Page 97 of Down Bad

“Can I?” I ask—or rather moan, as the tips of his fingers start to tease along my crack, making my insides twist apart with eager yearning for him to be inside me again.

It’s immeasurable.

How badly I want him no matter what we’re doing.

How deeply I crave his hands all over me.

His whole essence inside of me.

Consuming me in every way a person can be consumed.

“Can you what?” he asks.

“Stay?”

His hands stop, cupping my cheeks.

Thumbs tracing my crack.

The thought sitting inside him.

Just say yes, I would beg.

But right then, his phone goes off, a text. I feel his left hand slip off of my body as he reaches for it.

Then he mumbles, “Fuck.”

I lift my head. “What is it?”

“Realtor.” He sighs. “Got a fucking showing in thirty.”

—20—

Diego

If that didn’t just blow the lid right off.

“Where’s the ladder? We need to dust the ceiling fans!” shouts Wyatt from the living room.

I’m putting shit away in the kitchen. “They look at the fans?”

“They most certainly look at the fans!”

Minutes later, he’s way up on a ladder with my tío’s handheld vacuum he somehow knew was kept in the coat closet while I’m pretending to give a fuck about curtains. “Partway open,” he tells me from the top of the ladder, then changes his mind, “That one closed, and that one open. All the way. Catches the back garden the best in the evening sun.”

I pause. “There’s a back garden?”

He sighs. “Do you even live in the house you’re living in? Yes, there’s a—Have you seriously not been in the backyard?”

My mind flashes instantly to the night I snuck up to the fence and caught him on the phone with his sister.

“I’ll check the bathroom,” I decide, leaving the curtains alone.

Strangely, we circle back to the bedroom at the same time. We stare at the bed. Not sure if Wyatt’s having the same thoughts I’m having. That some snooty-ass family is about to sniff around here where we’ve done our monkey business more than once.

“Do you have any air freshener?” he asks.

I eye him. “Sure. I’ve got eighty different scents in the closet, right next to a black light wand our potential buyers can use to inspect the sheets.”