“Couch, please,” I say when Everett hovers, waiting for an answer. “But could you…” I hesitate, feeling weird about asking him to do anything for me. It’s enough that he brought me here to have peace.
“Could I what?” he asks after lowering me to his couch.
“No, it’s okay.”
“What do you want, sweetheart?”
My heart thuds at the sound of his nickname for me, and I quickly find the words rolling off my tongue.
“Please could you get me the ginger cookies? They’re…on the bed.”
His mouth twitches. “You were eating cookies in bed.”
“Uh, yeah. I wake up nauseous and?—”
“It’s okay. I’m not mad. It’s just…I’m usually the one who eats cookie in bed,” he quips as he marches toward our bedrooms, leaving me with the delicious sight of his hockey butt as he walks away.
A girly giggle erupts. “You did not just say that,” I call after him.
“Not here, though. I’ve never eaten any cookie in my apartment.”
“Maybe we should fix that,” I shout, not thinking. “No. Shit. That’s not what I meant.” It totally was. “I meant you can have one of my cookies in bed and—” I give up trying to dig myself out of the hole I’ve created when his laughter echoes through the apartment.
I wait for him to return with the packet, but he doesn’t.
I hear him moving around, but he doesn’t emerge for long minutes, and when he does, he has my cookies, and he’s fully dressed. At two a.m.
“Going somewhere?” I ask as I pull a cookie from the packet.
“Yeah, the store. Did you want anything else?”
“Anything else?” I ask with a frown. “N-no, I don’t…What are you going for?”
“Hot chocolate,” he states, as if it should be obvious.
“Everett, it’s the middle of the night. You don’t have to?—”
“There’s a store right around the corner. I’ll be ten minutes at most,” he says as he pulls on a backward baseball cap.
Oh, holy crap balls. That’s almost as hot as nothing but his boxers earlier.
I wonder if I ask nicely if he’d combine the two.
My teeth sink into my bottom lip as my mind runs at a mile a minute, trying to imagine how that might look. I already know it pales compared to what reality would be like.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Y-Yeah. Great. You?”
He tilts his head to the side, studying me as if I’m some kind of puzzle he’s trying to figure out.
“So, hot chocolate powder. Anything else?”
“Cream and marshmallows,” I add.
“Well, obviously,” he says, rolling his eyes.
“And sprinkles.”
