Karmel rolled her eyes and shook her head. “You two need to have a conversation.” Then she lowered her theater-trained voice meant to reach the old lady in the back row with her hearing aid turned off to as close of a whisper as the woman had. “And you need to fuck him already, because where there are sizzling solo hand jobs there is also fire fucking.”

“That’s not a good idea,” Chelle said before her mutinous libido could start rationalizing exactly how and why it was a very, very good idea.

“Fuck good ideas,” Karmel said. “It’s about time you had a little fun.”

Fun? That really wasn’t part of her make-up any more than relationships were. Fun belonged on the pages of her fantasy books, the short side quests that involved drunk goblins with the giggles and retrieving gemstones infused with aphrodisiac spells.

“He’s too young,” she said.

Karmel dead-eyed her. “There’s barely a blip of an age difference between you. It’s what, less than a decade?”

“Eight years.” She was out of college when he’d been a high school freshman. He was a baby, a puppy, a—

Full-grown man packing a dick big enough to make her mouth water, going by what she’d seen when she’d looked at his gray sweatpants last night.

Shut up, brain.

“Uh-huh.” Her friend shot her a that’s-what-I-thought look over her mug of what in no way resembled anything close to coffee anymore.

“It’s not like we’re even together together.” They were, after all, only husband and wife on paper, and they had agreed to no sexy times—even if he had suggested tearing up that part of the agreement.

Karmel gave her a so-what eyebrow raise.

“He’d probably mansplain the female orgasm to me.” Why did that kinda sound hot? Oh God. She needed help. Professional help.

“I don’t know about that.” Karmel smirked. “Sounds to me like he’s open to taking orders.”

“I caught him off guard, and anyway, that’s not really my thing.”

Karmel scoffed. “Keep telling yourself that. You’ve spent your whole life having other people tell you what you want and how you should want it and what you should do to get it, but all of that ‘touch yourself’ stuff came out of nowhere?”

Vibrator-assisted fantasies and the joy of controlling all sorts of characters in her books aside? “It was a one-time occurrence.”

“Sounds to me like you both need to figure out if that’s really the case.” Karmel sat her mug down. “You know I love you.”

Chelle took a drink of her latte and braced herself for whatever was coming next, because she highly doubted she was going to want to hear it.

“But,” her friend continued, “maybe it’s time you get out of your own head and enjoy life rather than just watching it from the sidelines.”