“Eli,” his voice was rough. “Can I kiss you?”
I turned toward him, lifting my face.
His lips met mine, and everything else disappeared; there was only CJ left. The kiss felt like a promise. When we finally pulled apart, we stayed close, our foreheads almost touching.
“I don’t know how to do this,” CJ admitted quietly, a small laugh escaping him as he threw my own words back at me.
I smiled. “Good.”
His eyebrow lifted. “Good?”
I nodded. “Means we learn together.” I squeezed his hand. “CJ, I know you know what I’ve been through. I know you know the worst parts of me.”
His expression softened.
“But what we have, I want to build it. I want to learn it. I want this.” I swallowed hard. “I spent years barely surviving.” I looked at him. “Then you came along and reminded me I was supposed to live, too.”
His eyes softened completely. “I want that, too. With you.”
I kissed him again, because this time, I was choosing us.
When we pulled away, CJ smiled. “Eli, just so you know…”
I raised an eyebrow.
“You’re mine now.”
A laugh burst out of me before I could stop it. “Is that your way of asking me to be your boyfriend?”
That familiar smirk appeared. “Yeah, Baby Boy. It is.” He pressed a kiss to my forehead. “You were mine from the minute you opened that car door.”
For the first time since leaving Adrian, he wasn’t the loudest thing in my head. The fear was still there, along with the danger. But it wasn’t everything anymore.
CJ was.
Somewhere between coffee, late nights at the office, quiet conversations, and the way he always looked at me like I mattered, I had fallen in love with him.
* * *
When we got home, the sexual tension was humming, but there was something different in the air, too. After everything at thepier, after all those heavy emotions, neither of us quite knew what to do with ourselves.
We circled each other. CJ made coffee, and I stole his mug. He immediately complained as I refused to give it back.
“It’s mine now,” I told him.
Ten minutes later, he was still explaining why stealing someone’s mug made me worse than Finn and apparently a “menace to society”, all over a coffee mug.
I walked past him and deliberately brushed my fingers against his ass. He went completely silent.
I smiled over his mug, watching him.
His grin was smug as he disappeared down the hallway, returning a minute later wearing…
Fucking grey sweatpants. Are you kidding me right now?
I stared. Seriously, what the actual fuck. He looked way too good in them, and CJ caught me looking, the smirk on his face saying he knewexactlywhat he was doing.
He was sex on a stick. Seriously, he looked way too good. Somehow he’d become chaos, confidence, and sex wrapped up in a pair of fucking grey sweatpants.
