Chances Aren't (33 page)

"And that was the best you could do? Nearly getting yourself killed." Emily sighs.

I shrug. "Let's just say my… intervention didn't go as planned."

Emily runs her fingers through my hair. "I'm just glad you're okay."

"Yeah," I reply softly and we're looking into each other's eyes for what seems like a long time.

"Okay then..." Laura backs away from the bed. "I think I'll give you guys a little alone time."

Emily and I watch her walk out the door then Emily sits on the bed next to me and takes my hand.

Rolling my eyes, I smile. "God, I thought she'd never leave."

We share a laugh then I say, "I really was kidding about all that threesome stuff. I mean, just look at you, why would I ever want any other women?"

"I know, right." She makes a face.

"I made a promise a long time ago and just wanted to make sure she wasn't still hung up on me. I didn’t want her to be disappointed."

"Somehow I think she'll be okay." She holds back a laugh.

I curl my lip. "I'll be serious now."

"Are you sure you can?"

"I think so." I clear my throat then let out a long slow breath. "Okay." I look into her eyes and suddenly I'm overwhelmed with emotion. I sniffle and pinch the bridge of my nose to fight back my girly tears. "Sorry."

"What is it?" She leans in closer to me.

"I'm sorry about everything. You knew I was kinda dumb when you met me, right?"

"Well, yeah, but you were so cute."

"Okay, if you say so." I grin then study her face for a few moments and a tear slips out of my eye. "Just let me say this, let me, um, get it out, okay?"

"Sure."

Taking a deep breath, I sniffle once again. "That night when I couldn't find you and I thought that, you, you know... I was... oh, God."

"It's okay."

"No, it's not really okay." I frown.

"You're right, it's not, but what're you going to do... go back in time and fix it?"

I sigh. "Of course not. I'm not doing any of that ever again."

"Good." She gives me a gentle smile.

"I'm not sure how things with us originally got so out of control, but I'm sure that it's ninety nine percent my fault."

"I wouldn't say that." She shrugs. "It's in the high nineties, but definitely not ninety nine."

"Yeah." Shaking my head, I hold back a laugh. "I'm really trying here, so could you..." I plead with my eyes.

"Sorry." She shrugs.

"I just wanted to say, you know, sometimes it takes a second chance to realize you made the right choice the first time around."

Her jaw quivers a bit, she breathes out and her eyes are suddenly filled with tears. I pull my hand from hers, slide it up to her shoulder and guide her down for a kiss.

THE END

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Please check out an excerpt from the first book in my Friends With… Benefits series after the Author's Note below.

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ALSO BY LUKE YOUNG

SHRINKAGE

CHOCOLATE COVERED BILLIONAIRE NAVY SEAL

CHANCES AREN'T

The Friends With... Benefits Series:

FRIENDS WITH PARTIAL BENEFITS
(Excerpt Included)

FRIENDS WITH FULL BENEFITS

FRIENDS WITH MORE BENEFITS

FRIENDS WITH EXTRA BENEFITS

I hope you enjoyed
Chances Aren't
and my little trip back to my college days at the University of Maryland during the late eighties. I actually lived in that crappy frat house with that oddly shaped double room during the summer of my junior year (don't worry there was no peep hole between the two sides…) and worked at the ice cream place— it really was the time of my life. I was a huge fan of Swensen's cookies and cream milkshakes, chicken calzones from Tartaruga's and hanging out at the Vous.

I also had a very, very brief relationship with an amazing girl during that time and this book is based loosely on that. She turned me on to blue cheese, Popeye's chicken, visiting Annapolis Maryland and most importantly and for the first time in my young, inexperienced life, good sex. It was most definitely lust at first sight. I sorta screwed that whole thing up and have occasionally wondered how it might have played out differently had I been a bit more mature, less of a nerd, less of an idiot… (well, you see where I'm going with that…)

It probably wasn’t meant to be, but I'm a daydreamer, so I've logged a little time thinking about it. To be clear, I am happily married (for twenty-three years now) to a wonderful woman who can make some kick-ass spaghetti sauce, seems to actually still like me for some reason, puts up with me writing this kind of stuff (or pretends I don’t) and who continues to maintain her adorable ass.

But I am always searching my memory for story ideas and this just happened to be one I wanted to explore— it was a lot of fun to write. I wondered what it might be like to get a second chance and in order to explore some comedy, what it might be like to try to talk some sense into your "old self" and attempt to teach the young idiot a thing or two. My favorite scene is where Alan walks in on the two of them. After I wrote that, I thought I had something a little special — a worthwhile story to tell.

Now I did spend a little time at fertility clinics in my day and I'm pretty sure if my wife and I hadn't finally succeeded in getting her pregnant that we probably would have ended up divorced. Fertility issues can be complicated, emotional and stressful, I know… All of that was the genesis of this crazy time-travel story.

Again hope you enjoyed it and if you haven't had the pleasure of getting to know Jillian, Brian, Victoria and the wacky and naughty gang in my Friends With… Benefits series, please check out the beginning of book one,
Friends With Partial Benefits,
below.

Luke Young

Jillian Grayson sat up in bed, typing away on the keyboard of her laptop computer. She wore a nightshirt that wasn’t all that sexy, but what she was typing was… or at least it started out that way...

Dallas lay in bed, unable to sleep and wondering if Katrina was suffering the same fate—and for the very same reason. Did she want him as much as he wanted her? Katrina was but a few steps away, yet he dare not go to her, for he was a guest, and then there was Katrina’s mother, who was just across the hall. For Dallas, sleep came minutes later, but it would be short-lived, for soon Katrina stood over him, completely nude and pondering how to proceed...

Dallas must have been in a deep sleep, since he didn’t feel it when Katrina peeled the sheet carefully off him, exposing his muscular body, six-pack abs, and sizeable manhood. She quivered when his impressiveness sprang into view. For a long time, she kneeled next to the bed, just studying his body and savoring his scent. Taking his sex into her hand, Katrina worked it until it was rigid while she watched him sleep. When Dallas woke, he looked into her eyes, swallowed hard, and whispered, "I’ve been waiting for you."

Just as fast as his sex expanded, it lost its firmness and flopped against his leg. Katrina looked down at it in disappointment and then moaned in frustration. "What’s wrong?"

Dallas said sheepishly, "Sometimes that happens to me. Sorry. Ever since I cheated on my wife with that whore in the pool, I haven’t been able to—"

Jillian stopped typing and thought she might be heading in the wrong direction with this. How did her ex-husband get into the story? But then again, most men are assholes, she thought.

Picking up the glass of wine from her nightstand, she took a long sip and then replaced it. She highlighted the last paragraph about Dallas’s problem, hit one key, and it was gone. Just like his boner. She laughed out loud.

Jillian wasn’t exactly in the correct frame of mind to write at the moment, especially on this particular subject. She stared straight ahead and wondered about the likelihood of Dallas slipping in the shower, striking his head, and dying instantly. Or maybe an earthquake could strike, and Dallas’s amazingly perfect body would be trapped under a giant beam.

What the hell kind of name was
Dallas
anyway? She thought she might want to give her character a real name like Stewart but figured no one would believe that a guy named Stewart could give you six consecutive orgasms in one night.

What was she doing, anyway, writing novels about people having amazing sex when she’d never had any? Okay, maybe once or twice twenty years ago, but none since then. She had no right. If people knew that she was the one writing these books, they wouldn’t buy them. She was a fraud.

Jillian picked up her wineglass and took another long drink. She grinned, wiped those unhelpful thoughts from her mind, and started typing again...

Katrina took his sex in her hand and worked it until it was rigid. As she studied it closely, Katrina noticed two red bumps on the underside of his pathetic excuse for a penis. She recoiled in horror
—

Jillian hit the backspace key to erase everything after Dallas’s "sex" started expanding. Romance novels about erectile dysfunction and STDs weren’t exactly big sellers. She closed the lid on the laptop and tossed it gently onto a pillow at the foot of the bed. She emptied her wineglass with one last sip and turned on the television.

Jillian Grayson wrote under the pen name of Jaclyn West. She’d written fourteen bestsellers so far and had more money than she needed flowing in, so her next novel could wait. The book royalties had paid for her large, beautiful house in Miami. She still had plenty of money, even after the divorce, which forced her to part with nearly half of her earnings to her bastard ex-husband.

She’d never forget the day she came home early from a book tour and found George performing oral sex on that slut in the pool, the pool she had paid for and an act he rarely, if ever, did for her. Jillian always thought he hated oral sex or, more specifically, he hated the giving part. But there he was, naked, standing in the shallow end of the pool, and going to work on some other woman as she floated in the pool on a ring, which Jillian had also paid for. The pool oral sex thing actually looked like it might be kind of fun, and Jillian often wondered why George had never once tried that on her.

That day, when Jillian spotted them from the second floor balcony off their bedroom, she had watched for a little longer than she’d care to admit. Maybe that was because all her erotic romance writing had left her desensitized to sex, at least a little. At first, it didn’t seem real; it was as if she was visualizing a scene for a book, not watching her husband cheat on her.

When she finally came back to earth, Jillian left the house and went to the side of the pool. She snuck up on the adulterous couple and stood there until the woman being serviced noticed they had an audience. The woman tapped George on the shoulder to get his attention. When George turned around, he had a guilty look on his face that Jillian would never forget. Jillian wouldn’t let the naked woman back in the house to get her clothes. She simply threw the clothes out the door. The woman was forced to get dressed outside and shamefully leave through the back gate. George went into the house, got dressed, and left through the front door. It was the last time he ever set foot inside.

Jillian didn’t cry that day; instead, she put on a pair of kitchen gloves and retrieved the ring float from the pool. When her attempts to drain the float of air through the valve seemed to be taking too long, she stabbed it ten times with scissors. That could possibly have been overkill, but it did the trick and gave her a much-needed outlet for her rage. Jillian called a company to have the pool drained, scrubbed, and refilled at the cost of fifteen hundred dollars. It was worth it, she thought, because she would never have been able to dip a toe in the pool until every last drop of that contaminated water was replaced.

She imagined what George had been up to all those times she was traveling. What types of women had he explored in and out of the pool? How long had he been screwing around and with how many women? Although Jillian was out of town quite a bit, she had never suspected anything, since George never seemed to be sneaking around, nor was he ever evasive about where he was going or what he had planned. Their sex life was never great or very active, but he seemed to be an attentive and loyal husband—at least, most of the time.