Taking a seat on the ground in front of the couch, Indy sinks into the sofa behind me, sitting on top of her crossed legs. Her hands find my shoulders, kneading and manipulating my sore muscles into relaxation. Instantly, I close my eyes from the sensation.
“This is your shooting arm?”
She takes her time on my right shoulder, thumbs pressing into the sore flesh. I can feel my face contort with pain, but it’s equaled out with pleasure.
“Yeah.”
“How’d it get so bad?”
“Repetition, I’d assume. I’m shooting a few hundred shots a day between scheduled practice and my own time on the court. That, and, sometimes I’m not given the same respect as other guys with protective calls, so I can get thrown around in games.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t have a championship or an MVP yet and I’m one of the smaller guys in the league. It’s all politics.”
“You’re 6’3”，” she laughs. “And it’s only a matter of time for the other things to come your way.”
I don’t respond, but also don’t miss the blind confidence she has in me.
Her latest read sits on the coffee table in front of me. As usual, it displays a shirtless man right there on the cover.
“What’s this one about?” I ask, holding it up.
“The female main character hooks up with her ex-boyfriend’s dad.”
“What the fuck?”
“Trust me. The little shit deserved it.”
I’m glad she’s behind me and can’t see the smile pulling at my lips. She’s fucking ridiculous sometimes and I kind of love it.
Her warm hands work into my skin, loosening my muscles. Her fingertips move over the tendons of my neck, creating slow circles before the edges of her nails lightly scratch against my hairline.
My head falls forward with a low moan.
“Does this feel good?”
“So good.”
So fucking good. Yes, my muscles feel loosened, but being touched by her feels borderline euphoric.
Indy’s voice is soft and a bit hoarse when she asks, “Do you want to come up here with me so I can get a better angle?”
It’s a bad idea. It’s a terrible fucking idea. It’s three in the morning, I’m half naked with a half-hard dick, and my stunning roommate is asking me to get on the couch with her.
“Yeah,” I rasp.
Standing, I stretch my neck, already feeling some of the tension dissolving. I know of another way to dissolve some tension that involves a soft, flat surface like this sofa, and a lot less clothes on us both. My body is too aware of the option and the awareness only heightens when I sit on the couch and Indy sandwiches her body behind mine.
Her long legs open around me and fuck if that doesn’t send an image straight to my lusting brain.
Digging the heels of her palms into my back, she whispers, soft and low, “Does this hurt?”
Moaning, I shake my head. “No. It feels so good, Blue.”
I can feel her breath on my neck, her scent on my skin. She’s almost holding me in this position, her chest to my back, her legs wrapped around me.
I haven’t been held in years.
“Did you do this for Alex?”
She pauses her movements.
I don’t know why I asked. Maybe because I wanted to hear that I’m special. Maybe I wanted to hear that she treats me differently than she did him.
Or maybe I need to hear that her attentive doting is nothing out of the ordinary.
“No. He got plenty of attention from other people. He didn’t need mine.”
With her legs slung around my hips, I find one of her thighs, pulling her leg into my lap, and slowly running my palm from her ankle to her knee.
Even down to her toes, this girl is pretty. Slender bones and soft skin.
Indy’s touch is no longer a massage but wandering caresses up and over the slopes of my shoulders. They’re careful and exploratory, roaming my body.
The apartment is dark. It’s the middle of the night. Her mouth is inches from mine.
“Do you think you’ll ever be able to love someone the way you loved him?”
“I don’t know,” she says with honesty for no one else to hear but her and me. “Right now, it feels like he took everything. Like I don’t have anything left to give someone else.”
I swallow, hating that answer.
“I know I need to move on,” she continues. “I know I joke around a lot, but I’m really messed up, Ryan. As if that wasn’t clear from the night I moved in.” Her light laugh rumbles against my back. “How can I go from being with someone for six years to jumping into something with someone else? It feels wrong.”
“He did,” I remind her.
“I know.” Her forehead falls to my shoulder. “It feels disloyal, as ridiculous as that sounds, but that’s how long I loved him for. I never imagined loving someone else. But at the same time, if I’m being honest, when I think about the time we had, the overall feeling I come away with is that he made me feel like I wasn’t enough yet too much all at the same time.”
I shake my head, inhaling through my nose because well…I hate this guy. Indy would never question how magnetic, how distracting she is if she saw herself the way everyone in her orbit sees her. The way I see her.
“You can’t stop being who you are because someone else thinks it’s too much, Ind. He can go find less.”
From the sounds of it, that’s exactly what he did. You don’t get much better than Indigo Ivers.
“Do you think I’m a trainwreck, Ryan?”
I huff a laugh. “You’re more like a cute little fender bender.”
Feeling her smile against my skin, I pull her other leg into my lap as Indy wraps her arms around my neck from behind.
“Do you think he loved you the right way, Blue?”
“I don’t know. He loved me loudly. I think the romantic in me thought that was the right way. The grand gestures. The big love confessions. He wasn’t afraid to touch me in public but being away from him for the first time in my life, I’m realizing there are a lot of ways in which I thought he was showing me love, but really he was just showing me off.”
Leaning back, I push her into the sofa, which only makes her body close around mine even more.
“I thought he loved me loudly, but when I found him with someone else, you were right when you said he practically screamed that he didn’t want me. That was the loudest he’s ever been.”
My breathing turns shallow and rushed with the knowledge of her proximity.
Turning, my lips almost graze hers with how close we are. I can feel the erratic beat of her heart thumping against my back, her breasts pressing against my bare skin.
I want to kiss her, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop.
She whispers, low enough that if I weren’t inches from her lips, I wouldn’t hear. “Sometimes, I think I just need to move on in a different way. In the only way I can.”
In a physical way.
She’s your sister’s best friend, and you couldn’t handle just one night even if she weren’t.
“Indy, it’s late.”
“Ryan—”
“I should go to bed.”