Page 112 of For Pleasure Or Worse

I’d said it before and I’d say it again, there was nothing conventional about Natalia and me. Weddings were evolving. Couples didn’t even wait for the bride to walk down the aisle anymore; they were doingfirst looks, and I only knew this because the option was sprung on me and I stared at Tally like she’d grown two heads while she was forced to explain it.

Angelo’s room was on the same wing of the resort as mine and Tally’s, directly below it and facing the oceanside to catch the morning sunrise over the Atlantic. Meaning I’d have to stare at the ceiling all night wishing I could ram a hole in the drywall and crawl through the floor to her. We were rattling on about our hockey team’s recent playoff run when Ang shouldered us inside the doorway and flipped on the recess lighting. My shoes came to a squeaking halt on the wood floors.

“What the fuck is that?” My already low expectations plummeted further as I gaped at the bed against the wall. Theonebed, against the wall. This could not be fucking happening to me. My hands found my hips. I spun around, searching for a cot or a pull-out couch, but the only other things in the room were a cuck chair and a coffee table.

“We’re cuddling, brother.” Angelo leapt onto the bed, ruffling the white comforter. “Isn’t this everything you ever dreamed of the night before your wedding?”

My finger wagged back and forth at him. “Don’t mock me right now.”

“Are we going ass to tip or ass to ass?” He tapped his finger on his chin, a smirk showing off all his teeth. “Tip to tip?”

“Flat on your back, and if you so much as scratch the underside of your balls I swear to God I’ll maim them.”

Two grown men in a queen-size bed was too close for comfort, and I’d spent weeks in a six-by-six tent in the jungle with Pike, unshowered. The difference was I didn’t have a choice with one of them.

“I don’t like this any more than you do.” He hopped off the bed with his hands up. “You’re making it really hard for me to get laid. I could be prowling at the bar like Tyler but instead I have to tuck my big brother in and read him a bedtime story. I didn’t even get a choice. You were put in my roomwithoutmy knowledge.”

“Ang, if it were you and Echo sitting at a bar, what chance do you really think you’d have of getting the girl?”

Angelo scratched the back of his head, clearly unused to the shorter curls. “Some girls prefer a man with a little more pasta on his bones than meat. I’m warmer in the winter.”

“You keep believing that.” I smiled.

He snatched a toiletry bag off the top of his open suitcase on the floor and trudged into the bathroom, jarring it closed.

Not an hour later, Angelo was snoring beside me. I was under the covers with my fists pinning the sheets to my sides like I was a cadaver on a gurney, trying not to make any sudden movements and catch a hairy limb that didn’t belong to me. Even if my body was tired enough to sleep after a long day, my mind was still racing, and the ticking of Angelo’s watch on the dresser was keeping me just unsettled enough that my only option was staring at the wall.

This was complete and utter torture.

I snagged my phone off the nightstand next to me and opened our text thread.

Me

You up?

The three little dots on my screen showed up a few seconds later.

Tally

Damn, I haven’t gotten a 2 a.m. text like this since college, and on the eve of my wedding no less

Me

Send pics

Tally

Once a fuckboy always a fuckboy

Me

A domesticated fuckboy. I used to be for the streets

Tally

You are pretty well house trained

I smiled at the screen.

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