The living room was dark and empty, except for me, sleepless on the couch, and the glow of the bathroom light spilling through the cracked-open door. I didn’t want to look—well, I did, but I knew I shouldn’t want to look. There he was, a big red stop sign with abs and a side tattoo, pulling his shirt off directly within eyeshot. On the list of things that should be off limits, your ex’s best friend who also happens to be your mutual roommate should probably fall pretty near the top. But, look, I can explain.
The five of us—my then-boyfriend, his best friend, and two of my best friends—had all moved into a four-bedroom apartment in Queens our senior year of college. Up until that point, the situationship with my now-ex was mostly just an on-and-off, unofficial thing. But somewhere between signing a lease and my fear of stepping into adulthood, I stumbled into a full-blown relationship with him that was built more on convenience and security than passion and compatibility. For a year, I did what I thought was the noble thing: not “splitting up the family,” aka not threatening our precious roommate dynamic by breaking up. I think we both saw our relationship as more of a responsibility than a romantic connection since we lived with three other people who not only counted on our friendship, but our rent. And if that sense of duty alone wasn’t enough of a libido killer, the fact that he was a controlling patronizer put the last nail in my headboard. Halfway into a two-year lease, I was bored, stuck, and sexually marooned.
In a sexless, metropolitan desert, there was only one oasis: the impossible possibility of my then-boyfriend’s best friend, aka our roommate Jake*. He was a quiet, stoic guy with tattoos hiding behind a wardrobe of black T-shirts, dark jeans, and boots. Over the course of our five-year friendship, he’d bloomed from a scrawny kid with a wallet chain into a buff, dry humored, gray-eyed man who dazzled the sexiest corners of my imagination. Bad timing kept us mutually friend-zoned, but from the moment we met there was an attraction neither of us could fully ignore. Nothing ever happened while my ex and I were together, but there was always a certain tension, even before we all decided to shack up. Naturally, that attraction only escalated the day we moved in.
At first it was the typical stuff: lingering gazes and hugs held a few seconds too long. But as time went on and our quarters got closer, the tension got harder to ignore. Suddenly, he was getting first looks at every short dress and pajama tank I wore, and I was victim to his daily post-workout showers. We were best friends who were turned on, and we were barely trying to hide it.
In group outings in crowded bars he would whisper into my ear, lips touching my skin, as if that were the only way I could possibly hear him. When we would collide at the kitchen sink, instead of just saying “excuse me,” he would grab my hips and slide me to whatever side he chose. No lines were ever technically crossed, but we walked them like tightropes.
...Until the day my ex and I finally called it quits, that is. Sitting on his gray IKEA bed staring at the ceiling in silence, I asked him the one question we both knew the answer to: “Are you happy?”
Our mutual “no” might have been the only thing we ever actually had in common. By the time I walked out of his bedroom that evening, I was single.
That night I lay awake in my twin-size bed knowing I should have been overwhelmed by heartache. But in reality, the main thought keeping me up was Jake.
Somewhere around 3 a.m., I decided to take a hot shower hoping it would relax me enough to fall asleep. I stood letting the scalding water fall down my body so long that I was dizzy by the time I got out. Knowing everyone was fast asleep, I wrapped myself in only a towel and headed back to my room. But as I opened the door and tiptoed across the kitchen, there was a familiar tattooed body standing in front of the open fridge.
We froze. We hadn’t talked about the split yet, but I could see in his expression that he already knew. After what felt like forever, Jake scanned me up and down and met my eyes with a smirk. We were having a silent conversation, like we had countless times before, in a language we knew so well. And there, in the refrigerator light, in an empty kitchen while the roommates slept, we crossed the line.
I held my breath as I watched him walk toward me. When he got close enough to touch, he ran his finger from the base of my neck down to the gap between my breasts where the towel was tied in a knot. Looking into my eyes, he tugged on the loose tie, dropping my pink towel to my waist, where he caught it between his hands and my hips. Like a lasso, he used the towel to pull my body into his, our chests touching, inhaling each other’s exhales. Before I could say anything, his lips were on my neck and we were backing up into the wall behind me. He let the towel fall from one of his fists in exchange for a handful of my wet hair. We started making out frantically, desperately. If I was breathless before he ever touched me, now I was on the verge of suffocation. I pushed on his chest, calling for a pause. His forehead against mine, he watched the rise and fall of my chest as I gathered what was happening.
“I don’t think…” I whispered into the darkness.
But before I could finish, his lips were back on my neck and my hands were wrapped around the back of his. He slid two fingers inside of me to test my wetness and found exactly what he was searching for. Lifting me up, my butt in his hands and my towel on the floor, he pinned me between his body and the wall. As he slid inside of me, he freed one of his hands to cover my mouth, silencing the moans I could barely control.
I’m not sure if it was the years of pent-up tension or arousal from the possibility of getting caught screwing in the common area, but I came faster than a man for the first time in my life. When he realized, he gripped his hand around my mouth even tighter and chuckled while driving me harder into the wall, holding my muzzled whimpers in the palm of his hand. His eyes glowed from the refrigerator light as he refused to break eye contact, making everything that much more intense.
When my body went limp in his arms after orgasming, he did the single sexiest thing I had ever seen a man do—he ended the round without having an orgasm himself. He slowly let my feet find solid ground and held me up at the waist while I regained stability in my shaking legs. I stood staring at him in confusion and exhaustion. The events of the entire day were hitting me like a bulldozer, and he knew.
He bent down to grab my towel from the floor, but before he lifted himself back up, he kissed up my body from my stomach to my breasts to my neck, leaving one final kiss on my lips. He wrapped my little pink towel back around me, knotted it at my chest, and closed the refrigerator door.
“You should get some sleep,” were the first and last words he said to me that night. He ran his hand under my chin, and just as quickly as he had locked his body against mine, he was closing his bedroom door behind him.
I had no idea what was going to happen when the sun came up, but that night, for better or worse, I didn’t really care. Rather than worry about the living situation getting even more complicated now that I had become the apartment homie hopper, I did exactly as Jake said. I slid between my cool sheets, hair wet and body still trembly, and drifted to sleep with thoughts of gray eyes in cold light and the taste of calloused hands on my lips.
*Name has been changed.
Tommie Brown is a writer and poet. She has worked with Mitu, VICE, The Feminist Food Journal, and Boshemia Magazine. If she isn't writing, you can find her gardening or doing crosswords in pen. Follow her on Instagram @Tommiethegirl or find her at TommieBrown.com.
