occasionally, as long as we had sex first, she’d let me sleep in her bed and hold her. But only if we had sex. To her, the holding afterward was all part of it, I think. The second we left the bed, we had to shift back into friends-only mode. Of course this just made me that much more intent on making sure we ended up in bed. Not that I needed another reason to have sex with her, but now I was on a mission.
I wished I could put an arm around her on the couch when we watched TV or kiss her when we passed in the hallway, but her rules were rigid. I’d tried holding her hand once on a walk with Stuntman Mike and she fucking lost it on me. Didn’t talk to me for three days, almost broke things off over it. Said I didn’t “get” what friends with benefits meant.
After that, I didn’t try to make moves on her outside of her rules. She obviously wasn’t ready for an emotional relationship. It fucking sucked. But what was I going to do? It hadn’t even been a month since Tyler. I guess I couldn’t blame her for being hesitant to let me get close to her just yet.
She asked me all the time if I was going on dates, like she needed to make sure I was keeping up that end of the bargain. At first I was honest—told her no, I wasn’t seeing other people. But she got really worked up about it.
Really fucking worked up.
Said if our arrangement was keeping me from dating, we should end it. I think she felt bad she wasn’t ready to commit to me and didn’t want me to miss out on finding someone who was. She knew I wanted to get married, have kids. That I already felt late to the game.
So I lied.
I’d say I was meeting someone for drinks and then I’d just go home for the night and sit around. Maybe go to the gym. When she’d ask me about my fake date, I’d just shrug and say we didn’t have a connection. That seemed to placate her.
But the weird thing was, as much as she pressured me to see other women, I didn’t think she was seeing other men.
She only ever sent me orders from her laptop. So when I was at the fire station and I got an order at 10:00 at night, I knew she was at home sitting on the couch going through emails. Not on a date. Then I’d wait an hour or so and reply with a dumb question about the order. If she replied right away, I knew she was still sitting on the couch working. She always replied.
On my days off, when I came over, she never did anything other than hang out with me. She never left the room to take calls, and she didn’t disappear for mystery appointments or give me any reason to believe she was keeping to her promise that she’d date other people.
So why, then, didn’t she want to be exclusive? Because by all accounts, I was the only man she was with. And that was a good thing, because I didn’t think I could handle it if I wasn’t.
I was just patiently waiting for her to move on from Tyler. I wasn’t really sure I was actually making progress, but at least things didn’t seem to be getting worse.
There was something to be said for that.
It was a little after 5:00 p.m. when a black SUV pulled into the driveway. Since I worked with the garage door open, I’d become the unofficial doorman for Doglet Nation. I signed for all the packages.
This didn’t look like a delivery though. The driver was a man in sunglasses. He got out, and something told me I wasn’t going to like who this was.
The guy was good-looking. Taller than me. He worked out—that much was obvious. He was well dressed, maybe my age.
He came straight into the garage with a confidence that told me he had official business here. Someone who’d been here before and had a right to come back.
“You must be Josh,” he said, taking off his glasses and offering me his hand.
He had an accent. Not exactly Spanish, something else. More exotic, foreign. He wasn’t a client. No way this guy owned a purse dog.
“I’m Tyler,” he said, shaking my hand. “Is Kristen around?”