I chuckled.“I did.They were on sale, so I splurged.”
“Mmm, good.I could keep going,” he said against the racing pulse in my neck.“But if Marcus heard you come in, he’ll be all mad and pouty about you not going right up there to say hi.”
I stroked Dom’s spine as he continued to drip kisses all over the skin of my neck, wrapping me in his scent.
“How’s he doing?”
“Oh, he complained all morning about Blob kicking him, said something about how sweatpants were not clothing he ever wanted to see ever again, only to then steal half the laundry out of the hamper, some of which were my last sweatpants.I actually think something’s bothering him, but he nearly threw a pair of your dirty socks at me when I asked him about it.”
“I have some good news for him.Might cheer him up.The hunters took a plea, all of them.”
Dom let out a sigh of relief.“Thank fuck.Court would’ve sucked.”
I nodded.“Agreed.Let me go say hi and tell him.”
Dom nodded, his warm breath against my skin making me smile.“All right.I’ll pack away the shopping.Ask him what he wants for dinner too.”
We kissed, and with some effort, I peeled myself away from him.He looked gloriously flushed standing there, and I was probably the same.
I headed up the stairs, and here, Marcus’s scent was even stronger.The door to Linc’s office was shut, which meant he either had a meeting or didn’t want to disturb Marcus.
There were two more boxes of Marcus’s things right outside Dom’s door, waiting to go up to the attic once Dom was finished with it.I walked past the boxes and poked my head into what had been my room until just a few weeks ago.It technically still was.
This room was the smallest one upstairs, if you didn’t count the attic, which was Dom’s current project.I did have a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in here, and while it was mostly medical texts and non-fiction, I wondered whether it was the books that had lured Marcus.
He was on the bed, that much I could tell.The bed itself was covered with blankets, most prominently the summer duvet from Linc’s room, but there were one or two towels in there too, from what I could tell.As it turned out, Marcus preferred natural fibers for his nest, and while Linc’s, Dom’s, and my clothes looked like a clumped-together mess to me, I had no doubt that the chaos made sense to him.He’d rolled our socks into little balls, and they were on the floor all around the bed.
“Hi, Marcus.Are you sleeping?”
He’d draped one of Dom’s flannel shirts over his head, and his laptop was next to him.It looked like he’d found one of my sweatshirts and decided to wear that.His hand rested on the swell of his belly.
“Do I look like I’m sleeping?”
“Well, you know, it’s not that easy to tell, actually.”
He groaned, and with peak annoyance evident, he pulled the flannel off his face and blinked at me.“I know this isn’t normal.You don’t have to rub it in.I’ve turned into…into…a collector.”
I chuckled and took a step into the room.His eyes immediately darted to where I was putting my feet.He had a thing about anyone moving the sock balls, for some reason, and their number was growing each day.
“You’re fine.”
“I am absolutely not fine.”
“Want to talk about it?”
He snorted.“You know, that’s what my therapist says.”
“And what’s the answer?”
He pulled his laptop close.“I’m too exhausted to really get upset, but I know this is…a situation.Do you know what my therapist said the other day?”
“He probably told you this is normal.”
He narrowed his eyes at me.It would be so easy to do anything and everything for him, but that wasn’t what he wanted.I wasn’t quite sure yet what hedidwant.Things had moved faster than they should have, and while I loved everything about our life, I sometimes wished there had been more time for us to get to know Marcus better in the beginning.A courtship period, basically.
“He said, and I am misquoting, why didn’t your dummy alphas bite you already.So I said, biting is a little beyond my comfort zone, and—misquoting again—he said, dude, it can actually make you a lot more comfortable.”
I heard Dom inhale sharply and stop unpacking.He moved closer to the bottom of the stairs to listen.
