Kenzie: I bet that kind of afterglow would lead someone to assume your brains got scrambled a little bit.
Me: Oh my God, Kenzie, what are you talking about?
That is when Kenzie sent me link after link after link to a picture of me, asleep in Nate's arms, with the caption 'social official.'Then everyone was commenting on our newly announced relationship and what that meant for the Kodiaks.
I had come out of the washroom, in Nate's shirt and nothing else, wandering through his penthouse trying to find the man I didn't know if I wanted to clobber or pin down for round two.
I found him, wearing dark sweats that hung low on his hips, showcasing his sculpted masterpiece of a body.I stopped for a moment to take him in, dazed by flashbacks of what it felt like to be claimed by him.
Focus, Tessa, we are...Confused?Mad?
I pushed past the memory of Nate grunting into my hair just a few hours earlier, "What is 'social official'?And why is there a picture of me in your bed all over the internet?"
Nate turned to face me, and my heart did that pitter-patter thing that she loved to do in his presence.The late morning light bathed him in an ethereal glow, his dark blonde hair looked deliciously messy from where my hands had dug into it not long ago, and he had a few days' worth of rough scruff on his face.He looked relaxed, at peace, if not a little sheepish at the question I just lobbed his way.So different from how I had found him standing at the same windows not twenty-four hours ago.
He flashed me a beautiful smile and started to prowl towards me.
"Nate?"
"I couldn't help myself."
I barked out a laugh at how sincere he looked as he continued toward me."Couldn't help yourself from taking a picture of me in your bed and then sharing it with the world without my permission?"
The look on his face was purely predatory, and it made me squirm a little.I clenched my thighs and tried to focus on the whole point of this conversation.
Nate stopped right in front of me, and the smell of us and sex surrounded me.
"I had to."He smirked.
"Had to?"I parroted, trying to stop myself from jumping him.
Nate brushed a hair back from my face and smirked, "It is the equivalent of marking you, or clubbing you and dragging you back to my cave, or pissing all over you."
I couldn't help it, a snort bubbled its way out of me, "What?"
"In my world, Tessa, it tells everyone that you are mine and I am yours.It tells everyone that I am off the market and that you are my girl."
"And that is necessary?"I asked.
"Very," he responded, and I didn't know by the look on his face if he was serious, but then he said."I know you like your privacy, and I will never post anything that compromises you.But I had to tell the world that you owned me now, that I had the most incredible girlfriend, and I wanted to scream it from the rooftops.I figured that it was more effective to do it this way than actually going on the roof."
"Nate."I sighed as he pulled me flush with him, and I could feel the heat from his bare skin through the t-shirt I was wearing.
He trailed a hand down my back and cupped my ass cheek, a growl slipping past his lips when he touched my bare skin.In the next moment, I was up in his arms, and I instinctively wrapped my legs around his waist.Nate started walking back towards his bedroom.
"Nate, I need to shower and eat and..."
He cut me off with a bruising kiss and didn't stop his movement forward."We will shower, and then I will make sure you are fed."
And we did.We showered together, which led to sex up against the tiled wall, brunch led to sex on the kitchen island and me trying to get ready to leave because I had to catch up on chores and do groceries back home led to another round of sex in Nate's room.
And somehow, here we are nearing the end of August, and the edges of my life and his had blurred in ways I didn’t see coming.
My toothbrush appeared next to his without ceremony.A drawer opened, and there were my scrubs, my worn tee with the bleach stain no one but me loves.He gave me half a closet like it was a foregone conclusion and kept sliding things onto the hangers: an oversized Kodiaks hoodie, a whole collection of his jerseys.Dresses, I had no idea where I would ever find a place to wear them, and he smirked, saying I could wear them to bed as long as he got to see me in them and then out of them.
“Nate, this is crazy, I don't need all this, one jersey would have been good, and where am I going to wear all these clothes...I think my wardrobe here is bigger than the one I have at home...What's next, a horse?”I questioned.
“Baby, I would buy you a horse in a heartbeat if I thought you wouldn't get mad,” he said.“And I already told you; I want you to have everything you need here so you are always comfortable.”
