“I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry?” I breathe out. “For wh—”
And that’s when his body wrenches with a spasm, orgasm spilling into the condom.
11
ROMAN
I cannot look at Lilly.
Can’t be around her after I humiliated myself, this entire week a practice in circumvention and evasion.
She comes into my house, I go out of it.
I even catch a whiff of her presence or impending arrival, I pack up my shit and scram.
I came in under a minute.
Show me a guy in his twenties who can hold his head up and look a girl square in the eye after he comes inside her after thirty seconds, and I will bow down to him.
Metaphors for pumping and dumping flow through my brain, even as I do my damnedest to concentrate on my engineering project. It’s no use.
Pump and dump.
Three-pump chump.
Single-barrel action.
Tossing my mechanical pencil onto the desk, I stare out the window into the backyard. There’s an alley at the very end of the property where the garbage cans are stored and get picked up on Mondays, and I watch as a woman lifts the lid on the red recycling canister and tosses in a bag. I decide to make my way to the living room.
“Roman, it’s no big deal…” Lilly reached for me as I rolled away from her, fingers grazing my backside as I stood and grappled for my underwear. I couldn’t look at her then either, humiliation seeping through my body as quickly as the orgasm did. “Maybe if we had a vibrator or something so I could…you know…”
I lay in bed next to her that entire night—through the night until the sun came up and she slowly came awake. I pretended to sleep when she sat up and glanced at me over her shoulder, watching me far too long, waiting for me to stir or say something.
I didn’t.
I squeezed my eyes shut and did my best to control my breathing, not wanting my chest to constrict, giving myself away.
Waited until she’d risen and gotten herself dressed then tiptoed out of the room, but not before leaning over to my side of the bed and planting a kiss on the side of my neck, lips warm.
So kind and caring.
I lay there like a coward.
How the hell do I fix this?
It’s been four days.
Four days of avoiding her. Four days of thinking about her. Four days of remembering her body, naked. The sounds she made, the faces she made, the way she smelled.
I couldn’t make her come.
There is no one I can talk to about this without sounding like a twat, a British word I keep hearing Jack use to describe his old friends on the rugby team.
Perhaps I should talk to him about it? Get some advice on how to get a woman excited?
Just kidding, he seems like the kind of guy who was born into this world knowing how to have sex with a female and exceling at it from day one.
Unlike myself.
Pump and dump—literally.
Honestly, I came in under a minute—I should be drawn and quartered or publicly called out.
How the hell am I going to see Lilly again without sinking into a hole in the ground?
As if on cue, my roommate walks into the living room carrying a bag of potato chips and a soda, plopping down onto the opposite side of the couch, immediately ripping into the bag.
Pops a chip in his mouth and chews. “What are we watching, mate?”
Nothing. I was watching nothing because I cannot concentrate.
“Erm, nothing really.” I toss him the remote and he catches it on the fly, instantly flipping through the channels before clicking open the app and scrolling through those shows.
He settles on an action film about the end of the earth where only one man can save it from destruction.
Jack chomps on a chip, cracks open the pop, and slurps off the top. Eventually, after lots of chewing and slurping, he glances over at me.
“What?” He leans forward, setting the pop can on the coffee table, licking the chip salt off his fingers. “Something on your mind? You look ill.”
How can he tell something is wrong just by glancing at me for a few seconds? Do I look that sick?
Because I am; I want to vomit at the thought of Lilly out there, thinking I’m a premature ejaculator when I’m not. I was nervous and excited and it felt so fucking great. Amazing, like nothing I’d ever felt before.
“Nothing is on my mind,” I lie.
“Bollocks,” Jack argues, putting the chips on the couch beside him and crossing his arms. “You’ve got something on your mind. What is it?”
Honestly…
I barely know the guy; I’m not going to spill my guts and tell him I spilled my load within one minute when fucking his girlfriend’s best friend.
Not happening.
“Does this have anything to do with Lilly?”
I raise my head a bit too fast, his keen eyes sparkling.