Chapter 7

Chapter Seven

Reid

I’d felt a headache coming on while I was at work. My patience was frayed, and I was so close to losing it that my supervisor had taken one look at my face and had told me to clock out early and shoved me toward the back office to get my shit.

Sometimes you just hit your limit and tonight I’d hit my limit.

I almost walked right into Sophie heading up the stairs. In my burned-out state I saw that brightness in her eyes that meant she wanted to talk to me. I wasn’t up for it.Not tonight.

I’d literally just grunted at her and shut the door. If that made her mad, then so be it.

First thing, I’d shoved leftover cold chicken in my mouth along with whatever else I could consume quickly since I was starving. Once I was fed, I hit the shower and fell into bed, barely having enough energy to pull on a long T-shirt.

It was time for sleep, but then I heard something that made my eyes snap open.

A moan. A sexual kind of moan, coming from the other side of the wall.

Sophie’s bedroom.

I froze, barely breathing as I listened for it again.

Oh. Oh fuck. She was…well. She was getting off. And I didn’t hear anyone else, so I was pretty sure she was by herself.

I should put some headphones on. I should turn on my TV and crank the volume.

I should block her out.

That wasn’t what I ended up doing.

No, I was the fucking freak who kept listening. Who jumped when I heard a buzzing sound. Fuck, she had a vibrator too. A loud one. Mine were all expensive and whisper quiet, so she must have one of those old-school grinders over there. She couldn’t be aware of how loud it was.

The sound increased, her gasps and moans and whimpers increased, and I heard her come again.

Now was the time to stop. To not be a total and complete pervert.

But I didn’t.

I kept listening. I kept listening as my hand raised the hem of my shirt and stroked between my legs.

It was like listening to porn. Sort of.

Live porn. Live porn of my ex’s little sister.

Jesus fuck, this was a bad idea. I had to stop.

My thoughts weren’t affecting my behavior because my hand was still between my legs and circling my clit with rapid strokes as I shut my eyes and listened to Sophie get closer to another climax.

She came. Loudly.

I did too, my vision whiting out as the orgasm rushed down my spine and grabbed hold, gripping me so hard I didn’t know if I was even breathing anymore. I clamped my bottom lip between my teeth and muffled my noises with my arm so she wouldn’t hear me.

And then I raised my fist and slammed it against the wall.

She had to stop. We had to stop.

I could almost hear her gasp after I pounded on the wall and then the vibrator went silent. So did she.

Shit. Post-orgasm clarity was kicking in and I knew I’d made a mistake. If I couldn’t stop listening to her, the least I could have done was to let her finish and not draw attention to the fact that I could hear her.

Now she knew that I knew and the next time we saw each other, it was going to be weird.

Why couldn’t I have left well enough alone? I should have stayed at work.

As tired as I’d been when I’d walked into my apartment, it took me a long time to fall asleep that night. I couldn’t stop replaying what had happened earlier. Couldn’t stop thinking about the sounds she’d made that I’d heard even over the rumbling of the vibrator.

She sounded beautiful. Loud and so sweet at the same time. Her noises had plucked at something deep inside me. Better than any porn I’d ever listened to, if I was honest. I’d come harder than I had in a while. A long while.

Lately my climaxes had been lackluster. I’d chalked the change up to being tired from work and a lack of imagination with my fantasies. My tried and true scenarios weren’t working for me anymore. I needed new material, but it wasn’t a priority.

The next morning, I woke up horny again. Shit.

My clit throbbed between my legs, bringing me into consciousness better than an alarm clock. When was the last time that had happened? I didn’t even know.

A sleepy moan escaped my mouth as I put my hand on my pussy that was already wet. Like it had been doing its own thing while I slept and just waiting for me to wake up again.

“Fuckkkkkk.” I was so damn close already.

With just a few swipes of my hand, a quick hard orgasm shot through me, making me shake and tremble and gasp.

“Holy crap,” I said, my chest heaving. That was one way to wake up. I stared at my ceiling and enjoyed the post-climax tingles.

Most days I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into wakefulness but not today. I was all the way up now.

I had a shift that night, but my morning masturbation session had me feeling like I’d woken up on the right side of the bed for the first time in years. I caught myself humming as I made breakfast from scratch instead of being lazy and ordering something or walking to the closest coffee shop.

This pancake mix had been sitting in my cupboards for so long, and since I was feeling so damn good, I added both milk and white chocolate chips to the batter. I also sliced up some potatoes before tossing them in spices and lining them on a tray in the air fryer. Some bacon got tossed into a pan and I even got out my milk frother and made myself a dreamy latte with caramel syrup.

I ate on the couch with the sun pouring through the curtains and decided that I should definitely take advantage of the weather and go outside. I could hit the library and get some new books and maybe even hit that weird bookstore that Stace had told me about ages ago. I’d gone a few times and it was the most disorganized place I’d ever been in, but it had the most eclectic collection of books I’d ever seen in my life. If you wanted to learn how to marry a ghost, they had it. If you wanted a book about fixing model trains, they had many. Whatever niche topic you wanted to know about, they probably had a book for it. The adventure was in finding it.

That early climax had set the tone for the rest of my day and I found myself smiling at people on the street. Like I’d had a personality transplant.

As I practically skipped down the sidewalk, I tried to think of what I should say to Sophie when I saw her again. The best course of action, I thought, was to agree to pretend that it hadn’t happened. Just forget about it. Or at least tell her that I was going to forget about it.

I absolutely wasn’t going to forget about it. That would be completely impossible. All of those sounds were burned in my brain for eternity.

She was probably embarrassed, which was why it would be good to drop it and move forward.

A little voice in the back of my mind that sounded like my meanest third grade teacher admonished me for thinking about Sophie that way. She was my ex’s younger sister. I didn’t play by those “off limits” rules, but she was off limits for different reasons.

Her older sister had broken my heart and I wasn’t going to let another member of the Love family (oh the irony of their last name) get another chance.

The likelihood that she was even interested in me was slim. Very slim.

This was just a thing that we’d laugh about at some point. No big deal.

I arrived back at my apartment with too many books. I’d been smart and brought my tote bag for the library, and the bookstore had given me a recycled shopping bag for my purchases.

“Oh my god,” I said as I dropped both bags outside my door so I could get my key out.

“Hi,” A voice said, and my heart nearly stopped for a second when I realized that Sophie was standing right next to me. How had she snuck up like that?

“Heyyyyy,” I said slowly, turning to face her. Her entire face was beet red, and she couldn’t make eye contact with me.

“Sorry about last night,” I said, keeping things vague.

She let out a little squeaking noise.

“I shouldn’t have banged on the wall,” I clarified.

She nodded like a bobblehead as she twisted her fingers together so hard that I thought that one of them was going to snap.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped out. “I didn’t know I was that loud.” The last part was mumbled so low that I barely heard it.

“We can just forget about it,” I said, and she finally looked up at me before her eyes skittered away again.

“Okay,” she said, nodding again. “Let’s forget it.”

“Sounds good,” I said, turning back to my books that I needed to drag inside before I got ready for work. Tonight was definitely going to be better than last night and Sophie was partially responsible. I wasn’t going to tell her that, though.

Sophie went back inside, and I breathed a sigh of relief.