Make Me Read Free

unawares ever again, and yet somehow I’ve already done just that.
    Brandon is on me before I’ve even worked up the wherewithal to turn around. And he doesn’t do anything half-hearted, either, like pat me on the arm or offer me an awkward smile. He actually loops one arm around my shoulders from behind, in a way that’s so reminiscent of The Thing We Did I almost gasp. It’s like having a bucket of cold water dumped over my head – if a dumped bucket of cold water was one of my kinks, and having it done left my vagina in a quivering state of arousal.
    ‘I can’t believe you came,’ Brandon says, but I understand where he’s coming from. I can’t believe it, either. I spent all day yesterday thinking about what a bad idea this was, and now I’m here I know one thing with a deathly certainty: it’s a hundred times worse than my wildest imaginings. My entire body has clenched so hard I can’t even turn around and greet him properly, and the feeling gets stronger when he finally makes his way to my front.
    He looks exactly as I remember, right down to the backwards baseball cap and the hunched shoulders and, oh, that kinking-sideways grin. ‘It’s like you’re a robot from the future who’s trying to simulate a smile,’ I used to tell him.
    Back when I dared to do things like that.
    Now I just stand here and stare at his stupidly handsome face, head full of ridiculous thoughts like:
Were his arms really that big before?
And,
Oh Lord, you could cut your finger on that jawline of his.
    Because you could, you really could. Up this close he’s almost unbearably handsome, and apparently I’m not responding to that very well. The clenched feeling has gone, but it’s been replaced by a prickling under my arms and a heavy sensation low down in my gut, like maybe he punched me when I wasn’t looking.
    I want to double over, quick, before this staring contest gets any weirder.
    ‘It’s totally awesome to see you,’ he says, but as he does so he puts both hands in his pockets. Those shoulders bunch together even more tightly, and even if I didn’t know him I’d understand what that means.
    It isn’t totally awesome to see me, at all. I’m a relic of his odd threesome-having past, thrown up on the beach of this bar. This place that now looks more and more like a cocoon they’ve both wrapped themselves in so that they don’t have to face the kind of people they once were.
    Brandon – goofy and too sweet. Tyler … oh God, Tyler.
    I’m wrong, I’m wrong about Tyler. He
can
face himself.
    When he emerges from behind the staff door he looks so eminently confident in who he is, so flawless and be-suited, that for a moment I can’t look directly at him. I have to gaze somewhere just north of his right shoulder and hope for the best.
    ‘Here she is,’ he says, and I find myself wondering: Was his voice like this before? And if it was, how on earth did I bear it on a daily basis? It just pours out of his mouth like melting chocolate, and before I know where I am the stuff is up to my inner thighs.
    I’m not going to come out of this alive, I know.
    ‘God, you look good,’ he tells me, as he glides around the end of the bar, arms outstretched. And then I realise – he’s not signalling to some imaginary plane that’s flying in, he’s moving towards me like that because he actually expects me to hug him. Front to front, too, and not just the little half-cocked one-armed thing Brandon attempted.
    I can’t
, I think,
I can’t
, but by the time I’ve finished resisting in my head I’ve been engulfed. The scent from the suit jacket surrounds me, deeply familiar and almost too much to bear, but it’s the feel of his body that really pushes me over the edge. The shirt he’s wearing is strangely flimsy, and I swear I feel the burr of his chest hair against my cheek. I feel his heavy flesh pushing against various pressure points on my body: the tips of my tits, suddenly sensitive; my lips, which I didn’t