Page 122 of Stags

“When?” she said.

“Less than an hour,” he said.

She gave him a small smile. “If you need more time—”

“No, I just need to take a shower,” Stockton said.

“Okay,” she said.

Stockton went back into his room.

She came down the stairs. She glanced up at Bruin and then away. “This is going to be really weird with us, isn’t it?”

“Probably,” said Bruin. “Worse than weird, I think.”

She made a face.

“Thank you,” said Bruin. “Thank you for coming and talking to him. You’re good for him.”

“We’re good for each other,” she said. “At least, I think we could be. I hope so.”

“I hope so, too,” he said. “We’ll find a way through the weird.”

RORA DID GETa text within an hour from Stockton. He picked her up in his car and they drove around, sort of aimlessly, taking back roads that led them out of town. They wound through fields and forests.

“I don’t know how to talk about it,” he offered.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” she said. “We can absolutely never talk about it.”

“Yeah,” he said.

And then the silence swallowed them up for some time, and she looked out the windows at the trees going by and wondered what to say now, if she should say anything, or if this was all a lost cause, after all.

“The thing is,” he said, “the past week or so, it’s kind of been all I can think about? I, uh, I keep picturing it, wondering about it, wondering about details, and…”

“Oh,” she said. “Yeah, maybe I can understand that, actually.”

“I want to ask you invasive questions that I don’t think I have any right to ask,” he said. “It was like that with Maibell, too. I wanted her to give me a blow-by-blow, every second of it with this guy. But with her, maybe I was entitled to know, because we had an agreement that we were only going to be with each other, and she broke it. But I had no rights to you when you were with Bruin, none at all. So, it’s not maybe strictly my business.”

She drew in a deep breath and let it out. “Ask the questions.”

He swallowed.

But then, he didn’t ask her anything.

And they drove.

“Yours is bigger, you know,” she said finally, and she couldn’t help but smile.

He snorted. He glanced at her and then back at the road, grinning. “Okay, then.”

“Sorry, should I not have—”

“But he knew to lick your clit?”

She stopped smiling. “I mean, yeah.”

“Yeah,” he said. He wasn’t smiling either.

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