Chapter 5: She Belongs To My Rival And I've Been Jerking Off To Her Face For Months

Arc 2: My Rival's Girl

I'm not a good man.

I want to be upfront about that before any of this unravels. Good men don't spend twenty minutes in the shower with one hand braced against the tiles and the other wrapped around their cock, replaying the way a woman laughed at someone else's joke across a dinner table. Good men don't lie awake cataloguing the exact curve of someone's girlfriend's mouth or the way a particular dress sits on particular hips or the specific sound of a name said in a particular voice.

I do all of that. Regularly. Shamelessly.

Zara has been quietly dismantling me since the night Rafael introduced us eighteen months ago at his rooftop party. Red dress. Warm brown skin. A laugh that came from somewhere real, not performed, not polished. She shook my hand and her fingers were cool and her eyes held mine two seconds longer than necessary and I spent the entire cab ride home with my jaw tight and my thoughts somewhere they had absolutely no business being.

That was eighteen months ago.

I pour whiskey. I don't think about her.

The knock comes at eleven forty-seven.

Three raps. Firm and decided. No hesitation in them. I cross the room, open the door, and she's standing in the hallway in a thin silk wrap dress that the cold night air has pressed flat against every curve of her body, hair loose around her shoulders, cheeks flushed, and she's looking at me with the expression of a woman who argued with herself the entire drive over and finally, decisively, lost.

Or won. Still unclear.

"Mateo." Just my name. Quiet and slightly breathless, like she walked fast from the elevator.

My hand tightens on the door frame until my knuckles pull. "Rafael's in Thailand."

"I'm aware." Her chin lifts. "I know exactly where he is. I'm not here for Rafael."

Every muscle below my waist tightens at once.

"Zara..."

"Don't." She steps forward, close, too close, close enough that her perfume reaches me before she does, something warm and faintly sweet that I have completely against my will memorized over eighteen months of careful proximity. "Don't be the responsible one right now. I have had the worst night of my adult life and I drove thirty-five minutes to get here and I need you to let me in, Mateo. Please."

I should say no.

I should be measured. Decent. The kind of man who says go home, sleep on it, this is complicated and we both know it.

Instead I step back from the door without a single word.

She walks in.

Her arm grazes my chest as she passes and I feel that graze like a struck match, heat spreading outward from the contact point. I close the door. Press my back against it for exactly one second to collect myself. Then I turn around and she's in the middle of my living room, arms loosely crossed, the city lights through the floor-to-ceiling window casting everything in amber and shadow, and the silk dress is doing absolutely criminal things in that light.

I can see the outline of her thighs. The curve of her waist. The fact that she is not wearing much underneath that dress and the cold night air made that very clear the moment she stepped inside.

"He forgot our anniversary," she says, still not looking at me. Her voice is controlled. Barely. "Not in a busy-got-distracted way. In a kissed-my-forehead-and-caught-his-flight way. Like it was a random Friday." She pauses. "I sat in that apartment alone for four hours. And the whole time, the only person I kept thinking about was you."

The room gets very quiet.

She turns around.

"That's been the problem for a while now," she says. "Hasn't it?"

"You know it has." No point dressing it up.

"Say it properly." One step toward me. Then another. "I want to hear the actual words, Mateo. Just once."

My jaw works. "Every time you walk into a room, I have to make a deliberate decision not to reach for you. Every single time. Eighteen months of that. Every dinner. Every party. Every time you looked at me across a table and looked away a half second too slow."

Her lips part.

"Every time you laughed," I continue, because we're clearly doing this now and I'm done pretending otherwise. "Every time your dress shifted and I caught a glimpse of your collarbone. Every time I went home after seeing you and stood in a cold shower telling myself to get it together."

"Did it work?" she asks softly. "The cold showers?"

"What do you think?"

She looks down, just briefly, at the front of my trousers, where thinking about her for the last thirty seconds has made my current state entirely obvious, and when her eyes come back up they are dark and certain and done waiting.

"Show me," she says. "Everything you've been keeping to yourself. All of it. Right now."

I close the distance in three steps and grab her face and kiss her and she makes this sound against my mouth, desperate and relieved all at once, like she's been holding it specifically for this moment, and her fists twist into my shirt and she pushes up onto her toes to get closer and I walk her backward toward the wall because I need something solid behind her for what comes next.

She goes willingly.

More than willingly.

Her hands are already pulling my shirt loose from my waistband before her back even hits the wall, already working, already done with patience, and I think about eighteen months of careful distance and I think good riddance.

Arc 2: My Rival's Girl continues in Chapter 6...