Page 12 of Best Friend Burden

“Okay, that's actually not bad,” I said.

“See?” she asked. “Not cardboard after all.”

“I need to go practice,” I told her. I needed to get out of this situation fast. But the practice part wasn't a lie. There was an avant-garde jazz pianist coming in to use our recording space tomorrow, and he needed a bassist as a ringer. I'm a rock bassist, but I have enough basic knowledge of jazz language to keep up so long as I'm prepared. The problem was I wasn't prepared.

“Uh huh,” she said, “so this isn't just an excuse to get out of here before I see your boner?”

“I don't have a boner,” I said. That, of course, was a lie. And she knew it was a lie, so I didn't wait for her to call me out. I just turned around and walked to my room, closing the door behind me like a giant weirdo.

I was hoping for a bit of serenity in my own room, but there was still the awareness of Melody in the other room, dancing around in her underwear and daring me to take off my clothes. I knew this girl was trouble.

Meanwhile, my raging hard-on refused to relent, which made it particularly difficult to focus on practicing, but I pulled out my bass, and plugged it into the amp. I was about to turn it on and start practicing when I heard some minor commotion coming from behind my closed door. Nothing alarming, just distracting. I could work through noise, but it was the source of the noise that was giving me trouble.

I needed something that would calm me down and chill me out. Drugs were off the table, so that left only one option to get the job done and get it done quickly.

In my desk drawer, I kept a small bottle of lube. I grabbed that bottle along with a couple of tissues and got to work.

It was impossible to get the image of Melody in her underwear out of my mind, especially with that ass of hers so plump and beautiful in her panties, rubbing up against me. That wasn’t the kind of thing one just forgot. Instead of trying to fight it, I was going to focus on it and hope the problem took care of itself.

CHAPTER5

***MELODY***

What was I even doing? I was behaving like I was back in high school, except I'd never have had the cajones to try to get Kiefer to strip like I just did. It's as if I had the horniness of a teenager with the confidence of a woman in her late 20s. Which, you know, normally would have been great, but I needed a place to stay and, more importantly, a place to cook. And with the state of the kitchen (it was pretty bad — but my cooking is my art, and I treat my canvas like Pollock did), I was very much on thin ice, which I was afraid was already cracking underneath my feet.

When I finished my first batch of tacos, three different types. Some had the jackfruit shredded into imitation pork, others had a tofu chicken-like substitute I'd made, and the last with just standard veggies by themselves. I tried one of each and thought they were just fine, perhaps even worse than that. But I could be my own harshest critic, and I was curious about what an Angelino would think. Kiefer may not have been native, but he'd been out here long enough to qualify. And I needed some harsh feedback. If the grumpy guy whose kitchen I destroyed making the tacos could enjoy them, then anybody could.

I put a trio of the tacos, one of each, on a plate I grabbed from the cabinet and arranged them nicely and symmetrically. After all, most people don't realize it, but the first taste you get of any meal is with your eyes. Especially now with social media and online reviews. The first thing any customer looks at is the pictures, and if my food didn't photograph well, then nobody would even try it.

I ran into the bedroom I'd taken over and put on a night shirt and sweatpants. Obviously, I was making him uncomfortable with my body, and while I almost never wore clothes in my own apartment, it was in his space and I wanted to get in his good graces. The best plan was to do what I could to follow his rules.

With all the bravery I could muster, I grabbed the taco plate and knocked on Kiefer's bedroom door. There was no response even after a few seconds, and that concerned me. What if he was truly so mad at me that he was just ignoring me?

No, I told myself. He said he was practicing. Since I didn't hear any thick bass notes coming through the walls, he must have been wearing headphones and couldn't hear me. Just like I couldn't hear him when he approached me in the kitchen. Maybe I’d lecture him about the volume of his headphones just like he lectured me.

Here goes nothing, I thought.

I opened the door and looked to the back of the room, but he wasn't there. Instead, he was right next to me, sitting at the desk by the doorway, smelling of lube and holding his throbbing dick in his hands.

“Oh my God!” I said out loud and put the plate down on his desk. “Here!”

In putting the plate down, one of the tacos rolled off the edge, right onto his cock, covering it (or at least part of it — these tortillas weren't nearly large enough to cover what he was handling). I literally tacoed his dick…

I avoided eye contact and slowly backed up out of the room like a bank thief.

“I'm so sorry!” I said, completely frazzled.

Then just to make things even more awkward, because that was a Melody special, before closing the door I bowed in forgiveness like someone would do to the Pope. Then I slammed the door.

“Could you knock next time?” he asked from behind the door.

“I did knock!”

“Then knock louder!”

"Okay,” I said, trying to get the image of him jerking it out of my head. “I'm so so sorry.” But honestly, I wasn't that sorry. Like I was and genuinely felt bad, but there was also a part of me (okay, nearly all of me) which was thrilled at the sight that I could forever keep in my memory of what my high school crush looked like while pleasuring himself.

I wished I had stayed in just a half second longer to see the expression on his face. Not after I'd startled him, but before that. Before he realized I was in the room. If such a time even existed.

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