Page 7 of Half-Hearted
“You spilled,” I tried again, nudging a box of tissues in her direction.
The red jelly had started to move. Down. And I definitely, for sure, was not thinking about how badly I wanted to lick it off her skin.
“Oh. Whoopsie.” Alexis giggled, then slowly swiped a finger across the sweet goo, brought it to her mouth, and sucked.
And Idefinitely,for sure, was not insanely turned on by that. The first time she did it or the second.
That would be wrong.
I cleared my throat. “I think we should take you… home now… and…” I trailed off, my brain plummeting into hormonal incoherence as Alexis traced the rim of her sandwich with the pad of her index finger, brought the excess jam to her lips, and licked it off with a slow, delicate swipe of her tongue.
“Joel?”
There was still a tiny bit of jam left on her chest.
She said something else.
I hummed.
She had really pretty shoulders. Nice blades. And they were, like, really smooth and stuff. I bet she moisturized daily.
I wonder what they—
Alexis bounced out of her seat with a perky “gratzie” and pranced back into my bedroom.
I stood there, trying to recall what I’d hummed my agreement to. It wasn’t the easiest task, what with almost no blood circulating to my brain on account of her bare shoulders and the strawberry jam.
Best-case scenario, she’d just crawl back into my bed and fall asleep. Then I’d crash on the couch, and in the morning, this whole nightmare would be over.
Worst-case scenario…
“Thank you. This is so much more comfortable.”
Alexis sauntered back to the kitchen, wearing one of my old hockey T-shirts. The dark blue one. It was absolutely massive on her, falling all the way down to her midthighs.
Bennett 88 was printed across her chest in large white letters.
That.
That was the worst-case scenario.
3
Joel
It waslike watching a train wreck happen in super-slow motion. Except instead of a train, it was a five-foot-nothing drunk ballerina, and the thing she was crashing into and wrecking was what little remained intact of my life.
Alexis sauntered gracefully to the living room and plopped herself onto the couch, seemingly having forgotten two very important necessities: the rest of her sandwich and her bra. Because if the perky little pebbles poking the back of my name on the borrowed T-shirt were any indication, she definitely wasn’t wearing one of those anymore.
I ripped my eyes away and started to busy my hands with the cleanup, ignoring the fact that there were fire ants crawling all over my skin and that I was officially sporting the biggest hard-on of my life.
“Joel.”
Nope.
I closed a bunch of lids, shoved a bunch of jars into a bunch of cupboards while thinking about a bunch of really unsexy things. Like praying mantises and the whole sexual cannibalism thing the bug-eyed, creepy little freaks had going on. And then I tried to use that to get my brain to associate sex with death via cannibalism, because hopefully then—
“Joooeeel.”
