He was too cute like this. All curled up and grumpy. His face was so soft in sleep, so relaxed with his long, muscly body stretched out. I could see goose bumps on his arms. But apparently, he wasn’t concerned about being warm. Or sleeping in a bed. I poked his chest with my big toe. He just held it tighter in his sleepy grip.
I sighed in defeat. And then yawned. I was tired too. Too tired to deal with him right now.
Leaving him exactly as he was, I dropped my cozy, plush blanket on top of him so he wouldn’t freeze. Then I sprinted to my bedroom, where I closed the door and ripped off my work clothes and bra, only to replace them with some sweatpants and a tank. Then I faceplanted on my bed and burrowed beneath my covers.
Tomorrow Eliza would have to deal with Jonah too. Or maybe Tomorrow Jonah would wake up, realize he wasn’t where he was supposed to be, and drag his big butt back home.
I fell asleep with him still wrapped around me. His scent. His touch. His warmth. And I thought, Tomorrow Eliza will be better at shaking him off. Tomorrow Eliza will remember that he didn’t give her butterflies. Or make her heart squeeze painfully. Or remind her of when she used words like “future” and “love” and “soul mate” whenever she thought of him.
The sun would come up, and sense would return to Tomorrow Eliza and Tomorrow Jonah. And life would click back into normal mode, just like all the times before. Easy peasy. Because no matter how many times he tells me I’m sexy, I’ll never be awomanin his eyes.
* * *
A chainsaw woke me up the following morning. I flopped over in bed and pressed my hands to my chest to keep my heart from leaping out of my body.
With a few seconds of wakefulness, I realized it wasn’t a chainsaw. It was my coffee grinder. And with that sense of clarity came a lot more confusion. Had I programmed it last night? I’d only remembered to program it the night before twice. So... doubtful. It took effort to clean out all the pieces and set them up for the morning. I was always too tired at night and promised myself I’d do a better job in the morning. Only to curse myself every morning because who wanted to clean the individual pieces of a high-tech coffee maker first thing in the morning?
If it was programmed, I definitely hadn’t added coffee to it. So was it going to brew yesterday’s coffee? Was that somehow going to eff up my stupidly expensive machine?
Now in a full-fledged panic, I threw the blankets off me and grabbed a throw from the end of my bed—because why was the morning always so damn cold?—then ran into the kitchen, planning to tackle my coffee machine—which had clearly come alive in a machine-versus-humanity-type scenario—and wrestle it unplugged.
I skidded to a stop as soon as the kitchen came into view and screamed something unintelligible and wildly profane. My coffee machine wasn’t possessed. A man was in my kitchen tending to it. A man I had forgotten fell asleep on my couch last night. A man I was not expecting to see until after my workout, shower, hair and makeup was done, and several hours of daylight.
He spun around and did a double take. “Morning,” he said, eyes bulging with shock. “Hope this was okay. I didn’t think I was safe to drive home without some caffeine.”
“You scared the living shit out of me, Jonah! I forgot you were here. I thought my coffee machine was alive!” And why was I yelling? It was way too early for yelling.
He cleared his throat and had the good sense to look embarrassed. “Yeah, uh, sorry, I had no idea it was going to be that loud. This thing is like industrial-strength.”
I sniffed, unsure if he was insulting me or not. “Coffee is very important to me.”
His lips twitched, but he remained serious. “To me as well.” After an awkward pause, he repeated, “I hope you don’t mind. I looked up the instructions online...”
“You can google coffee machine instructions, but you can’t drive yourself home?”
His embarrassed expression intensified. I was pretty sure his cheeks turned red. “Okay, the truth is I’m out. And I didn’t want to stop. And this thing looked... like it would make something good. Don’t be mad.”
I rolled my eyes. “It would take a lot more than making me coffee in the morning to get me mad at you.” A shiver rocked through me, and I realized how badly I had to pee. I gestured toward the kitchen. “Go ahead and help yourself to whatever. I think there’s oatmeal in the pantry. I’ll be right back.”
Safely back in my room, I realized several things at once. One, I wasn’t wearing a bra. I’d had the blanket wrapped around my shoulders, but had it been tightly? Two, my breath was rock-solidly awful. Shouldn’t have skipped brushing last night. Gross. And three... I looked like a clown from a circus that performed nightly in hell. Oh, my gosh, I hadn’t taken my makeup off last night. Or put my hair up!
Well, that explained his look of sheer terror.
I stumbled to the bathroom and gripped the edge of the sink, gaping at my appearance. My dark hair was absolutely wild, sticking up everywhere, and inhumanly frizzy. And my eyeliner and mascara from yesterday made raccoon circles around my eyes. My unwashed face was oily and so shiny it might be literally reflective. And then there was the breath. Which was somewhere between as bad as possible and worse than humanly possible.
Thankfully, I was about sixty percent sure Jonah and I had stayed far enough away that I was safe there.
Okay, forty percent sure.
Maybe a strong ten percent positive my breath hadn’t infiltrated the entire apartment by now, and he was currently passed out on the kitchen floor dying of asphyxiation.
Priorities—I peed first. Then made my teeth sparkle. And then got to work on the mess that was my face and hair. Fifteen minutes later, I emerged from the bathroom fresh-faced and with my hair on top of my head in a supersoft satin scrunchie. I’d also slipped a bralette and cardigan on to save Jonah from a peep show he didn’t ask for.
He dug around in the refrigerator while I lustfully eyed the full pot of coffee.
“You have nothing to eat here,” he said into the empty expanse of the fridge. “Is that why you’re so skinny?”
Admittedly, food was not my priority. I loved to eat well. And I loved good food. But I worked too much and was gone even more than that to make cooking and grocery shopping a regular event. I usually had takeout for too many of my meals. But I couldn’t bring myself to eat it more than once a day. Usually once every other day. So I subsisted on instant oatmeal and premade protein shakes.
