And then the fourth chapter, the window cleaning chapter… where I’m afraid of heights and have to clean the windows with my eyes shut while he fucks me against them is crazy. And I tell him I’m afraid of heights, so he carries me to bed and holds me and coos to settle me and that turns into him offering to fix my problems for me.
God, this story is filthy. Every bit of it. And I’m ridiculous.
Clearly, three years without sex is my problem. Seeing my sexy grouch of a boss in his underwear didn’t help. It’ll be the third anniversary of Joshua’s death this Sunday. Thinking of it makes my chest want to cave in, makes the pain want to come back at full potency. I push it away and try to work on another story. One without faces, ones that aren’t named after me and the alphahole boss I’m stuck having as a roommate, but as the story materializes in my mind, the way I figured out it would do when I first wrote that first paid story for the twenty-five dollars the guy paid, the hero in this new story looks, too, just like Austin Carmichael.
Tall, blue-eyed, muscled and California-tanned Austin Carmichael.
I had a serious crush on Aiden, but I never wrote sexy stories about him.
Damn it! I need help.
I slip out of my room to go to the bathroom and catch a perfect view of the back of Austin doing pull-ups with a contraption that hangs over the door frame of the closet in the master bedroom.
The way his back muscles move with every pull. The look of his hands holding on. The pronounced veins in his forearms. His sexy lower back. The muscles in his legs.
It’s like I’m frozen to the spot for a minute. Superglued in place.
He stops and drops to his feet and I quickly go into the bathroom and shut the door, eyes feeling like they’re going to pop out of the sockets. That is some eye candy right there.
I shake it off.
16
Austin
I haven’t joined a local gym yet, so after some pushups, pull-ups, and chin ups on the closet doorframe, I shower and warm up the food she made for me. She made me a mountain of pasta with shrimp and vegetables in a garlic wine sauce. And it’s delicious.
The apartment is spotless. The master bedroom has been cleaned and dusted. My laundry is even done and put away. Neatly.
I’m kind of impressed. She’s either as efficient as Aiden said or she’s putting on a great show for her trial run. Either way, it’s good I don’t have to fire her tonight. I don’t have the energy.
After showering and eating, I pass out in bed without even getting under the blankets. I’m that exhausted.
***
I wake abruptly at twenty after four in the morning and my stomach is killing. Absolutely killing me.
I run for the bathroom and throw up. And then the explosive diarrhea hits. I have it so badly and for so long that I go through almost all the toilet paper in the bathroom. I’m not sure I’m done yet, and can’t find any more bathroom tissue in the cabinets so I haul up my track pants and, gut churning all the way, make my way down the hall and whip open the closed door on the main bathroom.
And here she is, sitting on the toilet, pajama pants around her ankles, sweat-drenched face sheet-white, and obviously suffering from the same affliction as me.
She shrieks.
I slam the door and turn away.
“Sorry!” I yell, still holding the doorknob with one hand, my gut with the other. “There’s no toilet paper in my bathroom and I’m… I’m sick.”
I hear shuffling and then I back up because the door opens enough for her to toss a four-pack into the hallway.
I squat, grab it, and make a mad dash back to my own bathroom, racing the gurgling that tells me I’m about to erupt again.
This goes on until after six o’clock in the morning before I’m back in my bed, curled into a ball, feeling like death.
So much for that awesome dinner I ate. If I didn’t see her in the same state as me, I’d have thought she poisoned me to get revenge.
At least it’s the weekend. I don’t have to go to work. I was planning to, but I don’t technically have to.
At six forty in the morning with my gut raw, a sore ass, and feeling like I might finally be done, I decide to investigate the fridge for a sports drink and some pink gut remedy, which I know I saw in there.
I find her in the kitchen, chugging back some pink stuff herself.
“What the fuck did you feed us?” I growl.
She shakes her head and holds her stomach, not looking at me. “I don’t know.”