She moves to the sink and fills it with warm water. The quiet domesticity of it all should feel mundane, but instead it feels...intimate. Soft. A little terrifying.
Halfway through scrubbing the dishes, she feels him come up behind her—one hand sliding low to curve possessively around her hip, the other skimming down to cup her ass with shameless familiarity.
“You wore these on purpose,” Garrett mutters, voice like gravel against her ear. “Just to mess with me.”
Naomi grins, her pulse fluttering wild and fast in her throat. “I’m almost done,” she breathes, the words hitching as he leans into her, all heat and hard muscle, solid as a wall at her back. “Go set up the TV. New Love Island episodes dropped.”
He groans into her neck, breath hot against her skin as he trails open-mouthed kisses there. “Do we have to? I need a lobotomy to watch that show. If I wanted to watch over-tanned narcissists cheat on each other, I’d go to the gym.”
She laughs, the sound shaky, barely held together by the last thread of focus she has. Her hands are still wrist-deep in soap suds, but the rest of her is fully occupied by the press of his chest against her back, the slow drag of his lips along the slope of her neck, the scratch of his stubble that makes her thighs tense.
“You love my taste in TV,” she says, tilting her head to bare more of her throat, shameless now.
Garrett scoffs against her skin. “I’ve lost measurable IQ points watching that show. Every time someone yells ‘I’ve got a text,’ a part of my brain quietly dies. I suffer for you.”
“And I love you for it.”
The words are out before she even realizes she’s said them.
She goes still, her stomach plummeting like she’s missed a step in the dark.
Oh no.
Her fingers are wet and pruney, her heart is pounding in her throat, and her brain is screaming,“Abort, abort, abort.”
Garrett hasn’t moved either. He’s still curved over her, his mouth frozen just below her jaw.
She swears the silence rings.
Naomi turns slowly, circling her soapy hands around his neck, aiming for flippant. “That came out fast,” she says, her accompanying laugh a little too high, a little too shaky. “Too soon, right? Just—pretend I said ‘I tolerate you.’ Or, like, ‘I medium-like you with a strong upward trajectory.’”
She leans up to kiss him, to distract him, to fix it.
But Garrett pulls back just enough to meet her eyes. His own are stormy, unreadable.
It feels like someone has reached into her chest and squeezed her heart, wringing it like the wet rag she’s holding. “Garrett?”
His name comes out strangled. The silence expands, crushing the air from her lungs, turning each second into an eternity of free fall.
And then he speaks—soft, but firm. “Don’t do that.”
Her voice is barely a whisper. “Do what?”
“Don’t make jokes. Say what you really mean.”
Her pulse thunders in her ears. Every instinct she has screams at her to backpedal, to cover it up with a joke, to patch it with banter and glittery distraction.
But he’s still watching her. Still waiting. Like he wants the real thing.
Naomi swallows, heart pounding.
She lifts her chin, forcing herself to meet his eyes even as her knees threaten to give out.
“I love you.”
The words hang between them, naked and terrifying.
For a beat, he doesn’t move. Doesn’t breathe.
