He leaned in, kissing me tenderly this time, slow and sweet like a secret.
When he pulled back, that trademark grin was back, eyes sparkling.
“Lunch on me, Pinky. We gotta celebrate.” He winked.
I really didn’t know what I had just signed myself up for.
But deep down, I realize I may just like where this is going.
CHAPTER 7
Third Plate
~MATTEO~
I have, in twenty-five years of being a person on this earth, never once considered the act of watching an Omega eat lunch to be anything resembling spiritually fulfilling.
Today, the universe is correcting that oversight.
Iris O’Shea is on her third plate.
Plate one was a mountain of grilled chicken, rice, and three steamed greens she pushed around with the dutiful resentment of a woman told to be a good adult. Plate two was a build-your-own bowl with an unholy amount of black beans and a quantity of avocado I would describe as alarming. Plate three is, somehow,steak.The campus dining hall offers it to people willing to wait twelve minutes at the carving station, and she waited those twelve minutes with the patience of a woman to whom protein is currency.
She has demolished two tall glasses of protein milk on the way through, and is now sipping orange juice between bites like a small predator pacing itself.
And I am, against every shred of my upbringing, sitting across from her with my hands folded like a man at confessionand watching her with what I am increasingly aware is a stupid look on my face.
Get it together, Santori.
The body remembers what the mouth has not yet processed.
Forty minutes ago, my mouth was on her: my hands were full of her, hot wet skin, soft thighs, and the kind of tight clutch that wipes the saved file of a man’s brain clean off the drive.
I have walked off the ice with adrenaline still firing through me a hundred times, but it’s never felt like this. Not with my cock still throbbing in some low traitor pulse against the seam of my joggers and the taste of her ghosted on the inside of my mouth, watching her chase a bite of medium-rare around a plate.
And here is the part nobody warned me about.
The most undoing thing in the room is not the memory of the shower. It is the way she eats. Without performance. With the appetite of a person who has, against all the evidence in her closet, been ignoring her body long enough that the body has stopped asking nicely.
She does not apologize for the size of her bites. She does not laugh and saygod, I shouldn’t. She just eats. Steady. Methodical. Like fuel.
The unsigned standing order in my gut, the one I have stopped trying to argue with, hums in deep, unqualified approval.
She catches me on the last bite.
Fork halfway to her mouth, eyes flicking up to mine through the damp pink fringe that has been refusing to dry since the shower, and the second she registers the expression I am no longer in conscious control of, color climbs her throat in a slow, telling rose.
“Santori.”
“O’Shea.”
“You are staring.”
“I am admiring.”
“It is the same thing with better marketing.” She sets the fork down, glares at me over the rim of her juice glass, drinks. “Knock it off. You’re putting me off my food.”
Fuck, I love an unapologetic woman.
