“I love you,” I tell him.
His lips meet the back of my head in response, and I know that he’s saying it back to me.
I reach forward to turn off the lamp sitting on my nightstand, shrouding the room in complete darkness other than the soft light coming off of the TV. I consider, for a second, turning the volume on it up for Eric, but knowing him, if he wanted it louder, he would make it happen.
The rise and fall of his chest against my body soothes me into a state of heavy drowsiness, and after no more than twenty minutes, I can feel myself starting to doze off, but not before I hear Eric whisper against my hair.
“You awake, Sugar?”
I don’t move, I don’t respond. If I do, it will scare away the thing that I most look forward to every night.
I feel the hard beating of his heart against my back while he somehow manages to pull me in closer to him; or maybe it justfeelscloser because of the way that his muscles tense up.
“I love you.”
THIRTY-THREE
Davis
It’s a little after four fifteen when I wake up, and Sophia’s still dead to the world asleep, so I figure now’s as good a time as any to do a little snooping through her shit. I carefully slip out of her bed, taking a second to really look at the way it’s set up. Her mattress is tucked into a wrought-iron frame, with only one side open; the side that I slept on. The side that she slept on is pressed up against the wall, tucked into the corner of the room. It’s not a huge space, but there’s enough room that she could have put the frame in the middle and left it more open.
She needs the security.
It makes her feel safer.
I grab the blankets bunched near her waist and pull them up, tucking them in around her shoulders before moving to the nightstand next to her bed. I crouch down and open the top drawer, met with a glass dildo and a bright pink vibrator, a bottle of Astroglide, the remote to her TV, and a book. In the drawer underneath it, she’s got a little glittery journal with a couple different colors of equally-glittery pens sitting on top of it –she doesn’t like glitter, my ass -and another tube of lotion like the one sitting on top of the nightstand along with the lamp and the box of tissues. There’s a bundle of tangled uphair elastics I’ve never seen her use, and a check for one hundred thousand dollars from yours truly.
She never deposited the fucking thing.
I look over at her, curled up in that bed, and all I want to do is wake her up and drag her little ass to the bank – after I rip her a new asshole for not taking the damn money. But I decide to let her keep sleeping and I slap the check onto the nightstand instead, then I head for her desk.
She’s got a couple of plants up here that look like they probably haven’t been watered in a couple weeks, some figurines of animals with cartoonishly large heads, and a few framed photos; some with Ava, others with people I haven’t met, and a couple with people who look like they could be her parents. Her laptop sits next to some brochures for a couple of those nail schools that she’s been talking about in the middle of the desk, closed, and I fight the urge to flip it open and see what she’s been up to.
I spend the next two hours sitting next to her in her bed, watching crappy TV with one hand resting on her hip. I don’t dare move my hand for the next two hours, until her alarm goes off. Even then, I keep it on her while she takes her time waking up. She’s so fucking cute when she’s barely awake. Her eyes flutter open about halfway as she slides her arm across my body and snuggles into my chest with a satisfied sigh.
We spend another half hour like this, just fucking holding onto each other withGeneral Hospitalacting as background noise, before we finally decide it’s time to get up and have some coffee and something to eat.
Sophia grabs a bag of coffee grounds and works to set up the machine while I pull up a delivery app on my phone and load up an order of probably too much food for the two of us, but I think her roommate’s still here, so he can have some, too, if he wants.
“You didn’t deposit the check,” I finally say, slipping my phone back into my pocket.
“You went through my stuff?”
I shrug. “You were sleeping. I had time to kill.”
“Insufferable,” she grits out, pouring coffee into her mug. “No, I didn’t deposit it, and I’m not going to.”
I strut around the counter, pressing my chest against the back of her, and I pull her hair over her shoulder. “That leaves me with a couple fun options, then,” I tell her. “I can work my magic to get it into your account, with a few extra zeroes just to make yourealmad, or I can have you put onto my account and get you a card. Maybe I’ll even buy you a house or two.”
“I’m not taking any more of your money,” she tells me, throwing her ass against me to shove me away from her, and I laugh. “It’s yours.”
“Everything of mine’s gonna be yours one day, anyway—”
My heart fucking stops and I freeze. I feel her freeze, too.
Fuck me.
It feels like an hour goes by while neither of us move, or breathe, or fucking speak.
