One Night Stand (31 page)
Authors: Julie Cohen
‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘What are we going to do about it?’
‘Ignore it?’ I said hopefully.
‘I don’t think that’s going to work.’
I considered him. He was wearing his glasses and a Dinosaur Jr. T-shirt that he’d had in university and which was nearly threadbare from so much washing. I wanted him more than I’d ever wanted any chocolate in my life.
‘No, you’re right, it isn’t,’ I said.
Hugh nodded. ‘Want to come in?’
I followed him inside his house and into the kitchen. I didn’t even look for the cake. Hugh sat down and I sat across from him.
‘You were right when you said I was jealous of George,’ he said. ‘But you were wrong when you said that jealousy was the reason I wanted to sleep with you. I’ve been attracted to you for a while.’
‘Really?’
He smiled at how incredulous I sounded. ‘I’m not bad at keeping secrets,’ he said.
‘You really kept that one.’
He shrugged. ‘I never thought there was any point in letting you know. You never seemed interested.’
I mulled that one over.
‘I’ve got something to admit, too. I was jealous of your blonde.’
‘That, I knew already.’
He sounded so smug that I couldn’t help bristling. ‘Oh yeah? How?’
‘Pregnant women aren’t so good at lurking in shadows.’
‘Damn.’ Heat flushed my face.
‘I was flattered. Once I stopped being angry.’
‘So what are we going to do?’
‘What do you want to do?’ he asked gently.
I thought about it, and decided that, on balance, the truth was a wiser path at this point.
‘I want to drag you upstairs and shag you senseless. Or better yet, shag you senseless here on the kitchen table, if I could be certain it wouldn’t shatter under my weight.’
Hugh laughed.
‘So it’s more than a one-night stand after all,’ he said.
‘It was really the afternoon. But yes, it’s more than that.’
After the uncontrollable passion we’d had last time, I sort of expected Hugh to take up my offer of shagging him senseless there and then, as quickly as possible. Instead he leaned his elbows on the table and looked steadily and thoughtfully into my face.
‘But you’re still pregnant by another man. That hasn’t changed.’
‘No. But George hasn’t made any signs of appearing.’
‘Sleeping with you doesn’t make your baby mine.’
I frowned. ‘I never said I expected you to be the baby’s father, Hugh.’
He shook his head. ‘No. You haven’t.’
He was still looking at me, making no move towards me, as if he were trying to read something in my face, though I couldn’t tell what.
Then he stood up and held out his hand to me, without taking his gaze from my eyes. I went to him and laced my fingers with his. I stood on tiptoe and I kissed him.
It was the first time I’d kissed him not half-asleep, not overcome with frantic lust. The first time from a cold start. It was warm and tender and deeply sexy. It tasted of everything that was sweet about Hugh.
When it was finished we didn’t rip each other’s clothes off, though I knew that was coming. We wrapped our arms around each other and stood there in the kitchen holding each other tight.
‘Your friendship is too important for me to lose,’ I told him. ‘These past few days of not speaking to each other have been horrible. I even went to Mr Tasty’s on my own.’ I shuddered.
‘So we’re friends?’
For a moment I worried, because he’d put that as a question, as if our friendship were in doubt, but when I saw his face I knew I needn’t have worried. It was full of affection as ever.
‘Best friends,’ I said.
‘Friends who have sex with each other.’
‘Sex friends,’ I agreed.
‘Friends who have lots and lots of sex with each other.’
‘Oh, yes.’
And that was when I decided that we’d talked quite enough and it was time to put the sex part of being sex friends into practice. Knowing how rubbish I was at subtle seduction, I unlaced my hands from Hugh’s and let one cup his perfect bottom through his jeans, and let the other creep round to grasp his perfect erection, which rapidly went from half-mast to full mast in my hand.
‘Upstairs or the kitchen table?’ I asked.
‘Let’s leave the kitchen table for after you’ve had the baby.’ Hugh pulled me rapidly to the stairs. ‘Likewise carrying you up these, I think.’
I was picturing another frantic stripping episode. But when we got to his bedroom, Hugh took off his glasses and we just stood there for a minute, looking at each other and smiling.
‘This should feel weirder than it does,’ I said. ‘I should feel as if I’m about to have sex with my brother. But I don’t.’
‘That’s reassuring, I think.’ Hugh pulled my T-shirt over my head. Underneath I was wearing maternity jeans, the really unflattering kind that had elastic more or less all the way up to my armpits. ‘I’m glad you’ve set me a challenge here.’
I started giggling as Hugh pretended to try various ways of peeling the elasticised jeans from my body. And then he started tickling. After seven years of nonsexual wrestling with me on couches and floors he knew all of my ticklish bits and, of course, I knew his. By the time we had finished we were both lying on the bed, panting and laughing, me in my knickers and bra and him in his boxer shorts, and it flashed through my mind that he’d somehow managed to undress me without my feeling self-conscious about my pregnant body at all.
Then he undid my bra and began kissing my breasts and my panting was with pleasure rather than with laughter.
‘Thank you, Tit Fairy,’ I gasped.
Hugh looked up from my right breast, his eyebrows raised.
‘Are you calling me a Tit Fairy, or is this your normal prayer during foreplay?’
‘The Tit Fairy is who visits you when you get pregnant,’ I explained. ‘Not only have I gone from 34B to 36D, but I have about a zillion more nerve endings in there.’
Hugh was delighted. ‘Really? So it feels even better when, for example, I do this?’
He ran his thumb over my nipple in thrilling circles and I moaned, ‘Yes.’
‘What about this?’ He licked it and then blew on it, hot liquid and cold all at once.
‘Definitely.’
‘And this?’
He did something so spectacular that I couldn’t even define what it was, just buried my fingers in his hair and held him there so he could do it again and again and again.
‘My God, Hugh,’ I squeaked.
He dropped a kiss on the tip of each of my breasts and propped himself up on his elbows next to me. His lips were moist and his face was bright and boyish.
‘Or you know what we could do,’ he said, as if we were in the middle of a completely different, non-breast-related conversation. ‘We could get married.’
Languishing in ecstasy as I was, it took a moment for me to hear what he’d said, and another for me to understand the words.
I sat up. ‘What?’
‘We could move in together, the baby would have a father; it might be a good idea.’
His voice was cheerful and casual, as if he were talking about the weather or a recipe for Victoria sponge.
I laughed. ‘You’re joking. That’s ridiculous.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well, aside from the fact that this baby isn’t yours and that you’ve sworn up and down that you’ll never get married, don’t you think marriage would put a serious dent in your social life? The blondes and such?’
He shrugged and began tracing around one of my breasts with a finger again. ‘Ah, well, there are more important things than blondes.’
His finger went down the top slope of my breast, around the nipple and over the top, zigzagging down the underside, then around the curve back up to the top again. It was very distracting, to me, and, apparently, to him, because he was intently following his finger with his eyes.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s very kind of you to offer to make me an honest woman, but it’s not necessary.’
‘Are you sure?’
I remembered his caution after we’d slept together that first time. This was typical Hugh kindness, and the best apology I could have. I leaned over and kissed him.
‘You can stop it with the knight-in-shining-armour rescue, Hugh. You’re a nice guy, the best guy I know, and you’ve just proved it. But you don’t want to marry me, and I don’t want to marry you. That’s all there is to it.’
He met my gaze briefly and there was a strong emotion on his face, evidently relief that I hadn’t taken him up on what he’d felt obligated to offer.
He looked as if he wanted to insist further, so I wriggled closer to him, wrapped my arms and legs around him, and pulled him down to me.
‘Now didn’t we mention something about shagging each other senseless?’ I murmured in his ear as I nibbled on it.
‘We did.’ He gave me a smile that was pure Hugh, and proceeded to do just that.
30
The next ten days passed in a frenzy of work and a cloud of bliss.
Jerry got one of Maud’s granddaughters to take over my shifts at the pub and I spent every waking minute writing
Throbbing Member
. That is, every minute that I wasn’t spending making love with Hugh.
Throbbing Member
. That is, every minute that I wasn’t spending making love with Hugh.
Lucy saved the Chancellor from the Minister’s nefarious plottings to destroy his career and his life, by a clever trick involving a cleaner’s uniform, a bottle of Plymouth Gin, and an iPod. Hugh and I lounged in bed on Sunday morning, arguing what was better, the cryptic crossword or the Sudoku, then getting distracted by the baby doing somersaults. Then getting distracted by each other.
Lucy cornered the Chancellor in a stationery cupboard, ripped off both their clothes, and at the climactic moment, confessed her feelings for him. Hugh and I had an oral sex competition, decided it was a tie, and decided we’d make it the best out of three. Or four. Or a dozen.
Lucy wallowed in the depths of despair after the Chancellor dumped her brutally, only to discover that he’d done it because he feared for her life. I wrote about a car chase, a thrilling brief encounter in a taxi, and a death-defying episode on the London Eye where it looked as if the Minister might triumph at last. And then I sneaked into Hugh’s house while he was at work and greeted him with a silk blindfold and an assortment of feathers.
Writing a book, when it is going well, is like falling in love. Every piece seemed to fall together. There were considerably fewer orgies than my readers were used to, but Lucy and the Chancellor had this chemistry that swept me up so that I typed and typed and still couldn’t get the words down quickly enough.
I even cried when I was writing the ending, something I’d never done before. Okay, so these days I cried at nappy advertisements, but I felt as if there were something special about how the Chancellor admitted his feelings for Lucy. I felt as if it were real.
I typed ‘The End’ twelve hours before my deadline. I did a lightning-fast edit, printed it off, and sent it to Bryce and my editor Duane before I could think twice, before I fell out of love with the story. And then Hugh made the biggest raspberry cheesecake I had ever seen and we brought it to the Mouse and Duck and everyone celebrated. Even the baby, who kicked like mad after I ate so much sugar.
I was incredibly happy.
And then I hit my third trimester, and things started getting tricky.
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