Exes Ignite at the Wedding Reception

I shouldn’t have gone to Jasmine’s wedding. Standing there in the ballroom of the old downtown hotel, champagne flute sweating in my hand, I told myself it was just for her. My best friend since college deserved every bit of the fairy-tale reception—string lights, open bar, that ridiculous chocolate fountain. But the second I spotted him across the crowded dance floor, every carefully constructed wall I’d built over the past year crumbled.

Marcus. Tall, broad-shouldered, that same damn jawline that used to make me wet just looking at it. White boy from the suburbs who’d spent two years buried between my dark thighs like he couldn’t get enough of the contrast. We’d burned hot and fast—fucking in his truck, in my apartment, once against the wall of a club bathroom—until the fights about futures and families pulled us apart. I’d sworn I was over him. Then our eyes locked, and the heat hit me low and immediate, a throb right between my legs. He remembered too. I saw it in the way his blue eyes darkened, the slight flare of his nostrils. Family and friends all around us, laughing, clinking glasses, and here we were, two exes who used to destroy each other in bed, pretending civility was even an option.

I tried to ignore it. Circulated. Hugged Jasmine, complimented her dress, danced with her little cousin. But every time I glanced up, Marcus was watching. Charged looks that stripped me bare right there under the chandeliers. Finally he cut through the crowd during a slow song, hand brushing my elbow like it was accidental.

“Aaliyah,” he said, voice low, that familiar gravel. “You look… fuck. You look incredible.”

Small talk on the edge of the dance floor turned electric fast. How’s work, how’s your mom, all the polite bullshit while his fingers traced the inside of my wrist and my nipples hardened against the silk of my dress. “I still think about you,” he murmured, leaning in so only I could hear. “The way you used to come on my cock. The sounds you made.”