“Yeah, yeah, likely excuse,” he said, giving me a smirk as he lowered me onto the bed.
“Shouldn’t we put the sheets on the bed?” I asked, looking at the large quilt he had spread across the bare mattress.
“Why?” he asked, seeming genuinely confused by the idea.
“Don’t you have a fitted sheet on your bed?”
“Guess mine looks a lot like this,” he said, waving at the bed. “‘Cept my mattress is in one of those bags.”
“Bags?”
“Seals around it, keeps bugs and water and shit like that out of it. Got burned too many times growing up. Know better now.”
“Men,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m assuming you don’t have a headboard either.”
“What do I need a headboard for? I’m not sitting up in bed. I barely sleep,” he added.
“Why?”
“Rather be working.”
“I mean, I like sleeping. But I get what you mean. I have a little bit of a lingering scarcity mindset I need to work through. I tend to work late.”
“Recording,” he said, going into the closet.
“Yeah.”
“I listened to a few.”
“You… listened to a few of the books I narrated?” I asked, not sure if I was delighted—or embarrassed—by that. Especially given that I mostly narrated books that got pretty spicy. And the things I read were things I would normally never say in real life.
“Yeah,” he said, turning back with another sealed bag; a smirk toyed with his lips. “Wasn’t helping the whole ‘I need to keep my hands off you’ thing. Get some sleep. I’m taking a quick shower.”
Some part of me wanted to join him when I heard the water turn on.
The other part, though, felt like every muscle in my body had its own pulse. That was how bad I was aching.
So instead, I just listened to the water under the covers until Venezio came out in a pair of low-slung pajama pants in the same exact pattern as mine.
“Guess they bought the clothes in bulk, huh?” I asked as he shot me a smirk before pulling on a sweatshirt that also looked like the one I had on, albeit in white and a larger size.
“You should be sleeping,” he said, climbing onto the bed.
I slipped the blankets over him and his hand curled under me, drawing me up to his side.
Then the two of us slowly drifted off.
It was the best night of sleep of my life.
And I had no idea if I could thank the exercise and adrenaline for that… or Venezio’s body at my side.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Venezio
I woke up with a start, feeling disoriented and slow.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize I wasn’t even in bed alone. Even though Steph had half-climbed on top of me in her sleep.
