Page 4 of Edged
His eyes closed and I dug my fingers into the back of his neck. He mirrored the pose, sliding one of hands around the back of my neck, using his nails to get a grip against the slickness of my nape. It hurt, it fucking hurt, and the throb between my legs was the first sign of life my cock had shown since I’d read the opening line of Owen’s letter hours before commencement.
“When what?” I asked.
He shook his head, settling somehow closer to me, his exhale damp against my lips for how close we were.
Owen was my best friend, my truest friend. He was my lifeline and this was agony. Whatever was happening between us wasn’t something I’d planned for and it was nothing that I wanted, but I didn’t know how to stop the trajectories of what had become glaringly separate lives.
“I’ve sat outside her room,” Owen whispered, nails gouging harder into the back of my neck.
“What?”
“When you’re in there with her.” He let out a pathetic laugh and tried to pull away, but I held him still, pulling him closer so he had nowhere to go but back to me. “I’ve listened to the way you make her come and the things you say.”
I was fully hard from his confession, but I didn’t have time to piece together what that meant for either of us. “What do I say?”
I knew what I said. He knew what I said. Why had I asked him that? Why did I want to hear my own words in his voice?
“Not yet, sweetheart.” Owen’s voice was thick with tears. “Don’t come yet, not yet.”
“Owen.”
“You taste so good, Mandy.” He sniffled, breath catching on his sister’s name. “I know you want it, but not yet. Last a little longer for me. Can you do that?”
“Owen, stop.”
My cheeks were wet and I didn’t know when I’d started to cry, but Owen’s breath lit up the tracks like a goddamn lava flow.
“That’s not what you say.” He licked his lips and tried to pull away, and I wanted him to go, but I could never let him leave me. Not like that. “You never tell her to stop, so why are you telling me?”
“This is wrong, Owen,” I told him.
I knew if I looked down, he’d be as hard as I was. The truth of the thing that we’d been ignoring for years not utterly unavoidable.
When I’d read his confession letter earlier in the day, I’d played our entire life together back through my head. I’d gone back to lazy summer days when we’d spent the whole day swimming and then strip out of our trunks and dry naked together in the sun. Had there ever been a time he’d tried to hold my hand? Or maybe grazed a finger against mine to see how I’d react? And I thought about homecoming our freshman year of high school when he’d only gone with Chrissy Martin because I’d wanted to go with Chrissy’s best friend, and I’d had to beg him to go along with it, but he’d spent the whole night with me instead of her.
Had our entire life been a series of near misses that I’d been blind to?
It felt that way now.
“I always leave after,” he carried on, unashamed of the admission or his tears. “I go back to my room and I…”
He trailed off, but I’d known him long enough to know what he was going to say. I didn’t have to ask, but I wanted to hear it in his voice. I wanted to know for sure.
“Tell me.”
“I pretend you were talking to me,” he whispered, words trailing into the softest and most delicate groan I’d ever heard.
Not once in my life had I thought about Owen that way, but now that I played back our friendship, it was clear that he’d seen me that way for years and years. And I’d been oblivious or maybe willfully ignorant, then I’d fallen in love with his sister. And I had no idea how he’d stayed my friend, unless he was a glutton for punishment, because I could hear it in his voice that everything about me—about us—was slowly killing him inside.
As for me, it was stirring up a whole new series of feelings that I’d never expected or wanted. Owen and I were so close I could smell the salt of his tears and I wanted to taste them. I wanted to close the mere inches between us and lick them away from his skin. Take him down onto the couch and feel how hot his cock burned against mine. I’d never thought of him that way, but now it was impossible to not.
But Mandy.
His sister, my girlfriend, the woman who wanted to marry me was upstairs in her room, probably with her hand down her shorts just waiting for me to come back and fuck her, but I couldn’t.
I couldn’t fuck her and I couldn’t go back.
“I know that’s pathetic,” Owen whispered. “I know I’ve ruined everything.”
