Stuck With My Best Friend: A Quarantine Novella Read online

  Stuck With My Best Friend

  A Quarantine Romance

  Sosie Frost

  Stuck With My Best Friend

  Copyright © 2020 by Sosie Frost

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you’d like to share it with. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

  Cover Design: Pink Ink Designs

  Created with Vellum

  Stuck With My Best Friend

  Hunter

  I've been in love with Déjà since high school. Now that we're quarantining together, it's time she learns the truth. But before I confess everything to her, she asks me a question I never saw coming...

  Déjà

  Hunter is more than my best friend. He's my rock, and I trust him more than anyone in the world. Which is why this quarantine poses the perfect opportunity.

  If I want a baby, is it too awkward to ask my best friend to be the father?

  And what happens if I suddenly want something more?

  Stuck with my Best Friend is a 32,000 word, 150 page best-friends-to-lovers BWWM novella. And, I'm gonna be totally real: this is romance at it's best--sweet, sassy, unrepentantly sexy smut. The sort of story that gets to the good stuff quick and leaves you with all the feelings once you've finished. If you’re looking for something fun, flirty, and naughty, tuck this novella under your pillow tonight…

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Epilogue

  Can’t Get Enough Romance?

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  Also by Sosie Frost

  1

  Hunter

  When I imagined telling my best friend, Déjà Derrick, that I loved her, I expected to be down on one knee and presenting jewelry, flowers, or her a mountain of Reese’s Cups.

  Instead, I parked my truck outside of her house with an eight pack of toilet paper.

  Mega-rolls.

  I wouldn’t let anything fuck up this moment.

  Now, the last thing I’d planned was to invoke a comparison of a potential relationship with me to shit. But a pack of Charmin was a hell of a lot rarer than diamonds these days. And, since I planned to crash at Déjà’s house unannounced for the foreseeable future, a gift seemed appropriate.

  Would’ve preferred a handle of Jack to undertake this sort of disaster, but the governor had closed the Wine and Spirits store on the very fucking day I prepared to bare my soul to the woman of my dreams.

  And I sure as hell wasn’t shooting back an ounce of alcohol from my only bottle of hand sanitizer. Lucky to find the container under the seat in my truck. Must’ve belonged to my sister. She bathed in the shit before the world decided to sell their firstborn for a bottle of Purell. Couldn’t handle a bit of mud, sawdust, and rusted nails in my truck, prissy little thing.

  But a bottle of hand sanitizer served as another gift I’d offer Déjà. Maybe it’d prove to her that I wasn’t just a best friend but the sort of provider who could wrestle a pack of toilet paper from Tidus Payne at Butterpond’s only grocery store, live to tell about it, and make it home with tons of other romantic goodies.

  Like soap.

  Bleach.

  A bag of flour.

  Neither of us knew how to cook, but that white powder was in more demand than goddamned cocaine, so it must’ve been worth grabbing.

  As for risking my neck at the store?

  Christ, Barlow’s Market had turned into a gladiatorial arena. That six feet of social distance rule ended right around the time I bent down to grab the last container of Clorox wipes and Alice Mahoney expressed her displeasure by impaling her cart six inches into my lower colon.

  At least my bruises would align like the stars with this opportunity.

  We had nowhere to go, nowhere to be, and no one to answer to. The shelter-in-place order had momentarily stalled my construction business and closed Déjà’s quaint little bookstore. All that mattered was finding a nice spot to hunker down…

  So I could confess my undying love for my best friend.

  A girl who had no idea my real feelings for her.

  This quarantine must’ve been fate.

  I didn’t believe in last chances or once-in-a-lifetime moments. Life was always a series of risks. A man had only his will and a pair of balls to get shit done the way he wanted. If he kicked his own ass to see it finished, his hard work would be rewarded.

  Not that loving Déjà was hard.

  In fact, it was the easiest thing I’d ever done. I’d fallen for her when we were kids, only realizing as an adult how stupid I was for not saying a damned word about it.

  No better time to confess everything than now.

  And no better reason to shack up with a beautiful woman than a worldwide pandemic.

  Especially as my mother had already kicked me out of our house.

  “You’ve been working in town all week.” Mom had told me. She’d fretted in the safety of her own home, wearing a mask when she trekked from the living room to the kitchen and banishing my father to the game room in the basement. Worked for him. Not like he ever came out of the bathroom anyway. “Lord knows what you might have now.”

  Well, I didn’t have any patience to deal with my hypochondriac mother—even without a plague bearing down on the community. But it served me right for crashing at their place while I built my own home on the outskirts of Butterpond. What I’d hoped would be a temporary surrender of my privacy while I constructed the perfect home for me and Déjà had turned into a mire of nightmarish delays and complications.

  The quarantine didn’t help matters.

  The state had halted all construction, and my mother then kicked me out of my only home because I’d taken a job the day before.

  “Maybe you caught something already.” She warded me away with a spray of Lysol directly into the eyes, burning both the virus and my retinas. “Stay with a friend until you’re sure you’re safe.”

  The only thing I might’ve caught doing a solo roofing job was my foot on a rusty nail. Still, my momentary homelessness did me one favor.

  It forced me to make the decision.

  Now or never.

  Tell Déjà the truth…or lament losing the only girl for m
e.

  Easy choice, but hard to execute.

  Especially as I had been social distancing from my own feelings for the past eight years.

  I parked my truck in front of Déjà’s house and took a deep breath.

  How many times had I pulled up to her English-styled cottage before? Hundreds? Enough times to recognize that her beloved house’s aesthetic was more money pit than idyllic countryside charm. The cottage was layered with perpetually loose brown stones, housed a cylindrical chimney which doubled as a bird’s nest, and lost three dark slate shingles every time the wind blew.

  But she liked the house. Therefore, I liked the house…

  And all of the repairs I did to it.

  To add a bit of sophistication, Déjà had introduced crawling ivy to her property. Big mistake—one she refused to admit. Her home drowned under layers upon layers of smothering ivy, blocking windows and choking out gutters. Every summer for the past three years, I’d been promised two pizzas if I took my sheers to the siding and hacked enough of the greenery so she could escape from her front door.

  Well, if she rejected my advances, I’d have two weeks’ worth of yardwork, house repairs, and thorns to pluck out of my heart and ass.

  But if she was amenable to my proposition…

  Trapped for a couple weeks with a beautiful woman was more than any man could ask for.

  I grabbed the grocery bags and avoided the jungle tendril-ing across her front yard. Five years ago, I’d built her little backdoor deck, only big enough to swing the door open and house the world’s wimpiest grill. Didn’t matter as long as she could cook herself a chicken breast to top her salads for dinner every night.

  I knocked, but she didn’t answer. Probably lost in a book, as usual. Wasn’t sure why I knocked. Typically, I’d bust in, toss my shit on the floor by the door, and settle on her couch until she made it back from the bookstore when we’d spend the next two hours debating which movie we should watch.

  But today felt…different.

  Like it was the right thing to knock before blindsiding her with confessions and promises and proposals out of fucking nowhere.

  She kept a spare key under the bird’s nest which infested her porchlight. Three years’ worth of twigs and feathers made for a biohazard worse than the virus, but at least it got me into the house.

  The door opened without the shuttering squeal which usually alerted the entire neighborhood to Déjà’s comings and goings. A good can of lubricant and a refitted door frame did wonders to grant her a bit of privacy.

  Just another reason why the woman needed to keep me around.

  Her starter home had been less fixer-upper and more deathtrap, but I’d worked through the more dangerous rotten floorboards and exposed wiring. New floors. Freshly caulked tubs. New drywall over holes. Couldn’t do a damned thing about all the frilly doilies she laid over her couches or the creepy-ass porcelain figurines which stared at me from every shadow of the house, but at least she’d been happy and cozy in her home. Gave me peace of mind and projects every weekend.

  I set the groceries on her kitchen counter. Figured I’d catch her sneaking a spoonful of the Rocky Road ice cream she insisted she bought just for me. Funny how the carton always ended up empty and stuffed in the very back of the freezer before I could grab a spoon.

  But Déjà wasn’t dancing with earpods in her kitchen, and she hadn’t crashed in her teeny den-turned-library. Stacks of multicolored books surrounded her paisley wingback chair. The woman refused to switch to e-books, claiming to prefer the heft of a good book in her hand. She likened it to wanting the right tool for the job.

  You wouldn’t use a rubber mallet to hammer a nail, she’d always said. I won’t let a computer screen to separate me from Jane Austen.

  That I didn’t understand. After she’d gifted me my very own copy of Pride and Prejudice, a goddamned football field wasn’t enough separation between me and Jane.

  No sign of Déjà.

  Maybe she’d finally suffocated under an avalanche of books.

  Or died of boredom. But she’d insisted she wanted the early edition Dickens classics for Christmas. Not sure why. That shit was like Ambien for poor assholes in the 19th century.

  I was just about to call for Déjà when her voice carried over the cottage.

  Light. Muffled.

  Almost like…

  A groan?

  I went still, the hairs on my neck prickling like I’d spent a little too long on top of a roof during an approaching storm.

  This wasn’t like Déjà. The woman lived most of her life in a bookstore—shushing giggling kids reading the naughty parts out of books and shooing the elderly patrons stealing candy from the dish by the register. Her life was a whisper, and she liked things quiet.

  …Except when she sang—but only when she thought no one could hear her belting out Beyonce.

  She didn’t sing it well, but, with earplugs, she could be fucking adorable.

  But this wasn’t singing. Or talking.

  A whimper echoed from upstairs—shrill and alarmed.

  Fuck.

  We lived in a safe town, ravaged only by the occasional loose barnyard alpaca or retirement community member who happened to get behind the wheel of the groundskeeper’s golf cart.

  But that didn’t mean trouble couldn’t find a girl as innocent as Déjà.

  I grabbed the broom she kept stacked in the corner. The handle broke over my knee with a sharp crack. I chucked the bristles and armed myself with the jagged edge as I rushed up the stairs.

  My boots slammed against the old wooden floorboards.

  My vision tinted.

  My heart pounded.

  And my breath infused me with a feral hatred towards any halfwit criminal who dared to fuck with my woman.

  A sliver of light glinted from the crack of her bedroom door, pushed up and hiding the whimpers which set my teeth on edge.

  I charged with a roar, kicking the door open. The wood splintered before it slammed against the wall. I lunged into her bedroom, remembering to duck before I cracked my head against the slanted walls of the converted attic.

  Déjà screamed.

  I scanned the room.

  Empty.

  The fuck?

  Well, there weren’t many places for the creep to hide.

  She’d somehow fit a queen sized, wrought-iron bed against her wall, gilded in flaking gold. The mattress drowned under no less than eight fancy fucking pillows with more shams and embroidery than one person could hope to drool on in a night. No way someone was hiding beneath or beside the bed. Or in the ruffled, cream curtains she’d tugged over her windows, dredging the room in a muted darkness despite the caressing afternoon sun.

  Damn.

  We were alone.

  I lowered the broom, but Déjà continued to scream.

  Suddenly I became the jackass in desperate need of a rescue.

  The most beautiful woman in the world lay naked and writhing on her bed, one hand cupping her rounded and full breast, the other tucked neatly between her legs. She ripped her fingers away from the slickness coating her thighs and gasped my name in a breathless whisper of a woman edging halfway towards oblivion.

  Déjà was an absolute vision when she wasn’t on the verge of an orgasm. But now? The woman personified sensuality. Her lovely skin was a toasted shade of darkness—a vibrant pecan that enveloped her in radiance. Her wide eyes rounded even larger. Shocked, yes, but dilated with a flush of desire. The bright copper shone as bright as the lucky penny I kept tucked in my wallet.

  Déjà struggled against the blankets, her thick hair freed from her usual headband. The twisted curls plumped around her heart-shaped face. An innocent look for someone exhibiting some very naughty behavior.

  With a shimmy of her legs, she attempted to shield herself and all her soft curves and secrets. But the woman wasn’t stick thin. In fact, she’d always been curvy in the right places. Thighs. Chest. Chipmunk cheeks.

  Of course
, I’d only ever imagined the beautiful sight before me. I’d never been so lucky—so goddamned blessed—to walk in on her tangled in such a vulnerable and perfectly compromised position.

  But she was the loveliest woman in the world.

  …And the angriest.

  “Hunter!”

  Her screech resonated throughout Butterpond.

  Déjà always hated her eyebrow and the scar which had accidentally sliced her left one in half. The uneven bare patch danced when she became expressive. This time, however, it went still. Locked into a frenzied, furious furrow of her brow. Not unlike the day I’d accidentally given her that scar as well as two stitches after sled riding with her through the lower branches of a pine tree.

  “Hunter, what are you doing?”

  The only way her squeal could’ve sounded better was if she’d murmured my name in rapturous pleasure.

  I stood paralyzed, but who could blame me?

  I’d shake the hand of the man strong enough to avert his gaze and act like a gentleman by turning away.

  If she’d been the Ark of the Covenant, sure as shit I’d have disintegrated on the spot, but what a way to go.

  I expected the pillow to slam against my head. And I dodged the second and third which followed.

  I missed the fourth. The corner rammed into my eye, and I swore, ducking for cover before Déjà reached for her old-school, analog alarm clock and decided to relive her days on the varsity softball team.