It might have seemed odd to anyone else to sit in silence with someone you know is hurting one moment and for both of you to act like it never happened the next. But it didn’t strike me as strange at all.
I’d expect nothing less from either one of us and whatever this fucked up dynamic between us was.
“See ya around.” Wes walked out, and I had just started to close the door when he called out to me. “Hey, Morgan…” I paused, peering around the door into the hallway. He rubbed the back of his neck, looking at me with what I could have sworn was a foreign hint of self-consciousness. “…Thank you.”
I hadn’t been expecting that.
I held his stare transiently, and for that brief moment, it was almost as if we were…friends.
“You’re welcome.”
Chapter 21
“Wes!”I heard Morgan shout my name from her bathroom. My brow furrowed as I pulled my shirt over my head, but before I could respond, the door flung open. “What the hell isthis?”
A laugh rumbled out of me when she pointed to the red mark on the side of her neck, her eyes wide with mortification. “Looks like a hickey to me.” She shot me a murderous glare, not finding my straightforward sarcasm as humorous as I did. “I literally sucked for like…two point five seconds! I barely latched on!”
“Does this look likebarelyto you?” I looked at the red mark again, bringing my fist to my mouth to muffle my snort. “It’s not funny!”
“It’s alittlefunny.”
“Wes!”
“Okay, okay! Jesus, calm down, alright? I know how to fix it.”
“You can’tfixa hickey!”
“Just sit tight.” I turned toward her bedroom door. “Trust me.”
“Trustyou? That’s absolutely terrifying.”
I threw a middle finger over my shoulder before disappearing down the hall.
Morgan just returned from Aruba late last night, where she’d been on an extended vacation for two weeks for her brother’s destination wedding. I sent a message to see if she wanted to meet upbeforewe headed to the bar for Saturday night out. She’d messaged back and told me to come over.
Once again…simple, easy, straight to the point.Perfect.
Making that deal with her four months ago had turned out well in my favor. I hadn’t had much better luck in the flings and casual dates department than before we made it. I’d met some women here and there just as she had gone on dates of her own, but they didn’t go anywhere. I swore everyone in this damn town was looking for commitment all of a sudden.
I walked into Morgan’s kitchen and opened a few drawers until I found the one with utensils. I grabbed what I needed, then turned to the cabinet behind me to get a glass, filling it with crushed ice before making my way back down the hall.
When I returned, she arched her brow curiously. “Why do you have a spoon in ice?”
“Just come here.”
We sat on her bed, and she pulled her hair to the side, exposing her neck and the red mark. I chuckled as I looked at it. I wasn’t a hickey kind of a guy, so I wasn’t sure what came over me. The only excuse I could come up with was that it’d been a month, and when I saw her, she looked all sunkissed and hot from her time in the Caribbean. And she had on this red tank top, and something about her in red did things to me. Needlessto say, I got a little carried away. But I swore it was only a couple of seconds. It wasn’t my fault she had sensitive skin.
I took the spoon out of the icy glass, pressing the back of it against the red mark, earning a small hiss from her. “What the hell is an ice-cold spoon going to do?”
“A hickey makes the blood vessels break and leak, and the cold makes them vasoconstrict—or tighten up—so they don’t keep leaking.”
She slid her eyes over to me, furrowing her brow. “How do you know that? And words like vasoconstrict?”
“My mom was a doctor. My sister is a nurse, almost an NP. And I watched a lot of Greys. I’m basically a medical professional by default.”
“Jesus Christ,” she whispered.
“Just shut up and let me work.” I pressed the spoon more firmly against her skin. “You know, maybe that two seconds was all Karma needed.”
