Page 48 of The Friend Zone

Josh

We stood in her kitchen eating cereal, looking at each other. She ate hers out of a measuring cup because she “likes the handle.” It made me smile.

“Don’t smile at me.” She gave me a warning glare. She’d been feisty from the moment she woke up. It was adorable.

Her hair tumbled wild around her face, still curled a little from the party, and she wore nothing but an oversize sweatshirt that bared one shoulder and the light-blue lace G-string I’d gotten to take off her last night. She was beautiful. So fucking sexy.

“I can’t even smile now?” I grinned at her. My heart was so damn happy.

Waking up with her was like Christmas when you see you got everything you wanted. I woke up with a grin on my face, and then she’d gotten up and jumped me again.

It had been a good morning.

“I need to make sure you’re clear on the rules here,” she said over her cereal. “This is a booty-call situation. That’s it. Friends with benefits.”

Yeah, she’d said that last night—a few times actually. I’d been so focused on the sex part of that statement I hadn’t really processed the rest of it. I’d been a little distracted at the time. Now that we were clothed, and my brain was working properly, I was ready to address this.

“What if I don’t want to be just friends with benefits?” I smiled at her.

“Then we’ll only be friends.” Her face was stony.

Wow. Okay.

Was she really bent on this booty-call thing? I’d half thought she was just giving me shit last night with the whole “thanks for the sex, get out now” bullshit. She liked to give me a hard time—it was her thing. I didn’t think she was entirely serious.

I decided to poke her.

“Oh yeah? So we can see other people, then?” I took a bite of my cereal with a smirk.

Something flashed in her eyes. “Of course. Bone whoever you want.” She shrugged, looking away from me.

I studied the side of her face. Her forehead wrinkled the way it did when she was frustrated. It bothered her—I could see it. So if it bothered her, why was she insisting on it?

“Well, we should probably start using condoms, then,” I said casually, calling her bluff.

“Fine. We probably should have used them anyway.” She put her cereal in the sink.

This was not the answer I had hoped for. She didn’t like condoms, so I’d been expecting something snarky along the lines of, “Well, I’m not the one who wants to see other people.”

Now I’d just talked myself into using a condom. Fuck.

I set my cereal down on the counter. “Well, you’re on birth control. And of course, if we agreed to be exclusive, we could keep—”

“Nope. Condoms are fine.”

She walked out of the kitchen, and I watched her go with a wrinkled brow. But I didn’t have time to get further into it with her. I had to be at work in twenty minutes. I’d slept all of two hours last night. I was exhausted and work was going to suck because of it.

It had been worth it.

I washed my bowl and went looking for her. She sat on the couch with Stuntman Mike, her laptop on her lap.

“I gotta go to work,” I said. I’d talk to her about this later.

I put my hand on the back of the couch and leaned down to kiss her, and she jerked her head back. “No. We don’t kiss unless we’re fucking.”

The comment gave me a small, unexpected jab in the heart. “Why?”

“Because this is a sex thing, Joshua. It will only ever be a sex thing. We’re not dating. There are not going to be any public displays of affection or hand-holding or any of it. If you can’t deal with that, then let’s stop this right now.”