Page 42 of For Pleasure Or Worse

“Your first thought was, ‘How am I gonna fuck that worm? Where’s the worm hole?’”

He ran a hand across his mouth, concealing a laugh. “You are unhinged.”

“No, now that I think about it, I’m so glad you answered the way you did, because I was right. That was your only concern. Not my personality, or my character, or all the memories we have together. Sex is the most important thing to a man. If it came down to it, you wouldn’t love me if I was a worm because you couldn’t fuck me if I was a worm.”

“I would try,” Mateo said.

“What the fuck?”

“I would try to love you! I would try to love you, if you were a worm. I would carry you around in a little plastic sandwich baggie of dirt or something. I’d become the town psycho walking around talking to my worm bag and calling it my wife.”

“I’d definitely suffocate and die that way.”

Mateo scrubbed his palm down his chin and massaged his jaw. “So how do I win, Tally? What do you want me to say to you right now? This is all about you being insecure. I reassure you day in and day out about how much I love you, how beautiful you are, how deeply I care about you, and today that isn’t enough for some reason. I want you to feel confident in our relationship no matter what outside force gnaws at you. Ineedit actually, because I’m going to marry you and marrying you isn’t casual to me. So tell me, please. Tell me if I’m not doing enough.”

Guilt rocked through me. Mateo was more than enough; he treated me how every woman dreamed of being treated. I couldn’t help but fall back into bad habits no matter how good it got with him because I was conditioned my entire life to think I wasn’t enough. I was deathly afraid of Mateo realizing one daythat I wasn’t either. Worse, the novelty of having a sex-working significant other would wear off for him, or his parents would find out and convince him I was the biggest mistake of his life. Their reaction would be no different than my own parents, that no self-respecting woman would ever take her clothes off for money. And maybe they were right. Maybe my respect for myself laid in other people’s respect for me.

Before I could say anything the door handle to the laundry room started jarring violently and every single hair on my body stood up like lightning had struck.

“Mateo, are you in there?” Anna bellowed, jingling the handle again despite it being locked, like an impatient toddler outside a parked car.

Matty fumbled from inside me and tugged the neck of my tank top up over my tits again, scrambling just as quickly to tuck himself away and zip his jeans closed. Our eyes were wide and frantic, and my skin turned a glorious freshly sunburned shade as I jumped down off the washing machine and hopped gracelessly on one leg to put my pants back on. It was a mess of hushing and pitter-patter; my heel slammed into the metal appliance and Mateo cleared his throat entirely too loudly to try to mask it.

“Mateo?” Anna’s voice was closer, like she was pressed against the door and sniffing it.

“Just a sec!” he answered.

“What are you doing in there?”

“Um.” He looked at me. “Laundry?”

Unhappy with that reply the door handle jiggled again, more aggressively.

“Fuck, she’s gonna know,” I whispered. I’d barely gotten over the embarrassment of the dildo debacle and now we were getting caught in pound town again.

“She won’t.” Mateo paced in front of me. “Will she?”

“We’re in here with the door locked. What else could we be doing?”

“Is that Natalia?” Anna murmured through the wood.

Mateo ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah she—she got stuck in the dryer. I was helping her get out.”

My eyebrows creased and my jaw dropped open. “Stuck in the dryer?” I mouthed. Anna was never going to believe that, and the cliché would haunt me.

“Well, is she okay?” Anna’s voice hinted at genuine concern. “Need help? I can get a stick of butter; it'll loosen her right up.”

“How big does your mother think I am?” I mumbled sharply and Mateo’s palm came down over my lips.

“Don’t worry, she slipped right out of there like nothing when I got her a little wet.”

The bastard had the audacity to wink at me before unlocking the door and swinging it open, dismissing us, his mother, our conversation, and the ever-nagging feeling that sooner or later this was all going to feel like shaking a bottle of soda and opening the cap for it to blow up.

chapter fourteen

Mateo

I wantedto pull my hair out. I was close to it, sitting at the reception desk of a new law office in Coconut Creek with an Excel spreadsheet of backwork, pages of firewall breaks and detected malware staring back at me. The building was dark, nothing but the blue light from the desktop keeping me awake for yet another late night working after hours. Most places preferred that I came when the work day was over so I didn’t disrupt employees or force shutdowns on programs. That led to a lot of lonely dinners and load buffering while I stared at my watch.

---