“No, man,” he laughed. “Your friend called and asked how many pizzas he had to order to get you the night off with full pay. I tell him…? Twenty pizzas! And he ordered them all.”
My eyes widened.
He had to be fucking joking.
“Go, go!” Ibra legit shooed me off. “But you put gas in the car, you hear?”
Christ. “Y-yeah, of course.” I always did. It was the one upside to working for him. Late shift on Saturday and early shift on Sunday meant we could keep the car overnight, as long as it was parked in a garage.
Ash had a garage.
I grabbed the twenty damn pizza boxes and stumbled out the door and toward the car.
Was Ash for real?
I mean, I’d known he had a sweet side since the first day, but this was insane.
I knocked on his door with my sneaker. The boxes were getting heavy?—
He always opened the door so fast. Did the doorman give him a heads-up every time? Even when I had the code?
He smiled widely. “Great! Dinner’s here.” He stepped forward and grabbed all the boxes.
A breath gusted out of me.
“Close the door, lose the clothes, and take a seat on the couch,” he instructed.
“Um, I have questions,” I said, dumbfounded. I shrugged out of my windbreaker and kicked off my shoes.
“Don’t worry, I have answers,” he replied. He’d disappeared around the corner. “First of all, yes, you’ll meet my mother tomorrow morning when we drop these pies off at the shelter. Secondly, we’re keeping one—because I’m starving. And third of all, yes, I bought the ginger ale you like.”
See, I hadn’t wondered about any of that.
Wait. I was meeting his mom?
That had to mean this was serious. So, we were like…dating, right?
I felt a smile tug at my lips as I walked farther in.
Oh wow. He’d lit two candles, and he’d prepared the couch with sheets and his covers.
“Sit down,” he repeated. “For the rest of the night, you’re gonna relax, eat pizza, watch movies, and make out with your boyfriend.”
My boyfriend.
I grinned. “You did all this for me?”
He smiled and rejoined me with one of the pizzas. “You need to rest, baby. You work way too much. So I figured, this is how I can help out every now and then. Oh, and I give great foot rubs.”
Fucking hell, sensory overload. If he was trying to get me to fall in love with him, he was succeeding a little too well.
But that’s you in a nutshell, Ash. You love freely and in a big way. When you realize you love something or someone, you let them know right away. Just like you did with me a few weeks later. I remember you stood in your little kitchen. I was setting the table. We were waiting for takeout delivery, and I said something like, “We should eat at the table more often. It feels more official-like. Like it’s a date or we share an everyday life together.”
You looked up from the dishwasher, stared at me, then rounded the bar and came over to me.
That intense look in your eyes made my stomach tighten, but not in a bad way.
“Yeah, that did it,” you murmured. “I want that with you. An everyday life together, I mean. ’Cause, uh…I, uh, I fell hard for you, Nathan. I love you.”
