my brother we’d have a night out with the football guys after he claimed it was the closest he’d ever be getting to football.
“What’re you staring at?” Reid’s voice came from behind me.
“Just checking out the stands.” I said, affecting a casual tone.
Reid squinted in that direction, his lips parting slightly. “That must be Jesse’s brother. Wow, Jesse wasn’t lying when he said he was bigger. Jesus.”
I frowned. “When were you talking to Jesse about his brother?” I thought Reid had long since turned in the pass that allowed him to have that kind of familiar conversation with Jesse, even if he had tried to make amends recently.
“I don’t know. Freshman year, probably.” He shrugged. “Hey, are they coming out with us tonight, Jesse and his brother, I mean?”
I stared at him. “I don’t think so.”
I didn’t want to get in the middle, but shit, I started wondering if Reid was up to what I thought he was. If so, I didn’t like it.
When he caught me watching, he cocked a brow in question, and I finished off the rest of my water before tossing the bottle back on the bench and heading back out onto the field without answering.
Reid stepped under the showerhead next to me after the game, soaping himself up vigorously. A current of tension ran between us, but I wasn’t sure if it was just me until Reid gave me that same assessing look he’d given me on the field earlier.
“What’s up with you and Jesse?”
All right, more blunt than I expected.
I scrubbed shampoo through my hair. “How do you mean?”
“Are you close friends?”
“He’s my roommate, obviously, and I suppose I’d say we’ve grown pretty close, yeah.” I wouldn’t mention the part about how the shit that had gone down on the couch last night had effectively reset my barometer on sexual fantasies. I didn’t have a foot fetish, I didn’t think, but I wasn’t sure when I’d last gotten off so hard. No, that was a lie. It’d been with Jesse. Again. Every encounter kept topping the one previous, and my OnlyFans subscribers were growing like kudzu thanks to him. This is insane, he’d said last week, when I’d handed him an envelope with five hundred dollars in it—his half of the profits. He wasn’t wrong, but lately it wasn’t the only reason I wanted to keep going.
“Is he seeing anyone?”
I snorted. “Seems like that’s something you could ask him yourself.”
“I think he’s probably still pissed at me.”
“Do you blame him?”
Reid turned a scrutinizing look upon me, like he was trying to peer behind the guardedness that arose in me anytime Jesse came up lately. “I apologized to him the other day. Like, a heartfelt one. And I meant it.”
“Doesn’t mean he has to accept it.”
Reid narrowed his eyes. “He is seeing someone.”
“You’re out of control, dude. Let it go.”
He sighed. “All right, fine. But what would you do? How would you get someone back?”
Fuck me.
“I wouldn’t have cheated on someone in the first place.”
“It was more complex than that.”
“Not really,” I argued, frustration creeping into my voice.
“No, it was. He was so damn…sweet. I didn’t know what to do with it after a while. I mean, we were both younger, and he was pretty inexperienced—”
Reid gaped at me as I chortled. I couldn’t help it because, once again, I was thinking back to last night and then to the numerous other encounters Jesse and I had had. A mean little part of me wanted to say Jesse had apparently gained plenty of experience after their breakup.
“What’s he into lately? You live with him, so you probably know, right? What’s he watching on TV? He used to like Top Chef. Does he still?”
I could tell Reid about how into his job as a sous chef at Fuego he was, that his favorite video game lately was Northern Nights, that he loved Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, hated Joker, and was on the fence about Little Women. That he was completely addicted to Bake Off, all of which made me grin because huh, I hadn’t realized that I’d picked up on all these things about him over the past couple of months.
What I did realize, though, was that my mean streak ran deeper than I thought, because I said, “He’s not really into that anymore. He’s all about Hell’s Kitchen.” He hated that show with a passion. “Ask him about that next time. But if you’re really smart, you’ll leave him alone.”
Twisting off the tap,