Roomies by Christina Lauren

eighteen

Rolling over, I straighten my legs and push my hair out of my face. A hammer inside my cranium bangs against my skull in protest.

Do not move, it says.

The sunlight beaming across the bed feels like it’s coming from a star just outside my window. Calvin’s groggy moan reaches me from the other side of the bed.

The other side of the bed?

I sit up, jerking the sheet across my bare chest, and my world tilts in a heaving, nauseating lurch.

Oh.

I’m naked.

I’m naked? I pull the sheet away from Calvin’s facedown form . . . and . . . he is also naked.

The visual reminder is quickly chased by the more physical one: I am sore. Oh my God sore. What the hell did we do sore.

He presses his face into the pillow. “Mmmmph. I feel like I marinated in beer,” he says, words muffled. And then he twists, looking over his shoulder, staring down at his body: “Where are my clothes?”

“I don’t know.”

He looks at me, and seems to surmise that I am equally naked under the sheet. “Where are yours . . . ?”

I keep my gaze carefully diverted from his muscular backside. “I don’t know that, either.”

“I think . . . I think I’m still wearing a condom.” He rolls over and I get an eyeful of impressive morning wood before my gaze shoots skyward again, fixed on the ceiling.

He is, indeed, still wearing a condom.

With a whimper, he slowly peels it away and bends, dropping it in the trash bin near my bed. He rolls back, and the resulting silence pulls my attention over to his face.

He’s grinning. “Hi.”

I think my cheeks are going to melt under the heat of this blush. “Hi.”

Saturday morning, late February, in my bed with Calvin McLoughlin. My bed. I have located myself in time and space but I still have no recollection of how we ended up here.

He scratches just below his eye. “Don’t be surprised, okay? But I think . . .” He looks around at the mess of my bed. “I think we finally consummated the marriage last night.”

“This theory is supported by the obnoxious hickey on your shoulder.”

He turns his head to check for himself, and looks back at me, impressed. “Do you remember . . . anything?” he asks, squinting at me through one eye.

Inhaling deeply, I think back.

Champagne at the theater.

He crossed the room, and everything inside me turned into tiny golden bubbles.

Dinner with about fifteen others.

Wine. Lots and lots of wine.

“Dancing?” I ask.

He hesitates. “Yeah.”

More drinks and the deep pulsing of music.

Being tugged onto the dance floor. Calvin pulling me right up against him, his hands bracketing my hips, his thigh sliding between my legs. His mouth just below my ear, saying, I can feel the heat of you. Is it the drink, or is it me?

And then: watching him trip toward the bar and calling after him, No more shots!

The smile on his face when he returned, handing me a shot anyway. His gleeful Just one more! This is called a Cowboy Cocksucker!

More dancing. More of his hands on my hips, and my ass, and snaking up my waist, flirting with the sides of my breasts.

I remember sliding my hand up beneath his shirt, feeling the heat of his stomach on my palm. And I remember how our eyes met.

He said, I want to take you to bed.

A stumbling walk home at three in the morning.

I glance toward the doorway to my bedroom, finding my discarded dress there. It’s muddy, and that triggers another image. “I fell.”

“Right.” He reaches for my comforter, which has slipped onto the floor, and pulls it over his lower half, sparing me the effort it’s taking to keep not looking. “Apparently I failed to save you.”

I remember this. Oh God. I drunk-yelled at him for not having faster reflexes. He picked me up, threw me over his shoulder, and carried me back to the apartment. And then—oh.

Then it was a frenzy. I think we both remember it at the same time, but I can’t look at him to confirm. I remember him walking in the door, the way he slid me down his body, his hands all over my ass, and then how we just stood there, weaving, staring at each other.

“I like you,” he said.

“You keep saying that.”

“Well, I do.”

He bent in the only remaining tentative moment of the night, and pressed his mouth to mine.

It was like pushing my maniac button.

“I mauled you,” I say.

He laughs, delighted. “I think you did.”

“God, we were drunk.”

A slideshow shuffles through my head: tearing off clothes, mouths everywhere, teeth knocking. Fingers, lips, and then him over me, pushing inside.

“Neither of us . . .” He trails off.

It takes me a second to figure out what he’s saying, and then I blurt it out: “Finished.”

“We gave it a good effort but after . . . a while . . . I think we just passed out.” He laughs again. “What a testament to my masculinity.”

My verbal filter is apparently gone: “Does that mean we didn’t consummate?”

He giggles and pulls a pillow over his face. “The sex is the consummation, not the orgasm.”

A hundred questions fly into my head, birds flapping in the confined space.

But, without the orgasm, did he like it?

Did he mean for us to . . . yaknow?

Does he feel weird about it?

Do I? I mean, obviously I’ve wanted to have sex with him since the beginning of time, but I didn’t really want it to happen like this—drunk, messy, and where the emotional implication is so vague.

“You okay?” he asks, dropping the pillow. “I mean, mentally and . . .” He nods to my body beneath the covers.

“Yeah. You?”

This makes him laugh, like he doesn’t even need to answer, and there’s some consolation in that.

“Don’t look,” he says, grinning over at me. “I gotta pee, and I’m going to walk naked to your bathroom because I think you ripped my clothes off by the front door.”

I squeeze my eyes shut. “It’s your bathroom, too.”

Once he’s gone, I bend over, picking up my phone. I immediately want to text Lulu and tell her about this insanity, but I hesitate. Lulu used to feel like my bestie, the person I wanted to share every tiny detail with. But the past few weeks, she’s been hard to read, and I don’t like the sense I have that she would eventually use this story against me somehow.

I’m just starting to turn my screen back off when I catch the number of texts in my iMessage app.

There are 364.

“What the hell?”

I open it, reading the one up top from Jeff, delivered only three minutes ago.

I’m assuming you’re still asleep. Careful where you get your hangover breakfast today.

What?

There are seventy-three texts from Lulu, and the bottom ten are in all caps. I only need to read the most recent one to begin to understand what’s going on.

OPEN YOUR GODDAMN TWITTER.

I open the app. Oh my Jesus.

I scroll, and scroll, and scroll.

In the other room, the toilet flushes, the water runs, and the door opens. Calvin comes back into the bedroom, wearing only boxers.

“Let’s head down to Morning Star,” he says. “Get some greasy eggs. Some bangers. Some solid hangover food.”

“I think we have eggs here.”

“No, Holls,” he says, flopping down at the end of the bed. “Food.” I don’t even care that the movement has tugged the sheet off my boobs and he’s getting his own eyeful.

“I’m not sure we should go out and about today,” I say, looking up. I’m trying to fight the hysterical bubble that’s formed in my throat. “You’re trending on Twitter.”