effortless, gym-honed leverage, and pulled me up with him.
We made it down the hallway in a hasty, uncoordinated rhythm of mouths colliding, hands tugging at hems, and the soft thud of a shoulder brushing the doorframe.
By the time my shirt went over my head, we were at the edge of Lesley’s mattress, and the lingering absurdity of the situation finally evaporated beneath the immediate, heavy heat between us.
Sam wasn’t flashy, but he was extraordinarily thorough.
He took his time shedding his own clothes, his focus entirely on me as he pressed me back into the sheets. There was no ego in the way he moved – just a quiet, deliberate intent to pay attention. His hands were warm and broad, tracing the curve of my waist, the slope of my hip, anchoring me to the bed while his mouth mapped a path down my stomach that made my breath hitch in my throat.
“Still thinking about what to tell Lesley?” he murmured against my skin, his fingers shifting to part my thighs.
“Shut up, Sam.”
He smiled against my inner thigh, the warm pressure of his mouth making me arch into the mattress, before his touch found the center of me with a precision that instantly wiped every coherent thought from my brain. It was an agonizingly slow, rhythmic friction that built the pressure in my lower stomach until I was gripping his shoulders, my heels digging into the duvet.
When he finally shifted up over me, resting his forearms on either side of my head, his eyes were dark, searching mine. He didn’t rush it. He pushed inside me in one smooth, agonizingly deliberate slide that drew a long, ragged sound right out of my chest.
The rhythm he set was unhurried, deep, and relentless. Every thrust was calculated to drag a reaction out of me, his hips rolling against mine with a heavy, steady cadence that made the rest of the world narrow down to the friction of skin, the weight of him against me, and the growing, tight coil low in my belly.
I wrapped my legs around his waist, pulling him closer, needing the contact to be harder, faster. He obliged, his pace picking up just enough to push me over the edge, his thumb pressing right where I needed it most until the coil snapped – a sharp, breathless rush that sent a tremor straight through my spine.
There’s probably no need to tell you we didn’t do it just once that night.
There was a moment, somewhere in the aftermath, tangled in Lesley’s admittedly excellent thread-count sheets, staring at her ceiling, where I had the specific thought: I was going to owe Lesley an apology, which was frankly the most upsetting development of the evening.
Sam, beside me, looked entirely too pleased with himself for a man who’d said maybe forty words all night.
“So,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You were absolutely going to say something.”
“I was going to ask if you wanted water.”
“Oh.” I considered this. “Yes. Water. Water would be good.”
He got up to get it, unbothered, unhurried, entirely comfortable being naked in his girlfriend’s kitchen fetching water for the woman his girlfriend had specifically arranged for him to sleep with, and I lay there thinking, with real and growing alarm, that I understood now – completely, thoroughly, inconveniently – exactly what Lesley had been so smug about all summer.
Lesley called it a “work emergency” for exactly as long as it took her to walk back into her own apartment the next morning, coffee in hand, sunglasses on indoors, wearing the smug expression of a woman who has never once in her life felt guilty about anything.
I was still there.
Technically I was in her kitchen, wearing one of her t-shirts, drinking her coffee, because apparently that’s just how this arrangement worked now.
“Where did you even sleep?” I asked.
“My sister’s.”
“You went to your sister’s so I could sleep with Sam?”
“When you say it like that, it sounds weird.”
“There is no way to say it that doesn’t sound weird.”
“And yet here you are. Wearing my T-shirt.”
I threw a dish towel at her.
She caught it, obviously, because catching things I throw at her is apparently a skill she’s maintained specifically to torment me.
“Well?” she said, dropping her bag on the counter like she was clocking into a shift. “So. On a scale of one to ten.”
“I’m not rating a human being.”
“That high, huh?”
“I hate you.”
Lesley grinned into her coffee. “You’re welcome.”
And that was the first problem.
She was right.