Like a Best Friend | ✓

chapter twenty-one

By the time we get back to the hotel, after calling an Uber to collect us from the fountain, I feel a hell of a lot more sober. I'm still a little tipsy, sure, but there is too much going on right now for me to be anything but one hundred percent present in the moment.

I love Kitty.

Kitty loves me.

Levi is gay and Kitty loves me and their marriage would have been so much more doomed than I could've imagined.

"The problem with fancy restaurants," Kitty says, "is that their portions are way too small."

It's the first thing she's said since we tumbled out of the Uber and she thanked the driver, and it's not what I'm expecting to hear after we have both poured our hearts out to each other in the middle of the Strip.

"You want to get room service?"

"I'm craving those loaded fries we had the other night," she says, already on her way to the phone. I sit on the edge of the bed, stunned. We have both dropped bombshells on each other tonight and she is calling room service. I have to laugh. Fuck, I love her. I am nauseatingly heart-stoppingly in love with Kitty Cohen and her need for loaded fries after we just spent more on dinner than I spend on a month's worth of groceries.

"Do you want anything else?" she asks, hand over the receiver.

"More fries," I call out. She laughs. Asks for extra fries. Ends the call and throws herself onto her side of the bed. I roll onto my side to face her, taking a moment to drink her in, unashamed to stare because Kitty loves me.

She lies with her elbow under her head. "Can I tell you something?"

"Of course."

"You have to promise not to judge."

"Do I ever?"

Her voice is deadpan when she says, "Yes."

"Fair enough." I laugh. "But I promise I won't judge you for whatever you're about to say."

Even the lighting in this suite is romantic, warm and dim and almost suggestive. My thoughts are ricocheting off each other, scrambling to figure out what Kitty's about to confess that she thinks I'll judge her for – she paid for her followers? She doesn't like coffee? She's never actually read a book? – but I am not prepared for what she says.

"Levi never made me come."

I gasp and almost choke. We've gone from confessions of love to this? "I'm sorry, what?"

She can't look me in the eye, her gaze dropping to the covers. "Uh, yeah. I never had an orgasm with him."

"Oh my god. For two fucking years?"

She grimaces and nods.

"Not a single orgasm?"

"I mean, I got myself off, but he never did."

"Holy shit." I'm slack-jawed, staring at her. "I'm not judging you at all, I promise. I am judging Levi a bit, though," I joke. I'm not really. I can't. Poor guy spent two years with Kitty, trying to come to terms with his queerness.

"It's not his fault," Kitty says, pulling her knees up and moving her hair out of the way before she tucks a pillow under her head. "He was a virgin when we got together and the first time we had sex, it, uh, it didn't last very long and he was pretty embarrassed and I felt bad for the guy so I kind of ... pretended."

"Oh my god." My hand is over my mouth. I can't pick my jaw up off the floor. "Kitty ... you faked it with him? For two whole years?"

She holds up a hand and says, "More like a year and a half. Less, even. We were together for nearly three months before we even slept together and then we didn't do it at all for the last four months of our relationship."