With one arm sprawled on the armrest, his shirt was plastered completely to his entire upper body, wrinkled and rippled along his wide ribs, with stuffing from the ruined couch stuck to different places along his sides. His jeans were tight on his thighs… and opened in a V at the crotch, showing just a tiny triangle of black material underneath. That rough, handsome face had “sleepy” written all over it.
I don’t think he’d ever looked better. This sense of longing just…
Sheesh. How was he so freaking good looking all the time? I didn’t need a mirror to know I looked like hell. I’d been looking at myself in the mirror for the last twenty-six years. I knew my eyes were puffy, my face swollen, my mouth swollen. I hadn’t tucked my hair under my head before I’d fallen asleep, so it all had to be sticking out in random directions.
Oh well.
I smiled at him before slapping my hand over my mouth to yawn. “I don’t have anything your size to wear,” I told him as brightly as possible when I was done.
His blink was even lazier than before. “I got a shirt in my truck. S’all I need.”
I lifted my hands over my head to stretch and yawned out, “My shampoo isn’t too fruity, and neither is the soap, if you want to shower.”
Those teal eyes strayed down for a moment before coming back to my face, reminding me I’d slept in my clothes and hadn’t even bothered putting on pajamas.
“The bathroom is down the hall and to the right, in my room, in case you forgot. There are towels in the little closet in there,” I told him as I dropped my arms with another yawn. “I can get the shirt out of your truck if you want.”
Today was going to be rough. I needed ten more hours of sleep, easy. Maybe I could nap during my lunch break.
Rip watched me carefully for a minute before getting up to his black sock-covered feet with a nod.
“Holler if you need anything,” I said to him, still smiling, because why not? Maybe a lot of things sucked, but he was here, doing what he didn’t have to.
He hadn’t brought up the favor in a while, but I wasn’t holding my breath that he’d forgotten how he felt about it. Maybe he still thought he owed me something, but I hoped he knew he didn’t. For once, I didn’t want to remind him.
He shot me a long look, even flicking his gaze down to my socks before turning and heading in the direction of my room. Sitting there, I took a deep breath, smacked my cheeks a little with my fingers, and got up. It didn’t take long to find his keys and then do the same to the T-shirt in his backseat. Then, I followed in the same direction Rip had gone, heading toward my bedroom to pick out some clothes from the pile I’d set on the bed yesterday. We had thrown away so much stuff the night before, I honestly wasn’t sure what I had left. I hadn’t wanted to look too closely or think about it too much.
But things could always be worse.
I looked at the door connecting to my bathroom and imagined, for just one little second, the naked man on the other side. Then I sighed.
* * *
On my lunchbreak hours later, I headed up the stairs to the second floor of CCC to find two of the guys exiting the break room with funny expressions on their faces.
“Awkward,” the taller one of the two muttered.
“I wouldn’t go in there,” the shorter one said in a whisper.
I frowned.
“They’re fighting,” the taller one explained, still whispering.
Well, it had only been a matter of time.
The other one raised his eyebrows as they passed by me, disappearing down the stairs, as I kept going forward. I had planned on grabbing one of the frozen meals I bought and left in the freezer for emergencies since I still hadn’t gotten around to making my own lunch, and Rip hadn’t gone home, so I couldn’t expect something to magically appear.
I didn’t even need to take a step inside the break room before I heard the arguing.
“That’s fucking bullshit.”
“It really isn’t.”
“No, it really is. You had no right to make that decision without me.”
“I had every right to make that decision without you. You didn’t need to jump the gun—”
“They needed an answer and I gave them one. I tried calling you over and over again, but you didn’t answer.”
