Page 84
“Hi,” he rasps. His hair is smashed on one side, and he has a crease across his cheek, but I’ve never seen someone so pretty before in my life. His eyes shift to my notebook, and he tilts his chin towards it. “You’ve been busy.”
My shoulders lift. “You were sleeping. I didn’t want to wake you. Making decisions when sleep-deprived is a bad variable.”
He huffs a laugh into the pillow, then pushes up on an elbow. His smile stays on his lips, and I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t be able to do that to my pulse.
“Is that the list?”
“Yes.”
“Can I see it, or is this a private experiment?”
I almost say private, even though that wouldn’t make sense since I told him we needed rules. And I already added rule four for a reason. I pass the notebook to him and study his expression as he reads. His mouth twitches, only getting wider as his eyes skate across the page. He looks up at my mouth, and I assume he made it to three if the heat in his eyes is anything to go by. Then his throat bobs in a small swallow, before he presses his lips together and tries to stare a hole into the paper.
“Very thorough,” he says.
“The internet was insufficient.”
“Yeah. I bet.” He taps number five with his finger. The almost-smile is back, softer almost, like that one amuses him the most. “We’re not dating.”
“We’re not.”
“Got it.”
He doesn’t laugh. But he also doesn’t look like a man who just got offered the casual arrangement of his dreams. Maybe he’s having second thoughts. Although, he is sorta looking at me the way he did while on his knees, except now he’s rumpled and warm from sleep, and I want to climb into bed next to him.
“You can take it back,” I say. “You were exhausted. We were fighting, and we said things. People sometimes recant.”
“I’m not recanting,” he says with a smile as he sits all the way up, still holding the notebook. “No one else. No one knows. Either of us can start it. We talk things through. And we’re not—” he glances at the underlines. “That. I can do that.”
“You’re smiling.”
He hums and drops down to the floor. He closes the space between us, and my heart tries to escape out of my mouth. His hand comes up to cup my cheek as he sets the notebook down. The other comes up to match it.
“Your rules mean I get to do this,” he says and brushes his lips against mine. “Anytime I want. Of course I’m smiling.”
He waits there, asking without asking, and I make a sound I will deny later and kiss him back. My hands go to his shirt, and he deepens the kiss. He tastes like sleep. Not gross, but not minty. His thumbs move to the corner of my jaw and my whole spine goes stupid.
When he pulls back, he doesn’t go far. He rests his forehead against mine, still smiling.
“I think our room is going to be my favorite place to be,” he says.
Me too.
“We should eat.”
He chuckles. “Yeah. I wouldn’t want my FWB to waste away.”
I wrinkle my nose. “FWB?”
“Friends with benefits.”
“Right.” I nod. “Do you, uh, have rules you want to add?”
Intensity bleeds off of him in a way that makes me want to take the question back. Then he reaches past me, steals one of my pens—the blue one with the silver cap, in the middle of the bunch—and writes under rule number five. His handwriting is terrible. I watch the letters form needing to know what he’s going to add as soon as they are on the paper.
Six: If either of us stays out past eleven, we text.
Seven: If there is anything physical, we cuddle afterward. Ten minutes minimum.
