“Hi Elias,” she says brightly, and I think I grunt back.Caterpillars, I think.
I step into the elevator and all but crawl into our room.
Mia is still sleeping on her bed, but the water bottle on the bedside table is empty. I take all the notes and papers out of my pocket, throwing all of it onto my bed. I take off every single article of clothing I’m wearing and climb into bed with our plastic bag of grease and sugar. Because fuck it, right? A twenty-four-hour Pandora’s Box.
All I want is to hold Mia’s naked body in my arms, and I’m allowed to do that now. Thanks, and fuck you, Drunk Me.
I sit up with my back against the headboard. She half sits into me, snuggling into my chest, right where she belongs. I bend to kiss her head, running my hands over the smooth skin of her back.
“How do you feel?” I ask into her hair.
“Better,” she says. “What time is it?”
“Around noon,” I tell her.
Her body freezes. “I missed a workshop.”
I smooth the lines of her body down to get her to relax. Back, sides, waist, hips. A primal part of me roars when I notice little marks around her body, little bites and bruises and burns from my stubble. “I went for you. I took notes and got all the shit,” I say, waving towards the pile of papers in the bed next to us.
She sits up, looking at the pile first, then looking at me with hearts in her ice-blue eyes. It’s the way I want her to look at me for the rest of our lives. Wait,what? “You did that?”
“Yup,” I say, my hands roaming over the smooth skin of her face, her cheeks, lips. I press my thumb against a mark I left on her neck. I can’t stop fucking touching her now.
“Weren’t… Aren’t you hungover?” she asks incredulously.
“Immensely,” I say.
She leans over and kisses me on the lips, and it feels foreign and familiar and a little like coming home. It’s soft and sweet, the complete opposite of the way I want to maul her mouth, and I’m not sure I’ve ever kissed anyone with this much trust.
“Thank you,” she tells me, after pulling away. She pokes at the plastic bag by our feet. “Food?”
I sigh, feeling like an animal, but figuring we’re both too hungover to fuck right now, anyway.Womp womp. “I got us muffulettas. And chips and soda.” I use my toes to drag the bag up towards us. “I think we got so wasted last night because we didn’t eat dinner.”
She frowns, pulling a sandwich out of the bag. “I remember beignets,” she says.
“That’s all we had,” I say, pulling the bag of chips out and placing it between her legs.
We sit hip to hip, arm to arm, our backs leaning against the headboard. I throw my leg over hers, and glued together we eat in a contented silence.
“Am I officially a member of the Blonde Brigade?” she asks me proudly, with a mouthful of food. “Even if we haven’t fucked yet?”
I wince. “Will you stop with that?”
“With what?”
“Just… for the rest of the weekend, could you not refer to other women?” I plead. “Or other guys,” I tack on.
She shrugs nonchalantly. “Fine. But one more thing,” she tells me.
I groan.
She shifts to look at me. I turn. “I don’t regret it,” she says, looking directly into my eyes, searching for something.
I put my sandwich down in my lap and grip her chin, kissing all the parts of her mouth. “Me neither.”
After we finish our food, I throw the trash on the ground, pulling her down horizontally onto the bed so I can just hold her again. I’m stroking her arms, down her waist, across her stomach, around her ass and down her thighs, the two of us kissing gently, not making out, just little pecks all over each other’s faces. I feel her learning my body, too, tracing the lines of my triceps and traps and down the middle of my stomach and in the ‘v’ of my hips.
“For someone who has a rule against cuddling, you sure love to cuddle,” Mia says against my mouth.
