“I can tell when you’re lying.”
“No, you can’t.”
“I can,” he insists, before letting out a sigh. “Anyway, your point is proven: you have excellent cultural knowledge.”
“And you have proven you have a… fascinating taste in film.”
“Here we go.” He shakes his head, before offering me a small smile. “Just so you know, I don’t think of you how you think I think of you.”
I frown at him. “I’ve had too many drinks to decipher that sentence. Start again.”
“You’re wrong about how I think of you.”
“Yeah? Then tell me, Ryan, how do you think of me?” I ask innocently, taking a sip of my wine.
He doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me.
I freeze, completely under the spell of his unflinching gaze.
He puts his drink down on the coffee table and then reaches over to take my glass before setting that down next to his. It’s such a simple but sexy move, him taking control of the situation. Up until now—the suggestion to go back to his, the fingers entwining in the taxi—I’ve been leading the charge. But now, the way he’s looking at me, it’s different than before. There’s awantthere.
I smile so he knows.I want you, too.
He leans forward and I close my eyes as he presses his lips against mine, kissing him back hungrily. We fall back onto the cushions and I wrap my arms around his neck as his hands drift down my sides to my waist. My heart is pounding as I move my hands to the front of his chest, fumbling at his shirt buttons, desperate to feel his bare skin underneath.
He stops my hands with his, lifting his face to hover over mine and smiling, before rolling off the sofa onto his feet, straightening and holding his hand out to me. A little confused at the pause in proceedings, I take his hand and he pulls me up to stand with him, steadying me as I stumble, before leading me through a door off the lounge and into a bedroom.
I want to look around his room properly, but I want him more.
As soon as Ryan turns to face me again, I step toward him, tugging at his shirt as his hand brushes my hair out of my face. He kisses me again, crushing our lips together, and I’m so turned on I can barely breathe. His hands lower to my waist and then slide to the top of my back where he finds the zip of my dress, pulling it down so I can slip out of it as it crumples onto the floor. I frantically attempt to undo the buttons of his shirt, but they seem impossible, my fingers are shaking from exhilaration. I feel Ryan smile against my lips as his fingers take over from mine, whipping his shirt off in a matter of seconds.
As we hastily remove the rest of our clothes, we move unsteadily toward the bed, and when the back of my knees hit the mattress, I fall back onto the navy duvet, pulling Ryan down on top of me. As he presses his body against mine, I lift my hips up into his, and he pauses. For a moment I feel frozen with fear that he’s realized this is a mistake.
Instead, he whispers against my lips, “I’ve wanted this since the moment I saw you,” and kisses me so deeply, I shudder in frenzied anticipation.
We spend the weekend in a bubble of blissful happiness. I don’t know what’s gotten into me, but I devote myself to the role of heroine in a rom-com, walking around his flat in just my knickers and his shirt, nuzzling into his neck while he strokes my hair and kisses my forehead, spontaneously having sex at three o’clock in the afternoon without a care in the world for anything else but each other.
It’s surreal, a fleeting fantasy that I know has to end come Monday morning when we’re obligated to go to work, but for now it’s perfect. When I first woke up on Saturday morning, naked and slightly hungover, I got the classic wave of anxiety and fear, terrified that it might be awkward, but as soon as Ryan stirred and kissed all the way along my shoulder, I relaxed.
It was he who suggested we stay together for the weekend,and when I mentioned that I had no spare clothes, he said no problem, we could go back to my parents’ in a taxi and he’d wait in the car while I ran up and packed a bag.
“Unless that sounds much too intense, which I totally understand if it does,” he had said hurriedly, trying to read my expression.
Itwasintense. To sleep with a colleague after a boozy night was one thing, but to then pop back home to pack aweekend bagsounded utterly absurd and the actions of a love-drunk, horny teenager. But to be honest, that’s how I felt. Ryan had somehow opened this Pandora’s Box of suppressed feelings—I’d spent two months fighting with this guy and going out of my way to annoy him, and now, I couldn’t get enough of him.
So I went with it: he waited downstairs while I packed a bag and told Mum I was spending the weekend at a friend’s, not that she seemed to care. She hadn’t even noticed I’d been gone all night, assuming I’d gotten back late after they went to bed. When I shut the front door of the house and hopped into the backseat of the taxi, his eyes lit up and he leaned over and kissed me, as though he’d been wondering whether I really was going to return.
It’s a magical weekend; too perfect to be true. I lie next to him under the duvet, studying his face, his long eyelashes, his faint stubble, the way his throat moves as he answers all the questions I ask about him, wondering how I’ve spent two months next to this man and not really appreciated how mesmerizing he is.
“By the way, what did you mean last night when you said you’d wanted this since you saw me?” I press when we get onto the topic of the office, laughing at our spats.
“I meant exactly that,” he replies, turning on his side to face me.
“But how? I mean, it’s hard to believe. I got my hairbrush stuck in my hair in the first five minutes of meeting you.”
He chuckles, reaching over to run his thumb along my cheekbone. “I promise you, it’s true.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
