Her Billionaires(40)

Wait, Mike, he told himself. Savor this. After eighteen months of loneliness and pain, it was good to wake up in the morning with a smile on his face.

Even better, though, would be to wake up to two other smiles in his bed. God, the thought made him hard. Rock hard.

And so he found himself counting—879, 880, 881, 882—counting, counting, counting. And then he looked down and saw the tent on the top sheet. Ah, shit. There’s only one way to deal with this. A run.

He left the bedroom and nearly slammed into Dylan, who was coming out of the shower. “Hey, hey man, how was that date last night?”

Mike felt his expression shift to complete shock and he tried to cover up his feelings. “Oh, oh yeah, uh, yeah it was good.”

“Great,” Dylan clapped him on the back, staring down at Mike’s erection. “Yeah, thinking about her?”

“Thinking about a lot of things,” Mike answered, still stammering on the inside. Fuck—what if Dylan guessed what was going on before Mike could confess it? This was just too much. He spent most of his life trying to craft as simple a life as possible, and now he’d created a huge romantic clusterfuck. Way to go!

Dylan said, “Yeah, I have been too. But, well, anyhow...” He shook his head as if willing away something that was bothering him.

Mike knew he should ask, Mike knew that he should inquire, that this was Dylan’s way of reaching out, of being emotionally open, and yet he couldn’t. He just couldn’t muster the energy to deal with anyone else’s emotional struggles right now. Hell, he couldn’t even deal with his own. “Yeah, well, I’m gonna go for a run. I’ll see ya.”

“Alright, bye.”

They were just so articulate when it came to expressing their feelings. He could hear Jill’s words echoing in his head: “You two are about as good at talking about your feelings as I am at shaving my own balls.”

If he could get his feet pounding on the pavement, pounding on the trail, running in the dirt, the trees flying by, the buses groaning— whatever, wherever, whenever. Air in, air out, muscles up, muscles down. If he could reach that place within where everything disappeared and nothing was all—Mike knew he could figure out how on earth he was gonna tell Dylan that he had just stolen his girlfriend.



Dylan threw on a pair of shorts and some t-shirt from— he looked at the front—middle school? Yeah, middle school. He still had it. In fact, he never let go of any of his t-shirts. He probably had hundreds of them in various states floating around his apartment, everything from the ratty Monsters of Rock his brother had given him when he was just a kid, to the latest cheesy Daily Show shirt.

He opened up his laptop and he tried one more time. Clicking on Laura’s profile, he typed in the chat window, “Hey, Laura, are you there?” She had completely shut him out. He knew it had been a day, one day, that was it. Just a single day since she left his bed. But she didn’t answer his texts, didn’t answer his phone calls, didn’t respond to his chat window—nothing— and she had slunk out of his house in the middle of the night.

Now, he was certainly used to one night stands and having women sneak out—or being the one who snuck out on a woman —but he had felt such a connection with her that this mystified him. And now, the great silence. What was that about? Why was she doing this?

He knew how to find her address. He knew where she worked. He even knew the floor; she had told him. But he didn’t want to be a stalker. He didn’t want to be that guy.

And he wasn’t that guy. It wasn’t his style; he never did that kind of thing to a woman. This one, though? Oh, he could actually feel himself drooling, imaging her body, conjuring her touch, the way she shifted her hips, the way that she leaned against him, the way that her hair hung in his face, the way that her lips seemed to—

Oh, man.

He and Mike were a matching pair of tented shorts now.

What in the hell was up with Mike? He was acting awfully squirrelly. That was nothing new, but Dylan was going to all this trouble to find them another person. Not that anybody could replace Jill, but he wanted that closeness, he wanted that sense of family that only three could give him and Mike. And now, now he felt unmoored. Lost.

So he typed again. “Well, Laura, if you’re there, please, I’m trying to reach you. Give me a call, text me, something. I just wanted to talk. I really enjoyed the other night and let’s touch base”. And with that, he shut down, he logged out, set aside his computer and went to join Mike on that run.

As he started to put on his running shoes he remembered, Oh shit, I forgot to email my mom. His mom’s seventieth birthday party was coming up and he needed to give his dad some answer about some detail. His computer was already off. Oh, wait a minute, maybe I could just use Mike’s, he thought.