“I believed that too. Until you. Now I believe that we are bound to one another, predisposed to be together. I’m yours. No take-backs.”
When she coughs on a choked laugh, I glance up and find her staring at me incredulously. “Did you seriously just say no take-backs?”
“Yes,” I say, sliding a plate across the counter to her. “I belong to you now.”
“You belong to me?” she splutters.
“And you belong to me.” I point at her sandwich. “Eat,” I order.
Her expression is still adorably confused, but she does as I say and picks up her sandwich, taking a small bite. We eat in companionable silence, me standing on one side of the counter, she on the other.
The clock ticks loudly as each minute closer to 1400 hours passes, driving me to eat quicker than usual, and I’m brushing crumbs from my fingers onto my empty plate before she’s finished half of hers.
“We need to go shopping for furniture,” I tell her. “I bought a few things, so the rooms weren’t empty when we moved in, but we can choose the rest together. Does your gothic aesthetic extend to your interior decor preferences, or is it just your clothes?”
“Knight, I don’t live here. I’m not living here with you.”
“Would you prefer us to live somewhere else? I’m still renting the house on Jumpers Row, a few doors down from Etta. We could live there if you’d prefer, although as I’ve taken a leave of absence for the next six months, the house might be assigned to my replacement.”
Blinking, Doll looks up at me with a haunted, lost look in her eyes. “You really believe all of this, don’t you?”
“I believe that I’m yours and that you’re mine, yes.”
“And you think we’re just going to move in together?”
“We will be living together. Either here, the house on the row, or a place in town, if that’s what you’d prefer.”
“And what if I don’t want to live with you?” she sasses, arching her brows at me.
“You do,” I say simply.
“How can you say that? You don’t know me. I definitely don’t know you.”
“Because you don’t have one-night stands, yet you’ve let me fuck your cunt twice, and I bet if I picked you up, you’d let me slip my cock right back into you again. You opened the door to me, let me bathe you, then got on a plane with me and let me fly you out of the state. I don’t know every detail about you, but I know that deep in your soul, you feel how right this is. That’s why you know that we both needed me to fuck you. It’s why you know that this is your home. It’s why you’re standing there naked beneath my shirt and wondering how it’ll feel when I bend you over this counter and fuck my cum back into you again.”
I’m thirty-eight years old, and this is the most impassioned I’ve ever felt about anything. I never belonged anywhere until I moved to this town, and it became my home. My smoke jumper teammates became my brothers and my family. But Octavia, my perfect doll, is everything, and I won’t let something as stupid as societal conceptions ruin this.
She doesn’t speak, and neither do I. I’ve said what I need to say, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s it, and the wedding tomorrow will confirm it.
Finishing her sandwich quietly, she takes the bottle of water I offer her, then watches pensively as I fill the sink with suds and wash our dishes, drying them with a dish towel before I put everything away. Once I’ve finished cleaning the counters, thekitchen is immaculate and exactly how it looked before I started preparing our food.
Once I’m finished, I circle the counter, lift her off her feet, then carry her over to the black leather couch I purchased for us and sit down, positioning her on my lap. My shirt is huge on her, big enough to cover her from her neck to her knees, but with her legs straddling mine, I can feel her bare skin against me as she wiggles to get comfortable.
Reaching for the iPad I left out with this purpose in mind, I unlock the screen, then hand it to her. “Start looking for furniture,” I tell her.
“You should pick it,” she starts.
“I’ve never decorated anything before, so unless you want our home to look like this forever, you should pick what you like.”
“You’ve never decorated your home?” she asks, the surprise evident in her voice.
“This is the first home I’ve ever had.”
“Where did you live before you came to Rockhead Point?”
“I spent two years in Idaho, a few years in Oregon, and before that I was in California.”
“And you never decorated?” she asks, arching an eyebrow at me imperiously.
