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There’s nothing official about this night after night affair. I just keep ending up here. Along with Alice. Soul Girl. She’s always here, right along with me.

At first, it was an ok, one more night, plain and simple. I took Jack’s cock like a champion for three hours straight because Alice was so battered down below that she was considering a visit to her doctor. Jack just shrugged and told her she’d be fine. Then it was one more night after that. Alice took us one after the other in her tight wet pussy after three glasses of wine and a couple of paracetamol.

It was Alice who raised the bar on night three, leaving a pair of heels by Jack’s sofa and not taking them home. So, screw it, on night number four I grab a spare shirt for the day after tomorrow, because I have meetings first thing and can’t be arsed for an emergency wardrobe detour.

Jack, naturally, takes that as a victory. He holds up my pristine shirt like a trophy.

“Go, BT,” he says. “Big step. A therapist would be so fucking proud of you.”

I try to snatch it back off him, but he leaps around the living room in his boxers, holding it high over his head. Asshole.

“I haven’t exactly moved in to your playboy abode, jackass. I’m just being prepared.”

“This shirt says otherwise. It says you’re confronting your inhibitions.”

“It’s one shirt, Jack, for fuck’s sake.”

His smirk is infuriatingly beautiful.

“That’s how it starts, isn’t it? Shirt. Toothbrush. Emotional dependency. Joint Netflix profile. Matching slippers.” He laughs. “Now, cut the crap and get me that bloody toastie maker, will you? Or I’m going to take your key in the middle of the night and go get it for myself.”

I shrug. “Too late. I binned it.”

Jack stops dead. “You did fucking what?”

“Binned it. Wasn’t getting any use, so…”

Then the penny drops. He throws my shirt at me when he realises I’m joking.

“Bastard!”

Alice laughs so hard she nearly chokes on her prosecco.

It’s contagious. I can’t help laughing, too.

And that’s the thing.

We laugh. All the bloody time.

I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to laugh like this. Not the polite business chuckle. The one I use when Bill makes a dry joke across the boardroom and everyone knows how amused they’re expected to be. Real laughter. Stomach-deep laughter. The kind that catches us and escalates until Alice is wiping her eyes, I’m clutching my sides, and Jack is grinning like he invented humour just to show off. He probably did.

It reminds me of when Alice and I were young.

Except there was one major ingredient we were missing back then.

Nothing about the blond god of laughter, Jack Reid, could ever be compared to the innocence of teenage summers. But the spirit is the same. That feeling of the world falling away behind the freedom of hilarity.

Only now there’s more.

More danger. More heat. More tangled limbs and desperate flesh. More kisses that I want to last for eternity. More mornings where I wake up with Alice’s hair across my chest and Jack’s foot shoved against my shin while he spreads like a starfish.

More pretending it won’t all come crashing down.

I’m getting good at that.

Dangerously good.

It hasn’t even been a full week yet, but I’m better at masking than I ever believed I could be. Or maybe not. Maybe the mask has just flipped on itself and is facing a new direction.