“I’d suck you off if I didn’t think he’d notice,” she whispered. “I mean, you deserve the best. At least you’re beautiful on the inside, Max. Right where it counts.”

I burst into laughter, pressing my face into her neck to stifle the groan that followed when she focused her efforts on my tip. “Fuck, that feels good. A little faster, love. Can you?”

She faltered at the term of endearment, and then turned her face to suck on my jaw, her fist tight and fast over my cock. She glanced at the cabdriver but he was absorbed in the radio program and yelling at the traffic in front of us.

“Yeah? Like that?” she asked.

I nodded, smiling against her cheek. “I never would have guessed you’d be so good at this.”

Her laughter vibrated along my neck and beneath my skin. I’d never heard her make such a goofy, indelicate sound. Another one of her walls I’d penetrated. Victory surged warm and sharp in my chest, and for a brief pulse I wanted to yell out the window that she was letting me in.

She licked up the side of my neck, nibbled my lower lip. “You have the most perfect cock,” she told me. “You’re making me want you on a Tuesday.”

“Fuck,” I groaned. And as I came, jaw clenched, fists tight at my sides, I realized that Sara, too, had made me forget to act like a bloody arse about the whole thing and stop worrying about whether she was fucking with my head.

Sara reached into her bag, fished out a tissue, and wiped off her hand while it was still inside her purse, giving me a goofy grin and hiding the evidence from our cabbie. And then she leaned forward, and kissed me so sweetly it made me want to throw her down on the car seat and make her come against my tongue just to hear her little hoarse cries.

“Feeling better?” she asked quietly, eyes searching.

I learned something else about Sara in that expression: her first instinct—and the one she continually battled—was to please me.

But then we pulled up a block away from my apartment and she sat back, smiling pleasantly. “Is this where you’re getting out?”

I hesitated, wondering if she’d want to come with me. “I suppose, unless you’d like—”

Her voice was quiet, which I realized was her attempt at easing the harshness of her words: “I’ll see you Friday, Max.”

We were done. I was excused.

Nine

“Are we going to talk about it today?”

I turned from where I stood on the ladder and looked at Chloe. She held a paintbrush at her hip, and leveled her stare at me.

“About . . . ?”

She narrowed her eyes. “About the breakup. About your sudden move. About Andy and this mystery man you’re now fucking, and about how different your life is now from how it was only two months ago?”

I plastered a smile on my face. “Oh, that? What’s there to say?”