“His ex meaning you?” I ask, eyes on the hollow of her throat.
“She thinks I’m scheming to get him back.”
That gets a small eyeroll, even as my stomach tightens.
“Apparently he complains about me a lot? Shit, they’re moving away from the wall,” she says, scrunching up her face. “Ugh.”
That means it’s working. Great. Soon the girlfriend whose name I don’t care about will be gone and Meckler will be on his knees and Kat will have her revenge and that will be mission accomplished and we can be done with this weird fucking charade. Finito, The End, That’s All, Folks, and good because it’s not like cherry kisses and poolside cuddling was going to work out anyway.
Not when she’s always looking for him. Not when the moment we’re alone, she starts asking whether I have nightmares. Not when we only like each other for the purposes of the mission.
Kat sighs and plunks the glass down on the table. Through the wall, the voices fade a little.
And then I get a brilliant idea.
“Want to make them even more jealous?” I ask, voice low so they can’t hear it.
“What, by knocking on their door and then making out when they open it?”
“Have some subtlety,” I tease her, and she rolls her eyes at me. Smiling, though. “Like this.”
I reach a hand out to the headboard and shove, hard as I can. It knocks into the wall with a loud, dull thunk that’s definitely audible from the other side.
Kat frowns, her arms folded over her chest.
“Okay, how is that—” she starts, and then stops. “Oh.”
I do it again, working into a slow rhythm. Every inch of Kat’s skin that I can see turns dull pink under her gold.
“I see,” she says, after a moment. She takes a deep breath, looks at me like she’s thinking something.
“Yeah?”
“You can’t just have headboard slamming,” she says, voice quiet. The light’s low in here—the two bedside lamps, nothing else—but I’d swear she’s blushing harder. “I mean. That’s not…”
I lift one eyebrow and hit the headboard into the wall again.
“Satisfying?”
“Everything,” she says.
“How ungentlemanly of me,” I say, and I stop banging the headboard. “You’re right, it’ll sound better if there’s some foreplay.”
“Right,” she says, and she nods tensely, not quite looking at me. “We should probably, like, rustle the sheets some first—”
“How loud can you moan?”
Kat closes her eyes and scrunches up her face, and I swear I can see her fight with herself: the part of her that doesn’t want to make loud sex noises versus the part of her who suggested this in the first place.
Finally she takes a deep breath.
“Ohhhh,” she shouts. It sounds like she’s at a sporting event, booing the opposing team.
“Nevermind,” I tell her, leaning back on my hands. “We’re fucked. They’re gonna think we’re over here watching baseball.”
“I’m not good at sex noises, okay?” she hisses.
Embarrassing, how that phrase makes my cock stir.