MY EX'S BEST FRIEND

Spark

I leaned against the bathroom door and let the fabric of his shirt press to my face. It smelled like him—warm, faintly citrus with the sharp, clean scent of whatever soap he used—and the smell unlocked something I hadn’t felt in a long time. It eased into my chest like a hand smoothing a crumpled page, and the memory of other men evaporated. Even Rohan — the man I had loved for two years, who lingered in my thoughts like a dull bruise — couldn’t compete. This scent was immediate, intimate, as if the shirt remembered every movement of his skin.

“What are you doing, Ivy?” His voice from the other side of the door made my pulse ricochet. I had no good answer. Why had I lingered so long in the shower? Why had I buried my face in his shirt and breathed until the room wavered? Perhaps because the shirt was a small theft from him, and thievery had a rush all its own. Perhaps because the tattoos had been doing something to me that wasn’t purely visual; their curve and shadow felt like punctuation marks in the sentences of my body.

After three months of an exercise in restraint—celibate, if one could call it that—the want inside me had calcified into a hard, honest ache. I wanted him the way you want hot water on a cold night: not for poetry but for survival. I wanted him to lift me, pin me to a wall, and adopt that low, confident tone he used at the club when he said he wouldn’t leave me there. I wanted the certainty of being desired by someone who hadn’t been taught to hide that desire.

“Ivy.” When he used my name, not the ridiculous nickname he preferred, it landed differently—older, more deliberate. “You can’t stay there forever.” I sighed and smoothed the fabric over my hips. The shirt hung to mid-thigh, the same length as my dress, but its smell made it more luxurious than any silk.

Cole waited in the doorway, shirtless and towering in the doorway like a dark promise. Even in the dim light, his skin looked almost carved, the muscles catching the glow. He moved toward me with the casual confidence of someone who knew his effect. “Why are you hiding?” he asked, stopping close enough that his breath warmed the space between us.

“I was showering,” I lied, because calling it what it was—savoring his scent, stealing a piece of him—felt like admitting defeat.

He lifted one brow, unconvinced. “For twenty minutes? And ten minutes to put on a shirt?” His mouth tilted at the corners; amusement and something warmer threaded through his voice. He closed the last distance between us until his chest almost met mine. The heat radiating from him was immediate and physical, a pressure at my sternum that matched the ache below.

“You do look good in my shirt,” he said, and his hand moved to the nape of my neck, fingers disentangling my braids with fluid, practised motion. When he drew the hair back, his thumb brushed the slope of my throat. My n*****s hardened against the fabric, sharp points that betrayed how much his nearness affected me. He watched them, eyes shadowed, then licked his lower lip slowly as if tasting the idea of me.

His fingers drifted down my arm and, with a feather-light touch, brushed over one breast. “Very sensitive,” he observed, then squeezed—firm, possessive. The pressure sent a wave through me, one part shock, and three parts relief. I hadn’t expected to let go of control so easily. I inhaled, and my ribs rose, following the direction of his hand as though my body had its own language he could read.

He chuckled softly, a low sound that made the hairs on my arms stand up. “Are you wearing any panties, Ivy?” he asked in that tone that made the word sound like a private joke.

“No. They’re in my bag. I washed the other pair.” My voice came out smaller than I meant it to, but the answer was true. There was a childish thrill in confessing.

His hand found my waist, fingers mapping the curve with a possessive loop. He pulled me flush to him, and I melted into the contact. The world narrowed: the grain of wood under his elbow, the faint hum of the extractor fan, the distant thud of music from someone else's party. “You smell like my soap,” he murmured against my temple. “I like that.”

The question slid out of me before I could swallow it. “What are we doing, Cole?” I wanted boundaries, an anchor, some sign he wouldn’t become a storm.

He tilted his head, and the light along his jaw softened. “I’m enjoying having you in my hands,” he said simply. “Smelling like my soap. Want me to let go?” The offer was rhetorical; there was an entire world of patience and temptation folded into it.

“No,” I breathed. “I like your hands on me.” Their certainty steadied me. His fingers flexed, the muscles in his forearm tightening under silk and skin. “You’re treading on dangerous ground,” he murmured.

“I’m drunk; you can’t expect me to think straight,” I countered, lifting my face to look at him. I was acutely aware of how short I felt beside him—an effect both literal and metaphorical.

“Who said I’m sober?” he retorted with a grin. “I was drinking, remember?” His chest rose deliberately as he let the implication hang between us.

I let my gaze wander over the map of ink on his body, committing details to memory like a thief memorizes a safe combination. A flame coiled across his right bicep, licking toward his shoulder. A skeletal hand gripped a compass on the other arm, ribs of bone etched with uncanny care. A rose in flames bled toward his torso, petals and embers braided together. And along his spine, where it dipped low, a dagger threaded with roses plunged into the skin; a vine slipped into an hourglass near his hip, one grain of sand perpetually caught between youthful freedom and inevitable caution.

“You enjoying yourself?” I asked, reckless in how easily the words fell out now. My throat tightened with want; I tasted the salt of earlier tears and the metallic tang of alcohol on my lips.

He choked on a laugh, a quick cough that dissolved the tension into something more tender. Then he stepped back, not out of disinterest but of choice. “As much as I’d like to,” he said, voice roughening in a way that made the vowels heavy, “you’re drunk. We’ll revisit this when you’re sober and can tell me if you mean it.”

He guided me toward the bed with a hand at my lower back—firm, but not forceful—and eased me down among the sheets that smelled unmistakably of him. “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll bring you some water.” It was practical and absurdly intimate, as if in that small act he claimed a caretaking right over me.

When he turned, my eyes snagged on the art trailing down the expanse of his back. The dagger and roses were darker in the softer light; the vines seemed almost to move. Where the vine kissed an hourglass by his hip, it was like a secret invitation—time and desire braided together. My gaze fell lower still, and I found myself looking at a shape that made me blush: his ass, round and solid, the kind of thing that suggested motion and strength. He caught me mid-stare and grinned, the look equal parts warning and invitation. “Stop staring at me, Ivy, or I will come back there and have my way with you.”

Heat flamed up my neck, and I turned my face to the pillow, cheeks burning. I tried to will my breath into steadiness, attempted to fold myself into sleep, but the nerves under my skin hummed loudly. The scent of him in the sheets wrapped around my shoulders like an arm, steady and warm.

In the shifting quiet, my mind went to Rohan—his easy charm, the slow ways he’d undermined me until doubt nested like a parrot on my shoulder. Rohan had made me feel unworthy of attention; he’d rehearsed the cuts and called them concern. Every time someone else looked at me with something other than pity, I flinched. Yet Cole’s presence felt different: blunt, honest, a kind of unembellished hunger that didn’t masquerade as care. It both thrilled and terrified me.

I lay there, a tangle of cotton and want, sipping at the grey edges of memory and the pungent present. The nickname he'd used—the one that had always felt small and a little cruel—now felt like a spark he’d struck inside me. It was tiny but stubborn, the ember of something that might grow.

Cole’s POV

Three weeks had been long enough for a constant ache to make itself comfortable in my chest. I still remembered the exact way she’d folded into my couch that night, her hair loose, her laughter a little brittle from too much drink. She’d stayed because I’d told her it was an airbnb; she’d stayed because she needed to be somewhere that wasn’t his apartment, not that she said it aloud. After that weekend, I wanted more than a memory. I wanted the messy, tangible presence of her in my bed.

She was mine by proximity and circumstance—my best friend’s ex—and that complicated everything in a way that was delicious. The moral calculus did not interest me as much as the simple fact of her: the way she smelled like someone I could imagine waking beside for months, the way her skin looked under my hand, the soft exhale she made when I touched her shoulder. I’d given her my shirt partly to be kind, partly to keep something of her with me, and maybe partly to bait myself into longing.

I had her number, but I hadn’t called. There’s a threshold in desire where the risk of actually touching outweighs the safety of yearning; I hadn’t decided whether I wanted to break that final barrier. Calling would mean inviting her over and risking more than a shirt or a story. Calling would mean revealing that I’d thought of her between trainings, that I’d replayed the angle of her jaw when she laughed, the way her mouth softened around certain words.

Rohan—god, Rohan—was on the other side of a thin wall in the dorm, and his idea of privacy was an open-door policy for noise. I had banged on the wall earlier, not just to shut the shouting but to announce that I was still here, still breathing and still trying to focus. My scholarship meant I slept under the same roof as both of them sometimes, and that proximity had done the rest. I tried to study, muscles straining, but the rhythm of my thoughts kept stumbling on images of Ivy in my shirt.

I gave up and worked out instead. Repetition clears the head in a way nothing else does: a metronome of sweat and movement that makes the rest of the world recede. Still, the ache didn’t leave. It moved, pooled, and then returned, stubborn as a shadow. And each time I imagined her sleeping in the bed I had abandoned minutes ago, the desire for something more tightened like a band across my ribs.