Page 16 of Chosen By the BRATVA Grump

“And I’m saying that in the fullness of time I might tell you, when I trust that you won’t kill him.” I fold my arms. “The point of Craig is what came after. Two years on my own, and everyone I know has an opinion about it. I’m twenty-four, I should be out there, I should be having fun, I shouldn’t take anybody seriously.” I shake my hands from side to side and make my eyes wide. “And I don’t want that. I don’t want to spend a year finding out whether four different men are kind. I’d rather have one person and actually know him. I want to know where he grew up and whether he has siblings and what he does all day. So if this is you seeing what happens, tell me tonight, while I can still exit with something like dignity.”

“I don’t want to date around either.”

“You say that now, but I’m told that men in your general category tend to have a great deal of opportunity.”

“Category?” he asks, and actually raises an eyebrow.

“You know what I mean,” I wave my hand in his general direction. “I bet you own clubs or something and you have women, pretty women, throwing themselves at you.”

The laugh that rumble from him doesn’t seem real at first. I’m so used to seeing his surly face that I already believed I’d imagined his smile yesterday.

“Kimmie.” He says my name the way other people put a hand up. “There’s been nobody since the day I first saw you. I’ve crossed that bridge most nights for weeks to stand on a street in the dark and look at you through a window. I know how that sounds. I’m telling you anyway.”

“That does sound alarming,” I agree. “It’s also the single most romantic thing anybody has ever said to me, so we’re both going to have to live with what that says about me.”

He reached a hand out and strokes a lock of hair behind my ear.

“Then we do it your way,” he says. “Ask me anything you want. I’ll answer it.”

“Starting now?” I ask.

“Starting now.”

I look at him across my small kitchen table with his forearms on my wipeable placemats, this enormous quiet man who drove over a bridge at night because I sent three unhinged texts in a row, and I decide that the questions can wait eleven more seconds.

“Would you kiss me?”

He’s up before I’ve finished asking. His hand comes to the side of my neck, his thumb along my jaw, tilting my face up, and he kisses me carefully, like a man checking his own work. I get a fistful of his shirt and pull. I’m out of the chair without any memory of standing. He makes that low sound in his chest that I’ve been hearing on a loop since last night.

“Ask me something,” he says.

“Do you want the last cinnamon roll?”

“No.”

“Good answer.” I reach up and pull him back down to me.

Natan

She kisses the way she talks, in one long run with no natural place to stop, and every time I think she has finished she starts up again.

She has both hands in my shirt, dragging it up out of my waistband, and her hip catches the table leg hard enough that she says ow into my mouth and carries on regardless.

“Ask me something,” I tell her.

“Will you come to bed with me?” She says each word between kisses.

“Yes.” My hands are moving over her now, down the line of her neck and over her shoulders.

Kimmie pulls back an inch. Her glasses have gone crooked from my jaw. “That’s a start.”

“Ask me another upstairs.”

She takes hold of two fingers of my right hand like she’s leading a horse out of a burning barn. “Second door. The light switch sticks, so you have to hold it, and there’s a box of picture hooks on the fourth step that I’ve been walking around since I moved in.”

I lift her instead, one arm under her thighs and one around her back. She makes a startled noise against my neck and then says something about the ceiling light on the landing that I don’t catch, because she has her mouth just below my ear and I’m trying to concentrate on the stairs.

Her bedroom is small and warm and smells like her. A jar of brushes on the windowsill. A lamp with a scarf thrown over the shade, which is how houses burn down, and which I’ll mention another day. The bed takes up most of the floor and has more pillows on it than one woman can use.