“Then it’s working.”
I rolled my eyes, but I was smiling too. I didn’t know what to think about all of this, but right now he was very gentle, and I felt good around him. “You’re very confident.”
“I’m very motivated.” He leaned forward, elbows on my tiny table, close enough that I could see the gold flecks in his gray eyes. “There’s a difference.”
“What motivates you, then?”
“Right now?” His gaze dropped to my mouth for just a second before returning to my eyes. “You.”
I felt my cheeks heat. “That’s... direct.”
“I told you. Deliberate. No point dancing around it.”
Good gods, please help me.
By the time he left, the pastry box was empty and my face hurt from smiling. My cheeks were sore, my stomach was full, and my heart was backflips I wasn’t ready to examine.
At the door, Caelan turned back. “Thank you,” he said. “For this morning.”
“You brought the food.”
“You let me in.” His voice was soft. “That means more.”
He turned around and left, and I felt as if he’d taken something of mine with him. I closed the door, leaned against it, and sighed like a lovesick teenager in a romcom.
“What the hell is happening to me?” I asked at the empty apartment.
Gerald the ceiling stain offered no answers.
***
I spent the rest of the day in a haze.
I tried to write. I opened my laptop, stared at the blinking cursor, typed three words and deleted them. My brain wouldn’t cooperate. Every time I tried to focus on my fictional hero, I saw Caelan’s face instead. His smile when I said I loved the book, the warmth in his voice when he said “you let me in.”
I tried to write a paragraph about my hero’s mysterious past and realized I’d described Caelan’s eyes. I wrote a scene where the hero brought the heroine breakfast and it was basically just transcribing my morning. I wrote dialogue and it sounded exactly like him.
I deleted everything and closed the laptop.
I gave up on writing around six and made dinner. If “dinner” could be applied to cereal eaten over the sink while staring out the window at nothing.
What was I doing? I barely knew this man. But Caelan didn’t feel dangerous. He felt safe, which was terrifying, because Damien had felt safe too, at first. I should be more careful, keep my walls up. But when Caelan looked at me, I forgot all of that. Forgot to be guarded, forgot to be afraid. I just wanted to be closer.
I showered, the hot water running over my skin until it turned lukewarm, then changed into my old cotton pajamas that hung loose on my frame. I crawled into bed at nine, feeling like a grandma ready to call it a night. Exhaustion hit me from all the overthinking and the emotions churning inside, but sleep wouldn’t come. No matter how hard I tried to force my eyes shut, I stayed wide awake, staring at the shadows on the ceiling.
And I was definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent not thinking about the way a certain man’s hands felt on my back. The way his fingers pressed into my skin, sliding down along my spine, feeling every bump and curve like he was mapping it out. Heat started building in my body, skin getting tight and sensitive, thighs pressing together without me meaning to.
Nope. Not going there.
I rolled over onto my side, punched the pillow to fluff it up, squeezed my eyes closed.
His face appeared immediately behind my eyelids. Those gray eyes narrowing, turning darker with hunger, water droplets on his chest, the tattoos that snaked across his pecs and arms, lines thick and black against his skin.
“Fuck,” I whispered to the empty room. The warmth in my gut grew heavier, spreading down to settle between my legs, making everything throb a little.
This was a real issue. I was supposed to be his friend, nothing more. I’d said yes to just hanging out, keeping it platonic. So why did I crave everything else?
Friends didn’t stay up late running through every brush of skin, every look that lingered too long, every time our legs touched under the water, sending sparks up my calf.
