I’m gone,” he says, then tips his head to Holden and Grant, who are drinking beers at the bar. Holden is chatting with a woman in a peach dress, Grant with a bearded dude.
“Yeah, they look super focused on their mission to keep me in line,” I tease.
“They’re focused enough. Nine more days till spring training. You can do it. And then you’ll behave during spring training because you’ll be busy all the time.”
“I’ve so got this. And you go on your honeymoon. Worship your wife. Fuck your brains out. Drink piña coladas. I will be fine,” I tell him, and it feels mostly true.
Until I get in the elevator alone with Nadia at the end of the evening.
11
Nadia
I’m not into dick pics.
That’s not because I’m a prude. And it’s not because I still carry my V card. It’s because when I watch porn—and I do watch it, thank you very much, incognito mode—I’m not simply interested in the dick.
I want to know what the man does with it. How it makes the woman feel. But also how she appears to feel when he’s doing other things for her. Going down on her, kissing her breasts, worshipping her body.
So why does my brain keep planting images of what Crosby’s dick might look like?
Not helpful.
As in it’s not helpful to staying plus-one-ers.
Especially since he’s on a dating diet.
Maybe I need to reassure him that I’m not some kind of perv who’s dying for him to whip out his schlong for the camera.
That I’m his friend. That I support his anti-dating quest.
As the elevator shoots us up to my floor, since I booked a room for the night, I set my hand on his arm. “I just want you to know, as we embark on plus-oneing with the best man, that I will behave like your friend as we planned. There will be no deliberate or even accidental taking of dick pics, and no deliberate or even accidental asking for them. And I would never attempt to sell them.”
He wipes a hand across his forehead in a whew gesture.
“Because I live by the belief that friends shouldn’t ask friends for dick pics. And they shouldn’t take them either,” I say, raising my finger to make a point.
He laughs. “I do believe I’ve seen that on a bumper sticker somewhere. Along with Friends don’t ask friends to bang and Friends don’t ask friends for boob shots,” he says as the elevator stops at my floor. We step out, and as we walk down the hall, he drapes an arm around me, pals-style. “Also, told you I’d find out if you said ‘dick.’ I’m pretty confident I can get you to say ‘fuck’ now.”
I fling my hand across my mouth, Bette-Boop-style, playing it up. “Oops! Did I say . . .” I take my time, making him wait for it, before I finish with “Dick?”
He licks his lips and growls sexily. “Better than ‘eggplant.’ Soon you’ll be saying ‘cock.’”
I have nothing against cock.
Hell, I have nothing at all against cocks.
Someday I’d like to enjoy a cock against me.
But since I don’t say those words in the boardroom, and since I haven’t had the chance to say them in the bedroom, how it feels on my tongue is truly virgin territory.
“You never know,” I say with a flirty shrug. “For now, be happy I said ‘dick,’ since it’s way better than ‘wiener pic.’”
“How about ‘shaft shot’?”
“Oh, that’s good. But what about . . . ‘member pic’?”
He taps his chin, murmuring his approval. “I like that because it’s so euphemistic, the perfect amount of innuendo.”
“‘Member pic’ it is,” I declare, banging an imaginary gavel.
“You can accidentally ask me to show you a member pic anytime,” he says with a laugh, then the laughter fades as I dip my hand into my clutch purse, fishing out the key card when we reach my door.
He meets my gaze. His irises are rich with possibilities. “You know, if this were Plus-Oneing with the Best Man, this would be the scene where he accidentally shows her a member pic, they double over in laughter, she stumbles forward, and he catches her,” he says.
The movie reel of that moment unspools before my eyes.
And I like it.
I like it a lot.
Heat flares through me, a match striking. “I wonder what that would look like. The stumbling part.”
“And the catching part,” he adds.
“And whatever comes next,” I say in a softer voice.
Like we’re both tempting fate.
Testing possibilities.
“In a plus-one situation, it’s important to