Stuck With My Best Friend: A Quarantine Novella Read online

  It wasn’t every day a man walked in on his best girl-friend masturbating.

  But it seemed a damned good way to start the next two weeks of our mandatory quarantine.

  2

  Déjà

  And here I thought the most mortifying moment of my life would’ve been the moment my best guy friend caught me masturbating.

  Wrong-o.

  The true humiliation was my klutzoid freakout.

  I blitzkrieg’ed him with every pillow on top of the bed, broke my alarm clock with a wayward kick, then chucked my romance novel at his balls.

  At least now he’d have his own burning loins too.

  And…down he went.

  I followed, tumbling off the mattress in a flurry of uncoordinated kicks and unintentional twerking.

  What the hell was Hunter doing in my house?

  How much had he seen?

  And why did he demolish my bedroom door with his boots to announce his unwelcomed arrival?

  I couldn’t imagine why he’d broken my only broom to scare the ever-loving sunshine out of me. Then again, Hunter Jamison wasn’t a man I’d ever understood. But that’s what made him unpredictable and fun—the best qualities a girl could ask for in a man.

  Just…maybe not while she was naked, enraged, and robbed of an orgasm.

  But, during all the other times, Hunter was a dream.

  “What are you doing?” I squealed as I attempted to dislodge myself from a rather precarious situation involving my ankle and a tangle of bedsheets.

  “You okay?” Hunter asked.

  No. I wasn’t okay.

  And I’d never be okay in his presence again.

  Somehow, I’d managed to wrap my foot around a loop in the sheet. Now, not a lot of what I’d been doing in bed warranted any toe-curling or unrestrained writhing, but beggers couldn’t be choosers. A desperate girl—bored, forced out of work, and seeking distractions from a small town on quarantine—would take her prize anyway she could get it.

  Unfortunately, this caused the sheets to capture me in a blended cotton-fiber web against the side of the bed.

  My cheek smooshed against the rug.

  My other cheeks were exposed—wriggling in embarrassment.

  The sun hadn’t gone down yet, but the full moon was on perfect display.

  Had I been able to free my arms from the mattress, I might’ve covered my face.

  …And my other exposed bits.

  I struggled against the sheet, desperate to dislodge myself before Hunter reached for the blanket. Gnawing my ankle off at the bone seemed a satisfactory option.

  “Looks like you’re in need of a rescue, Déjà Vu.”

  Rescue? Nah.

  What I needed was a second knotted sheet long enough to wrap around my neck.

  I kicked, but Hunter nabbed my ankle and held me still.

  “The question is…” His blue eyes shimmered like ice, but it was just a camouflage. The color was cold, but the rest of him was warm, comforting, and every bit the teddy bear I’d lugged around for security my whole life. Unfortunately, with him hovering over my naked body, the ice melted, and a lot of heat remained. “Should I actually set you free?”

  He could do anything he damn well liked as long as he didn’t post pictures to Instagram.

  I covered my face. It didn’t help. I’m sure he’d already committed all the titillating bits to memory. Still, if I had to expose my bared secrets to any man, I could’ve done a hell of a lot worse than Hunter Jamison.

  Hunter was six foot three of absolute mischief, two hundred pounds of pure trouble, and one sly smile away from convincing me he was the most attractive man in the world that I could never have.

  I’d known him since he was a sprout of a boy, gangly and threatening all of Butterpond with a prickle of thorns.

  Yet that little weed had grown up. Now, he was thick as a tree and just as stubborn. Like every other good man in Butterpond, he’d spread his roots, dug in, and dared the world to move him.

  He resolved long ago to stay in town, and I’d vowed to stay with him. A girl didn’t find a best friend like Hunter just anywhere. He wasn’t only good for odds and ends around the house. He was the sort of goofball who could make me smile when it rained, shoveled my walk when it snowed, and was the first to toss kindling together for a bonfire on cool summer nights.

  Hopefully, he also had the common courtesy to bring me a damned robe before he started playing connect the dots with the freckles on my butt.

  I whined, and he relented, freeing my ankle with a heavy sigh.

  “Never thought I’d say this to a beautiful woman, but…” He scuffed his boots against my floor, leaving a mark I’d make him scrub up. “I guess you should put your clothes on.”

  I couldn’t wait that long. I fluffed the sheet and wrapped it around my curves.

  “What are you doing in here?” I covered my face with my hands. “Please tell me you didn’t see anything.”

  “Sure.” Hunter was always amenable to my demands. “Definitely didn’t see you…checking your oil.”

  Oh, no. “That’s…that’s not what I was doing. You’re assuming. And you know what happens when you assume.”

  “Yeah. Apparently, u show your ass to me.”

  “Hunter!”

  He laughed, and it was the one time I hadn’t welcomed that heavy baritone. “It’s no big deal if you wanna tickle your fancy.”

  “Don’t you dare think it.”

  “Think you’re the only one who churns their own butter?”

  I regretted throwing my pillows and running out of ammunition. I warded him away with a swipe of my hand instead.

  “This can’t be happening. Can’t believe you just saw me naked.”

  He dazzled me with a dimpled smile. “You’re embarrassed about that?”

  “Well, I didn’t think I’d start my quarantine by humiliating myself in front of my best friend.”

  “What’s humiliating about that? You’re beautiful. Sexy. Completely naked. The only thing better than that would be…”

  I didn’t trust the arch of his eyebrow.

  And I was right not to.

  Hunter undressed with superhuman speed. He gripped his shirt and tugged it over his head, stretching the thick, corded muscles which bulked his chest and back.

  This, I couldn’t watch.

  Though, gosh, I did love the front-row seat.

  I’d seen Hunter without a shirt many times.

  But this…was different from when we used to swim in the pond as kids. These days, he wasn’t the lanky, pimply faced kid with the squeaky voice who defended me from the town bully, Remington Marshall.

  Hunter hadn’t simply grown up. He crushed adulthood between his skilled hands with the practiced strength of a man who broke and rebuilt his body day in and day out doing construction work in the hot sun.

  “You don’t need to take your pants off…” I said.

  This was not a sentence I ever imagined asking of Hunter, and yet, it struck me as strange that the words had never popped out of my mouth before.

  His jeans rustled to the floor, kicked away with an exuberance befitting a man who had forgotten to remove his shoes before the denim.

  Hunter struggled to remove his boots and failed. He crashed into the bed, just out of my sight as he cast away a pair of boxer shorts dotted with little blue hearts.

  Oh, dear Lord.

  I cast my eyes only towards Heaven. “What in the world are you doing?”

  “Getting naked.”

  That much was obvious. “Why?”

  “Didn’t want you to be embarrassed.”

  “So now I get to be ashamed for the both of us?”

  Hunter grabbed me under the arms and hauled me beside him on the bed. Damn. The man was strong. Manhandling me was hardly a challenge.

  I ensured the sheet wrapped completely around me, fixing my eyes on the sloped ceiling and exposed timber framing.

  “How is this any better?”
I asked.

  He shrugged, relaxing against my pillows. “How is it any worse?”

  I did my best to resist stealing a glance, but what twitched in the corner of my eye was a most impressive intruder to the relative peace and quiet of my bedroom.

  Hunter played it cool, as usual. But his confidence was his only attribute which rivaled his charm.

  He shifted against the sheets. Great. Now my bed would forever smell of that perfect, outdoorsy, sunshiney masculinity that had gotten me all naked and bothered in the first place.

  “We’ve been through so much together,” he said. “A little nudity isn’t the end of the world.”

  I twisted one of my curls around my fingers and scrunched into a tighter ball. Didn’t work. Hunter weighed more than me, depressing the bed and nearly rocking me onto his muscular chest as he shifted his weight.

  “It wasn’t exactly the nudity that worried me,” I said.

  “I get it. You don’t want me to know that you masturbate.”

  I shushed him even though we were the only two in the house. “Don’t say that word.”

  “Masturbate. Masturbate. Masturbate.”

  “And there you go.” I shoved him as hard as I could, but the man planted in my bed like a boulder wedged into the Earth. He wasn’t going anywhere. “You’ve taken the fun out of it. It feels dirty now.”

  “Oh, Vu, it’s very dirty.” His smile turned wicked, tickling the parts of me still warm and pulsing from my interrupted activity. “Question is, how dirty was it? What were you thinking about?”

  I did my best to change the subject while hiding my trashy romance novel under the blankets.

  “I was thinking about a nice, private moment in my own home,” I said. “Alone. Where I obeyed every social distancing recommendation while voluntarily quarantining myself for the next two or three weeks. Question is…what the heck are you doing in here? And why did you destroy my door?”

  “Oh.” He chuckled. “I heard you from downstairs. Never thought you might be doing that, so I assumed you were in trouble. I came to rescue you and defend your honor.” His gaze drifted over the sheet. “Had I known you’d already sullied yourself, I might’ve taken my time and opened the door with my hand instead of my foot.”

  “I’m not sullied!” I pinched him. God. The man was impossible. And impossibly muscular. Not an ounce of fat on him to nip with my fingers. “Did you come here just to mortify me?”

  “Nah. Didn’t have a choice. Know how my mom acts on normal days?”

  “Lysol on every surface and a mandatory showers whenever someone enters the house?”

  “Yeah. Crank that up to eleven. She’s barricaded herself in the house and nailed the windows shut. Thinks I’ve been exposed while working alone on roofs or on my empty lot doing framing work on the house.”

  “She kicked you out?”

  “I’m lucky she didn’t dunk me in the bleach water along with every utensil from the kitchen. She told me to find a place to quarantine, figured you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Pretty sure your mom expected you to be wearing pants during the quarantine.”

  Hunter chuckled. “Same for you, Vu.”

  He was onto me, reaching over the side of the bed for the book I desperately wished I’d kept hidden.

  “Wait…you’re reading?” He squinted at the pages. “How are you masturbating without any porn?”

  I lunged for the novel and prayed he wouldn’t realize it was practically porn. No such luck. I’d accidentally worn a crease into a particularly filthy section. Hunter flipped the book open right to the dirtiest, most outrageous scene.

  I tugged my curls in front of my face as he roared with laughter.

  “What the hell is a steeled shaft?” He kept his place with his fingers while reading the scene, yanking his hand away as the words became a little too raunchy for him. “And how does he plan to use it if her hips keep undulating in wanton need? Is he aiming for her pool of moisture?”

  I dove for the book.

  He had a longer reach and held it over my head. I didn’t trust the sheet to hold if I bounced on the bed to steal it from him.

  “Do you realize these two lovebirds aren’t practicing safe sex?” Hunter scoured the page. “His seed is just splattering all over her molten core.”

  “Give it back.”

  “I don’t know what the word quickening means…but it’s probably not good in reference to a womb.”

  It could be very good—for the right people at the right time.

  For the woman who wanted it more than anything in the world.

  I flicked his ear. He winced, and I nabbed the book.

  “And I thought PornHub was depraved,” he said.

  “It’s a…romance novel.”

  And I stuffed it back under my pillow where it belonged.

  One good thing about owning my own bookstore—no one questioned when the owner and proprietor ordered questionable material. As far as the publishers were concerned, I was fulfilling the needs of my clientele.

  And not my own wish-fulfillment.

  “That’s dirtier than anything I’ve ever read,” Hunter said.

  “You don’t read at all.”

  “I should—only way I’ll ever learn what organs are supposed to throb and if a fiery muff requires a prescription to clear up.”

  “It’s a love story,” I said. “It’s not supposed to be vulgar.”

  He didn’t believe me. “One day I hope to find my one true soulmate—the one whose love canal is destined for my iron man root.”

  I smacked him. “You already ruined my…moment. Don’t ruin my book for me too.”

  “What’s to ruin? I can’t figure out what the hell he’s doing to her.” Hunter scratched his chin. “Either he’s fucking the shit out of her, or they’re going on some weird ass boat ride to a place called Ecstasy located somewhere over the brink of oblivion.”

  I sighed. “You sure do know how to spoil the mood.”

  I never should’ve encouraged him. Hunter rolled onto his side. Presumably, his man root went with him. I did my best to avoid looking at the monstrosity between his legs.

  But no words in my romance novel could do his body justice.

  His was no mere man root. Or love rod.

  Hell, he hauled around more than a hardening missile.

  Hunter possessed a cock.

  C-O-C-K.

  Thick, huge, and already glistening with a dew-drop of pre-cum that seemed to signify that the passage must’ve entertained Hunter as much as it enthralled me.

  Or maybe…

  Maybe his reaction was because of me?

  Hunter was a man after all. And, even though he was my best friend, I supposed he could be aroused by me.

  A delicious thrill teased over my body.

  I’d never thought of Hunter acting upon any primal urges before. But he was a man—handsome, determined, and massively endowed. He probably had needs just as demanding as the hardened cock jutting between his legs.

  “Call me crazy…” Hunter grinned. “But I don’t know why a woman would read some trashy book when she could experience the real thing.”

  “Kinda hard to get out there and meet someone during a quarantine,” I said. “Even harder to do the things in that book now. We’re supposed to keep six feet apart.”

  “Well then…looks like I’m the only man for the job.”

  I rolled my eyes. “What are you suggesting?”

  “I’m willing to do you a favor.”

  “Oh Lord.”

  “I assume you’re amenable to shacking up with me for the next two or three weeks?” he asked.

  I wagged my finger at him. “You’re free to stay here, if that’s what you mean. You’ve already made yourself quite at home.”

  He reclined on my bed, his arms behind his head. “Well then, as your guest, I’d be more than happy to assist you in whatever…activities you choose as entertainment during these next few weeks.”

  M
y hero.

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said. “I have this under control.”

  “It wouldn’t be any trouble. I’ve been told that I’m very skilled.”

  I nearly shoved him out of the bed. “Then why don’t you go crash at one of those women’s houses during the pandemic?”

  He shrugged the thought away. “Oh, those girls were in the past. They meant nothing. They’re nothing more than…training.”

  “Training for what?”

  His devious smile nearly dissolved me into a puddle of pure embarrassment and curiosity.

  “Training for this very moment…” Hunter’s ego would damn us all. “I consider myself somewhat of an…expert on the female body. I know what I’m doing, and I know exactly what you need to make this a better experience than…paddling your own canoe.”

  “And you assume I need help?”

  He tapped the book. “If you’re reading this, you need a good fuck more than I thought. Say the word, and I’d be happy to provide.”

  Hunter had always been a gregarious soul, but this was one endeavor in which I didn’t need anyone’s assistance.

  “I happen to like reading my books for…those sorts of titillating reasons.” I warned him with a glare. “But if you tell anyone I’m reading a smutty romance and not a boring biography on Theodore Roosevelt, I will kick your butt to the curb.”

  “The real thing is nothing like a book.”

  “I have a good imagination.”

  He laughed. “I’ll make you a deal. You let me stay here, eat your food, sleep on your couch, and I can make these days and nights just fly by. Imagine it. An entire quarantine, filled with so many orgasms that you’ll beg to stay in the house for another two weeks.”

  And while that sounded positively delightful, no way Hunter would want to deliver on such promises.

  At least…I didn’t think he would.

  I mean, he’d never flirted before. Not for real, anyway. Not beyond our usual games and innuendos.

  But here we were. Naked. In my bed.

  And I hadn’t needed to open one of my hoarded bottles of wine to make it happen.

  It was almost…too perfect.

  No awkward discussions. No bashful questions.

  I wouldn’t have to ask Hunter the most soul-wrenchingly terrifying question I’d ever imagined.