Free No Need to Ask by Margo Candela

 
     
    One
     
     
    Jillian squinted her already closed eyes. As much as she wanted to go back to sleep, the scratchy texture of the sheets against her bare skin wouldn’t let her relax. She shifted to her side, hoping that less surface contact would let her doze back off. Nope. She turned to her other side, but it was just as bad.
    “Go back to sleep,” grumbled Owen. He was just as naked as Jillian, but apparently oblivious to the dismally low thread count of the hotel sheets that were rubbing her naked body in all the wrong ways and places. “I can’t!” Jillian threw off the offending linens and jumped out of bed, leaving her ex-husband to yank the tangle of over-laundered sandpaper back over himself. “Look! I have a rash… and it better be from the sheets.”
    “Funny, Jillian.” Owen grunted and buried his head under a pillow as Jillian opened the curtains, revealing the Los Angeles airport in the near distance. “My flight call time isn’t till noon. Come back to bed.”
    “I’ve had more than enough of that, but thanks.” Jillian picked up his discarded button-down shirt and put it on.
    “That’s not what you said last night,” Owen said, coming up from underneath the pillow. He crossed his arms behind his head so she could better see the smug look on his handsome face. “Or last week, or the week before that…”
    “Don’t flatter yourself. If there had been something to watch on TV, I would have let your call go straight to voicemail.” Jillian kicked aside her sneakers so they were closer to her pile of clothes by the bathroom door.
    “It was a text.” Owen gave her a raffish grin, his even white teeth gleaming against his dark stubble. “And we both know you’d never deny yourself a first class trip on the Owen Express.”
    “Who would have thought getting a divorce was the best thing we could have done for our relationship?” Jillian focused on rolling up the sleeves of his shirt, letting her dark hair fall in front of her face. “Scratch that. Divorce has worked wonders for our sex life.”
    Within a year of signing the papers, they’d fallen into a comfortable routine of dinners, drinks and great sex at whatever hotel Owen was staying in. Sometimes they just skipped to the sex because neither of them was under the impression that they had gotten together for anything as wholesome as a date.
    “And I couldn’t be happier about it,” Owen laughed. He reached for his pilot’s cap, setting it on his head at a jaunty angle. “There’s no one I’d rather be divorced from than you, Jilly.”
    “Obviously.” She gestured to his lap where the sheet was tented. She picked up his blue suit pants and jacket, smoothing them over the back of the desk chair. “We can’t keep doing this.”
    “I can,” Owen said. “And, if we hurry, we can do it again before you have to leave for work.”
    Jillian ignored him, something she’d learned to do selectively during their brief marriage. She swept her hair up into a messy bun, using a hotel pen to hold it in place. “If I had a therapist, she’d be very upset with me.”
    “Who cares? We got married, it didn’t work out, we stayed friends and now we’re enjoying the benefits of our friendship.” Owen put on his watch, an Omega that Jillian had given him for their first wedding anniversary, even though they’d both known it’d be their last. He held up his arm and admired the way it looked on his tanned wrist. “It works for us. Why overanalyze it?”
    Jillian frowned at the nondescript furniture and art. It was a typical mid-priced airport hotel room, but it and her ex had looked much more appealing in the near-dark of the night before.
    “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because I’m 33 and you’re 35 and most of our friends, who are also in their 30s, are settled and having kids?” Jillian scooped up her clothes, her bare feet protesting slightly as they touched the cold bathroom tiles. “Maybe because I feel a little cheap