She pulled at his shirt buttons and he made no complaint when a few of them ripped, fumbling with the straps of her dress. She sat back and peeled the whole thing over her head with an impatient growl he might have mistaken for primordial arousal and reached for him again. He grabbed her neck and started pushing her down, but she strained against the order and brought her mouth to his jaw instead.
He had a boring face. Symmetrical. Blue eyes, equal distance from his straight nose, blond hair – a propaganda poster for 1950s true-blue Aussie masculinity. But the pressure between her legs, and the angry, almost violent way he was teasing her nipples was making up for it.
‘Birth control?’ he asked in between kisses.
She thought about lying like she usually did. Challenge 11 (Slip, Slop, Slap) was about protection, but when she’d come up with it at eleven years old, she wasn’t really thinking about condoms. Now it had become a bit of a game – lie about birth control, see what his reaction is. Does he risk it (idiot), does he leave (dickhead), does he have a condom in his wallet (serial cheater or actually under the age of eighteen), or does he ... stay?
‘Implant,’ she said truthfully.
‘Cool.’ He reached for his wallet anyway, ripping open a silver packet with his teeth (serial cheater). ‘Just to be safe.’
She heard the truth.I’m not going to have you ruin my marriage by having the nerve to get knocked up!
She sat back on his thighs, resisting the impatient sigh burning in her sinuses like a sneeze while he slid on the condom. The furrow of his ordinary eyebrows and every other lacklustre detail of his plain face as he hyper-focused on his own penis were sobering her up.
He started to say something, but as soon as her lips touched latex he stopped. Mission accomplished. But she didn’t miss the cloud of regret in his eyes that he’d come up with the fabulous idea of protectionbeforethis moment.
Nella was doing a half-arsed job of it, but despite the amount of alcohol he’d consumed, she was bringing him shockingly close to the edge. She moved away, but he pleaded for more. Honestly, she wasn’t sure if she could be bothered. Everything about him was making a quickie seem like the best-case scenario.
But shit, she wasn’t giving it away for free.
He seemed to register her frustration. He unclasped her bra in a more practised fashion than the way he’d handled the dress and fondled her in a way that reminded her of her annual breast check.
She brought his hand further down, past her navel and to the spot that was burning about as hot as a birthday candle, but still, she wantedsomething.Feeling about as turned on as a broken toaster plugged into a faulty outlet, her mouth was back on latex when the sound of a key rattled in her apartment door.
2
Jett
Jett tried four keys before realising the door was already unlocked. The claws of fear that had been scraping his throat for six months finally tore through: Antonella Barbarani had a death wish.
He shoved the (futile) heavy security door open with his shoulder, trying not to remember the last time he’d charged through a door to save her, refusing instructions to wait in the car where he belonged.Thatdoor had been locked, though. There was a good chance Nella wasn’t even home and as afuck youto the rest of her family she had left the shared Perth apartment open for any crazy Goldilocks to waltz in and feast on the Barbarani wine.
Or burn it to the ground.
Heart pounding more than he would ever admit to anyone, he prepared his rebuttal like a Year Eight debate team champion for the off-chance she was here and safe and about to throw a statue at him for ‘breaking in’.
(Unlocked. The door was unlocked. That’s your line of defence.)
Jett had learnt the hard way, fifteen years ago, that keeping up with Nella in a conversation required more than his incomplete high school transcript. After ten years as a lawyer, her tongue was decidedly lethal, but it had already been knife-sharp the day he’d met her. He’d been twenty-four but she’d made him feel about twelve as he took her in, tanned arm resting against the railing of the Barbarani mansion’s third floor balcony, lollipop in her mouth and winged eyeliner framing her hazel eyes. She was eighteen.
Since that day, he’d tried hard to hate her. But when that failed, he’d gone for mild indifference. Fifteen years on, friendship was the tenuous island he’d settled on.
Jett’s heightened senses noted the stale smell of the apartment – old cheese mixed with some sort of Chinese takeaway sauce. But despite that, it was impossible not to notice the rose musk and vanilla scent that had faded from the passenger seat of his car over the past six months. Which he would ignore. Easily. He tried to focus instead on the sound of SZA warbling faintly in the background, but a muffled groan (not from SZA) made him freeze.
Danger. Compute. React. He was a programmed robot. A driverless car.
He spun, ready to rip an attacker off Nella or beat the shit out of an armed burglar trying to break into the wine behind the bulletproof-glass cabinet.
Program glitch.
Abort.
An almost-naked Nella was straddling what looked like the Aldi version of a long-haired Chris Hemsworth. They were on the couch Jett had heard her refer to multiple times as ‘cat-vomit yellow’, and this time it wasn’t a lollipop in her mouth.
‘What the fuck, man?’ Aldi-Chris saw him first and pushed Nella off, covering his manhood with one hand, raking his twisted jocks up with the other. Jett tried not to look directly at his cock but tried not to look directly at Nella either. He settled for staring at a faded brown stain on the white carpet beside an overturned takeaway coffee cup, and urged his brain to try to work out if it looked more like Tomaso’s nose or a hunch-backed seahorse, instead of focusing on what was happening in his periphery.
A bra clicked, a belt buckle snapped.
