I pressed a kiss on the back of his hand, as gentle as the one he gave me. He nuzzled the back of my neck at the feel of the kiss. For the next couple of minutes, we laid on the couch, too content to move from our position.
When we finally did start heading towards my room, Dakota offered to clean up our snacks. I remembered my bed didn’t have sheets on it yet because it was wash day. So, as I found my extra pillowcases and blankets, Dakota washed dishes downstairs.
I wrestled to get the tucked sheet on my full-size bed. As I pulled the edges of the blanket underneath my mattress, my stomach jumped with a familiar set of nerves. Dakota was coming up to sleep next to me. Somehow, this felt one hundred percent more intimate than sex. Because having sex with him in the conference room wasn’t planned. I didn’t have time to think or wonder how it’d feel. Now, in the comfort of my own home, I had plenty of time to think about every potential awkward thing that could happen.
When he showed up in my doorway, my mind had wandered down a road where I started to fear my chronic snoring.
“So…” I straightened up when I saw him.
Dakota raised his brows. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine.” I winced at the overly cheery tone of my voice.
“You sure?” He looked amused and passed the threshold into my room. Instead of going for the bed, he lingered near my desk, leaning on the wooden chair. “You look a little weird.”
“I’m fine. Just…I feel like I should warn you I’m a pretty big snorer, and I sometimes have to wear this sleeve thing around my head. Which, I won’t wear tonight so I don’t know why I told you that part. I’m rambling now.”
Dakota crossed his arms over his chest, grinning at my fumbling speech. “You are, and it’s cute.”
I sighed. “Is it?”
“Very,” he assured. “And feel free to wear whatever you need to get a good night’s sleep. I don’t care.”
“You say that now,” I teased and walked over to my dresser to retrieve the anti-snoring sleeve. “But if you saw me in this, you’d think differently.”
Dakota pushed away from the desk and came closer to me. “You really think you wearing this would be my straw. That you’re going to put that on and somehow I’m going to call it quits before we’ve even started.”
“Maybe,” I mumbled, glancing down at the sleeve. It wouldn’t have been the first time some guy left because of how I looked.
“Hey.” He tucked his index finger under my chin and tilted my face up towards him. “I thought you were joking, but now this seems serious.”
“I don’t know if I deserve you,” I said in a voice so low I hoped he didn’t hear. Except, he did. He frowned at the words and moved his hand from my chin to cup my cheek.
“Why is that the exact thing I thought when I first saw you?” he wondered.
I laughed a little.“No way.”
“It is,” he promised. “I used to be a nerd before all this football stuff. In high school, couldn’t get one girl to talk to me.”
“Why does that sound like a lie?” I took in the beautiful curve of his jaw. “I’m sure the girls back home were too shy to say hi is all.”
“No, they were pretty straightforward in their disinterest. No worries though, I learned how to develop other traits instead.”
“Like?”
“Listening. Paying attention to the small things. Like how your cheek twitches when you’re excited to see someone but don’t want them to know.”
I blinked, impressed. He laughed at me and continued, “You whisper when you’re excited about something. You like when people whisper back. I think it makes you feel like you’re a part of something?”
“It does,” I confirmed, shocked that he caught onto something I barely realized.
“You want to be a part of something. You’re… you’re lonely.” His voice turned a bit somber now. I felt my shoulders lower a bit too at the observation. “You hate that, I think.”
I directed my gaze down for a moment to recenter myself. Crying in front of him tonight was not going to happen. I didn’t want it to happen because of all things, my shit wasn’t something that should bring on tears.
“I’m a big group kind of girl,” I admitted with a one-shoulder shrug to make it seem like I didn’t feel completely exposed.
“Nothing wrong with that.”
