My Favorite Hal-Night Stand - Christina Lauren Page 0,48

in his pocket or in a drawer—I don’t even want to think about where it came from—but one second there’s a condom in his hand, and the next it’s on him and he’s staring up at me, waiting.

I move so slowly, careful not to call his name or rock the bed; it’s almost hard to breathe, like the air is being pushed from my body to make room for his.

I don’t want to examine too closely that this is Reid, and that doing this with him is somehow just as easy as doing anything else together. The way he smiles up at me is the same way he always looks at me: like there is nowhere else he’d rather be. There’s no awkwardness or tentative touches. It’s just us.

His hands map a circuit from my hair to my arms and thighs and everywhere in between. I watch his face, noting when sensation becomes too much and he has to close his eyes and twist his fingers in the comforter, and then I do it again, wanting to see more, to see him rattled and undone.

“You are,” he says, breathless, “the best . . .”

And I shake my head, leaning forward to kiss him. I’m sweating and my muscles shake; I’m so tightly wound that I’m practically burning. I keep my movements small so we don’t move the bed too much, but then he makes this quiet sound of relief and I’m not sure I care anymore. I’m so close to that feeling that might overflow and drown us both.

Reid’s hands move from my breasts to my hips and he grips me tightly, moving with me. Sweat pools in the hollows of his collarbones, down the center of his chest to where our bodies meet, and I want to stamp the image on the back of my eyelids, frame it, and hang it on every wall in my house. His face is flushed with the exertion of holding back.

I see the exact moment he breaks. His mouth opens on a gasp, on a sound he can’t make, and he falls, pulling me down with him.

I wake up alone.

I don’t remember when Reid left, but when I think back on everything we did last night, I’m not surprised he needed to go crash in his own bed. The second time, we were . . . enthusiastic, to say the least, and I was exhausted by the end of it. My last memory is of falling to pieces with Reid behind me, and I swear I must have just passed out as soon as I returned to orbit. I’m no expert, but I’d call that a success.

Well done, Reid.

It takes some work to sit up and get my feet under me and—oh yeah, everything hurts. The bed doesn’t seem to be faring much better: most of the blankets are piled on the floor, a couple of pillows are by the window, and the sheets are barely hanging on.

I have no idea where my underwear might be.

At least my jeans are where I left them, and after a quick stop in the bathroom, I fish my phone out of one of the pockets. There’s just enough juice left to show that Cat has messages waiting.

Sheets straightened and pillows and blankets accounted for, I sit on the bed and open the app. I’m honestly surprised when I see one is from Reid; it takes me a minute to calculate when it could have shown up. There wasn’t anything when I came upstairs last night, so he would have had to have written it while he waited on the deck (before heading up to have sex with me), in bed while I slept (after having sex with me), or back in his own room (again, after having had sex with me).

My finger hovers over the unopened message. What does it say that Reid still wrote Catherine after deciding to or actually sleeping with me? The point was to get him to like Cat more than Daisy, so am I happy he possibly wrote fake me while sex-drunk naked real me was sleeping in the same house? Maybe the same bed?

But did he write Daisy, too?

Straightening, I stop the mental spiral. Reid isn’t a player. At all.

Still, knowing this about him doesn’t really make me feel any better; he still slept with me and then left to go write another woman. The fact that I’m upset only compounds the knowledge that this whole alter ego thing is