not in a sharing mood.
“With benefits,” Max says.
Dev freaking gawks at me. This is one of the reasons why Hazel and I have kept our sleeping together a secret. I can practically see the thoughts marching through Dev’s head. Hazel and I are business partners. We’re part of the same friend group. What happens when I fuck this up? But it’s actually nobody’s business what Hazel and I do together. We’re two consenting adults and nobody’s getting hurt.
“So...does that mean you’re ready to start dating again?” Dev asks.
“He’s ready for something.” Max sounds pissy, but you know what? It’s still none of his business.
“I don’t want to be in a relationship. Hazel is just Hazel.” I shrug. “She’s like one of us, one of the guys. She’s not the kind of girl you feel romantic about.”
Dev’s face sort of freeze-frames. Right. I don’t even need to turn around to know that Hazel’s heard what I just said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IT’S SATURDAY, TWO WEEKS after Hazel and I watched our friends tie the knot on a Cabo beach and I made an ass of myself. We’re both pretending everything is normal, even though it’s not. We go to work, we go home alone on the weeknights, and on the weekends we have sex constantly. The only thing that changes is where, because Hazel still insists that we alternate houses. It seems to matter to her, so I give up trying to figure out why and just do it.
This weekend it’s my turn to host, so we’re hiding out in my beach house. I finally let Hazel pass out around one this morning, so we haven’t gotten too much catch-up work done today, although we’ve both dutifully hauled our laptops into my home office. My office is a modern space with floor-to-ceiling windows. I can look out and see the ocean.
Today’s one of those rare rainy California days where the ocean is shades of gray and it’s cool enough that the heat is running. Hazel barely cracks her laptop before she passes out on the floor pillow she dragged next to the glass. She’s definitely been working too hard these last two weeks, so I don’t wake her up even though I was looking forward to lazy weekend sex.
After I clear my inbox, I open a new tab in my browser and look at Pinterest. There’s only one desk in my home office, so it feels like I should get another one for Hazel. I pin a few ideas so I can run them by her when she wakes up. Somehow I end up migrating from my desk chair to the floor beside her. It felt weird sitting up there when she’s down here—plus, I just like being next to her.
Hazel snores softly, making little sleep-whiffle sounds, and I pin. I have enough good ideas for thirty home offices, so we’ll have to narrow it down. I reach over and rescue the laptop when she rolls over, stretching like a cat. She looks really good asleep. There’s a smooth expanse of skin where her T-shirt pushes up, and I brush my fingers over it.
“You’ve been busy,” she says, her voice thick with sleep. “I passed out. Sorry.”
I close the laptop and set it to the side. “You were tired.”
“It feels like getting busted by my boss,” she grumbles.
She’s not wrong. Before we hooked up, I’d have given her shit about sleeping on the job. Now I want to scoop her up and carry her to bed because she does work too much and sometimes that means she doesn’t sleep enough.
“You know you don’t have to work 24/7, right? There are health benefits to sleeping.”
“I’m too old to sleep on the floor.” Hazel makes a face and sits up, looking around for her laptop. I nudge it firmly out of reach and pull her onto my lap.
I reach for her shoulders, working my hands over the knots I find beneath her shoulder blades. She feels wound up and tense beneath my palms. “Problems?”
Hazel shakes her head. Now that I think about it, I can’t remember the last time she opened up about something that was bugging her that wasn’t work-related. Maybe when she first pitched me our arrangement and complained about the lack of orgasms in her life?
“We’ve found your backup career,” she groans.
I smile into her hair. “If you’d sit in a proper chair at a proper desk, you wouldn’t fall asleep on the floor and then you wouldn’t have this problem.”
“Nobody likes a