His lips were soft and warm and wet in the way of a man who’d been licking them for a half hour before I got home. His kiss was gentle, almost timid, until his tongue joined the party, and fireworks went off, and the whole apartment complex felt like one giant, uncontained bonfire.
I set the water down, gripped his face with both hands, and kissed him with every ounce of energy and passion I possessed. He tasted of spearmint from his mouthwash with a note of cinnamon, probably from the creamer he’d used in his evening coffee.
I couldn’t get enough. I couldn’t taste enough. I couldn’t feel enough.
Between kisses, when air became a requirement, I grabbed the last buttons, ripped them loose, and shimmied out of my shirt. Peter went for the button on my jeans.
“Jesus, your fingers are cold,” I said, resisting the urge to leap off the couch.
He grinned. “You weren’t saying that when they were on your chest.”
“Chest and waist are two very different regions, Dr. Ice Knuckles.”
He snorted. “You can’t make up nicknames during sex. That’s gauche.”
I scowled. “If we’re having sex and a perfect nickname presents itself, you’re stuck with it, simple as that.” I cocked a brow, intent on proving that he wasn’t always in charge, then realized what I’d just said. “I mean, when we have sex, assuming you want to have sex, because I didn’t mean to imply—”
“Benj, I’m naked. We’re having sex. Now, stop talking, get naked, and decide whether I’m sucking you or you’re sucking me first.”
I blinked a few times.
He stared.
General Tsoyowled.
“I believe the emperor just kicked us out of the throne room.” Peter smirked. “Now, stand up, getout of those jeans, and get your naked ass into the bedroom before I get bossy and punish you.”
My eyes must’ve popped wide, because Peter burst out laughing.
“I’m joking, Benji. Jesus. You know me better than that by now.”
“I thought I did . . . right up to the part where you pulled out a whip and threatened to wear leather chaps while you spanked me.”
He laughed. It was his easy laugh, the open one that held nothing back, the one I knew meant he wasn’t clinging to his life raft or hiding behind any shield. I wanted to crawl inside that laugh and live in it forever.
But he shoved me aside, stood, and sauntered his naked ass past me and into the bedroom.
“Last one in has to bottom,” he called down the hall.
I’ve never been so glad to come in second in my life.
Chapter 28
Benji
In the dream, I was eating s’mores. This was immediately suspicious, because I hated marshmallows. I’d hated them since I was nine, when my best friend dared me to fit six in my mouth at once. The resulting texture experience, a kind of sugary suffocation that coated every surface of my oral cavity in synthetic sweetness, had permanently disqualified the entire food group from my life.
I didn’t eat marshmallows.
I didn’t eat things containing marshmallows.
I had once sent back a hot chocolate at a café because the barista had added a fistful of tiny bobbing marshmallow turds without consent. Mia described that as “the most unhinged boundary I’ve ever seen you enforce.”
But in my dream, I was eating s’mores with great enthusiasm beside a campfire that was also, somehow, a stove light. The graham cracker was a Post-itnote. This made perfect sense in the way that dream logic always makes perfect sense until you wake up and realize your subconscious has the narrative coherence of a toddler high on Pixy stick sugar while reading a screenplay.
But it was more than just the dream state that didn’t make sense.
The marshmallow waswrong.
