Page 76 of Emerson

“Not just this week. Just because I’m leaving doesn’t mean we have to stop.”

“Like…you mean have phone sex?” He rolls his eyes. “How many times do I have to tell you I’m not unblocking your number?”

“But you’ll let me inside your body? Make it make sense to me, baby, because I don’t get it.” I set my plate down with a clunk and rake my fingers through my hair.

“It doesn’t have to make sense to you,” he says defensively.

“So, what, I leave on Friday, and we just don’t talk to each other for months?”

“We went years without talking, Dillon. I think we’ll survive. By the time you get back, I’m sure whatever this is,” he says, waving between us, “will be out of our systems, and we can laugh about it and move on.”

“Are you serious?”

Emery looks at me with those fucking eyes. The ones that say he’s pleading with me just to follow along. Just pretend I’m cool with three nights a week, on his terms, his time. Just sex. Like it doesn’t drive me up a wall that I can’t text him on a Tuesday afternoon when I miss him or a Saturday night when I want him in bed with me, knowing I won’t see him until Monday. If he even shows.

His time.

His terms.

His fucking rules.

But what am I even asking him? To play long-distance friends-with-benefits with me? I rub my hands down my thighs and let a humorless laugh fall flat between us when he does nothing but look at me.

“Okay. Friday it is, then.”

If he wanted more, he wouldn’t be asking for this. Would he? He wouldn’t avoid my house when Penny is there. He wouldn’t make rules and sit feet away from me when all I want to do is be near him.

“Friday,” he says. The smile on his face is slow to bloom, and faker than fuck. “But we have now?”

Dread pools in my gut, mixing with the instant dose of desire that watching Emerson Lee crawl to me always gives. I hate how my body can hold so much want, and so much hate for the games we’ve been playing.

I can’t pretend that this isn’t going to fuck me up, because it is.

Once upon a time, Warren was worried about me getting mixed up with his brother and what that would do to Emery.

It’s me who feels a little more hopeful every time he comes to see me. Grows a little more attached. If I didn’t know him before the sex, maybe I could have parted ways without much damage.

But this is Emery.

And I’m completely fucked.

I watch him with bated breath as he moves to straddle my lap. I fight the urge to grab him, scared he’ll move away again. I fight the urge to toss him away to protect myself from the mixture of need and despair I already feel brewing.

Friday. One week.

His kiss does to me what it always does. My stomach feels weightless, my heart finds a rhythm that beats just for these moments, and I can’t help but hold his face between my hands and take his mouth in a bruising kiss.

“Take me to bed,” he says between nibbles of my lip.

I manage to get up with him clinging to my front, and he lets me figure it out as he kisses from my mouth to my ear and down the side of my neck, licking and sucking as he goes.

It’s not until I have him laid out under me across his pretty teal comforter that I find my voice again.

“What happens if I can’t laugh about this in four months, Emery? What if I want more?”

His pupils are blown wide, taking the dark brown to almost black. He holds my shoulders and licks his lips before whispering, “Then we can talk.”

“Promise me, Emerson.”