“Closer to ten, actually.”
“And you didn’t—” I tried to pull away, but his hand came up to cover mine where it rested on his stomach, holding me in place.
“Didn’t what? Alert you to the fact that you’d become a human octopus in your sleep?” He sounded amused. Warm. Not at all bothered by the fact that I’d been using him as a teddy bear. “You felt good. I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Farley.” He turned in my arms—which meant I now had to look directly at his face, at his sleep-rumpled hair and his soft smile and his eyes that were far too knowing for this early in the morning. “I didn’t mind.”
“You should mind. We agreed to be friends. Friends don’t—” I gestured vaguely at our current entanglement. “This.”
“Friends can be affectionate.”
“This is different, and you know it.”
“Yeah.” His smile shifted into something softer. “It is different. That’s kind of the point.”
We lay there, facing each other, close enough that I could count his eyelashes if I wanted to. Which I didn’t. Because that would be creepy. Even if his eyelashes were unfairly long and dark and—
Purrsephone chose that moment to insert herself into the conversation, leaping onto the bed and walking directly across both of our faces.
“Ow,” Samuel said, as her paw connected with his nose.
“I think she wants breakfast,” I said, grateful for the interruption.
“She can wait five minutes.”
Purrsephone meowed loudly and stuck her tail directly in Samuel’s face.
“She can’t wait five minutes,” I corrected, and used the opportunity to finally—reluctantly—extract myself from the bed. “I’ll feed her. You can... recover.”
“Recover from what?”
“From my apparently molesting you in my sleep.”
Samuel laughed, and the sound followed me out of the bedroom like a promise I wasn’t ready to hear.
Two days later,
I was in trouble.
Not the dramatic, life-threatening trouble of the blizzard. This was worse. This was domestic trouble. The type of trouble where Samuel Bennett had seamlessly integrated himself into my life, and I couldn’t remember what it had been like before he was there.
It had only been two days, and already we’d developed routines.
Mornings started with coffee—his French press versus my pour-over method, which sparked a surprisingly passionate debate that ended with us agreeing to alternate days. He made breakfast while I fed Purrsephone, and then we’d sit at the small kitchen table and talk about nothing and everything.
I’d work on my pathetic attempt at a romance novel in the afternoon while Samuel did yoga in the living room. Right there. In stretchy pants we’d rescued from the wreckage of his cabin. Bending into positions that should probably be illegal when performed in front of someone you’ve agreed to be “just friends” with.
“You’re staring,” he’d said yesterday, folded into some impossible pretzel shape.
“I’m writing.”
“You haven’t typed anything in ten minutes.”
“It’s a very, um, complex paragraph.”
He’d just smiled and moved into downward dog, which was absolutely, definitely not the reason I’d finally given up on the manuscript entirely.
