Page 41 of The Lipstick Flip

A satisfied sound came in answer.

I laughed. “So, what’s the deal here? Normally…” But suddenly it felt like a weird road to go down. Normally we’d cuddle. But. “I guess I’ve never done this before.”

“Well, you get an A-plus,” Noah said with a sleepy smile, eyes still closed. “Thank you, Howie. I really needed that.”

“Uh, yeah.” And then, because I’m such a fucking charmer, “Thank you, too.”

His smile grew. His eyes flicked open to amused slits. “Are you okay?”

It was such a strange question, mostly because Noah was the one who sounded like he’d died mid-nut. I mean, my God, I’d forgotten he made noises like that.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Oh my God. Do you have come in your hair?”

“It’s been a long time, thanks very much. You should take it as a fucking compliment.”

Noah’s smile was sleepy, but serious too. “You’d tell me if you weren’t okay, right? You’d tell me if I made you feel weird?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. I just…don’t want to mess anything up.”

And he didn’t say again. But we both heard it.

“I had fun,” I said. “Did you have fun?”

He nodded against the pillows.

“Then everything’s okay.”

“Good.” He reached for the phone. “Goodnight, Howie.”

I hesitated. Because it seemed like there was something else I was supposed to say.

But the call had already ended, and the screen was dark when I finally said, “Night.”

13

The next day was…normal. My daily call to the hospital. Texts from Noah, but about plans for Christmas Eve, about his family driving him crazy, about things we needed to buy for the house. And the day after that was normal too. And finally I realized everything was normal, because whatever that had been, it had been normal. Just something a couple of guys did when they were horned up and needed to blow a load. Everything was so fucking normal that I was jacking off twice a day like I was going to pull my cock off. To Noah.

And the next time I saw Noah, he seemed normal too. He showed up at the house with another unicorn latte as I was having one more fucking go at the pocket doors. He’d gotten a haircut, and he’d swapped out the choker for a thin platinum chain that looked like starlight against his pale skin, and there was a different dangly earring that looked like a leaf. It was an elf hat today, and the tips of his ears were red. When he handed me the coffee, I was ready: if he moved in for a kiss, if he wanted a peck on the cheek. But he just kept moving into the house, talking about getting a velvet rope to keep people from touching his tree, and I had to tell him this wasn’t the fucking White House.

So, the thing was, I couldn’t not notice his ass. I mean, he wore those damn leggings. And the oversized hoodie didn’t help because while yes, it fell past his hips, it only drew more attention—every time he bent or turned, every time the hoodie rode up, I was confronted with Noah’s grade-fucking-A bubble butt.

When I caught myself looking, I dragged my gaze away. And it seemed like that was working. For a while. Until I realized that when I wasn’t looking at his ass, I was staring at the smooth line of his neck, or the curve of his jaw, or those glossy pink lips. And I couldn’t help the fact that I knew what he looked like with a dick in his mouth. I knew what those lips looked like—puffy, raw, gorgeous—after he’d been polishing a pole. My pole. Worshipping it.

And then we were up to three times a day, me pounding my meat in the downstairs bathroom and cleaning up frantically with toilet paper like I was thirteen years old and thought I’d just discovered the secrets of the fucking universe.

But even with all that jacking off, I managed to get some work done. The house was starting to come together. Joe had finished the last of the carpentry work. The toilets and sinks and fixtures were all in place. The lights were mounted, and now when I came home at night, I walked into that warm glow. Like it wasn’t just a house anymore. Like it was turning into a home.

And some of that, too, had to do with the fact that the place wasn’t full of half-sheets of drywall and buckets of mudding compound, and instead, piece by piece, Noah was furnishing it. A sofa that I knew had come from his condo—because he made me and Joe pick it up and bring it over to the house. A chaise that he’d had in storage since before we were married. A fucking upright piano.

Stuff for the walls, too. Prints and photos and even some actual paintings—nothing personal, but not the junk you saw in some display homes, like somebody had just run to TJ Maxx. I thought some of the paintings looked familiar; there had been a time when Noah liked to go to markets on the weekend, and he’d gone through a phase of collecting work by local artists. But I wasn’t sure, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask him.

I was getting back from a day of errands—dropping off a load at the dump, followed by trying to figure out why the toilet, which we’d just fucking installed, was already leaking around the base, followed by a fun little trip to city hall so I could argue with the inspector about the fact that yeah, he actually had come and inspected the changes to the house, and yeah, they actually had been done by licensed contractors, and yeah, I had the fucking paperwork to prove it. Not that it didn’t still take almost two hours.

Which was why I didn’t realize two things until I was pulling into the driveway: