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At that, I relax a little.
“Good girl,” he says when he feels my body soften. And the words hit me somewhere dangerously low in my abdomen.
I frown up at him. “I am neither a girl nor a dog, Sunny.”
His grin is slow and dangerous. “No?”
I shake my head. “Given I’m thirty-two and hold a doctorate.”
“Uh-huh.” His response is irritating.
“So, I’d appreciate not being praised like I successfully rolled over or something.”
He slips his hands between my legs, cupping me over my shorts. His gaze drops for the briefest second before returning to mine, his smile way too smug.
“You know,” he says conversationally, “for someone who hated being told she was a good girl, your thighs got awful friendly when I said it.”
Heat floods my cheeks. “They absolutely did not.”
“Professor, I felt them.”
“You imagined it.”
“I didn’t.” His smile is so impossibly soft, I find it hard to temper my own. “I think you’re just trying to decide if you’re allowed to like it. I know your brain says no. But when did you last let your body decide what it likes? Tell me what you want.”
“I want…” I know what he’s asking, but… “I want my wetlands back, and this world to stop feeling scary. And to stop thinking because it’s all I do. And, yes, I want you too.”
He brushes his lips over mine. “I like that last bit best.” He stands like I weigh nothing and carries me up the stairs. They creak beneath his socked feet. “And you know something else, Indy?”
“What?” I ask, squeezing the back of his neck and playing with the ends of his hair.
“I can do some of my best work in less than twenty minutes.”
23
SUNNY
Dr. Della Hart has routines and processes.
Lots of them, and not all of them obvious. But I’m learning them one by one.
She doesn’t wring her hands or fidget or bite her lip. She makes lists and then can’t deviate from them. She finds things that need doing and then does them because she knows no one else is going to do them for her.
And every problem gets broken down into smaller problems until she can find a solution. Because if there’s a solution, she won’t get overwhelmed.
Same thing with structure, how she does her laundry, when she changes her sheets, how she labelled and tagged her samples so methodically that even I could follow along.
“Do you ever just want to blow everything off?” I ask her when I lay her down on the bed.
“What do you mean?”
The fact she’s asking the question honestly, like she doesn’t get it, speaks volumes.
“You know, like, your brain shuts up and demands a long weekend, or even a beer.”
She rolls her eyes. “My brain is an organ; it can’t drink beer independent of the rest of me.”
I grin at that.
