One Dirty Night

My car’s heater coughed, almost as if it laughed at me.

But it’s your birthday…

Gritting my teeth, I flicked my wipers on full speed to get rid of the incriminating flyer. So what? I was another year older. That meant I was another year wiser, not stupider.

I was going home to do what I did every night. Eat something bland, watch something boring, and go to bed. Alone.

I sighed in relief as the invitation tore into pieces under my wiper’s attack and plopped into the gutter. No way did I want my flatmate to see that. If I was a deviant pretending to be a prude, he was a straight-up, no libido puritan. I’d never met someone so aghast at seeing the smallest flash of flesh before.

The first time he’d seen me dash down our shared corridor from the bathroom in just my towel, he’d glowered at me so hard my skin broke out in hives. He’d left a note on the fridge the following morning telling me it was inappropriate to be in such stages of undress when we were colleagues and sharing a home as well as a workplace.

I hadn’t been able to make eye contact with him for a week.

Which was difficult because we worked at the same lab. Luckily, ever since that day, he’d changed his hours. Our shifts sometimes overlapped, but we never spent longer than an hour or two in each other’s company.

Which was fine by me.

I just wished we could figure out a roster like that for our weekends. I might not have much of a life, but at least I enjoyed going out to dinner with friends and doing my best not to waste the time I’d been given.

But Nicholas?

He made friends with meningococcal and the flu, losing himself in YouTube videos on the latest cure using ivermectin and fenbendazole. He might be a biochemist by trade, but I think he dreamed of ending the world’s suffering with a magic pill he could give away for free.

That purpose drove him hard.

To bring down Big Pharma.

To give health to billions.

His one-track mind made him the worst sort of flatmate because compared to him, I felt like some silly girl playing with a microscope while he was some disciple sent straight from heaven to do godly work.

I had doubts he was even a hot-blooded man.

Compared to the guy who’d just winked at me, I’d have to say a big fat no. Even though Nicholas wasn’t bad looking. In fact, he was bookishly handsome with a neatly trimmed beard and an envy-inducing mop of brown hair bordering on bronze that flopped over his forehead. I found his habit of pushing it out of his eyes colossally annoying—including his toned, stupid muscles from working out in our lounge and running around the park. And don’t get me started on the sculptured jaw, visible whenever he was clean shaven—a jawline that some roguishly good-looking ancestor had given him.

Fine, bookishly handsome was more like deliciously handsome, but it didn’t make up for his lacking personality. He didn’t make jokes, barely looked at me, and had no drive for anything but microbiology.

Living with him was like living with a sedative.

My stomach flip-flopped as I eased back into traffic and drove on autopilot all the way home. Why did the sex-maniac circus have to stop a block away from my house? Why did I have to drive past it? And why, oh why, was I pissed about it?

It meant nothing to me.

People could do whatever the hell they wanted.

It’s a free country.

I didn’t have to go.

I didn’t need a good time in the form of a black-haired man with abs like an old-fashioned washing machine.

Definitely not.

Nope.

What man?

See?