Chapter Seven
Piper is pacing in her living room when she hears a scream and immediately knows, in her bones, that Scott is being murdered in her bathroom.
She does what any reasonable, nonsociopathic person would do and grabs the first sharp object she can find. In this case, a fireplace poker.
“Scott?” Piper has the poker slung over her shoulder as she knocks on the door. “Are you okay in there?”
She hears the shower turn off.
“Piper?” Scott calls, sounding slightly strangled.
“I heard you scream.” It’s unlikely, but possible, that some kind of Christmas Eve bandit scaled her fire escape and shimmied over to the open bathroom window. Or, she supposes, that he slipped on some stray body wash or something.
Piper’s not sure what she’s going to do in a scenario where the ER doctor hurts himself in her home. Hold up a hand mirror so he can give himself stitches?
Scott clears his throat.
“I’m fine.” He sounds closer, like maybe he’s gotten out and is standing on the bath mat. “But, uh, there’s a spider in your shower.”
And okay, yeah, that makes sense. She keeps the window cracked for ventilation, because there’s no fan in that room. If Piper was a spider living outside in these frigid temps, she would also wander inside seeking warmth and water.
“It startled me,” Scott says, and Piper swears he’s somehow managed to lower his voice an extra octave, as if compensating for the scream.
She’s glad she’s on this side of the door so she doesn’t have to hide her smile. He’s so stinking cute. She likes him a truly goofy amount.
“Could you, um, do you have a glass and a piece of cardboard or something that I could use to capture it?”
Of course he’s gonna save the spider, she thinks. As if his whole thing isn’t already a tireless assault on her hormones.
“Sure,” she says. “One sec.”
Piper grabs a mason jar from the cabinet and fishes a mac-and-cheese box out of her recycling bin, tearing off a flat section at the back.
She knocks on the bathroom door to announce her return. “Here you go.”
Scott opens the door, not an egregious amount, but enough that she can see him from the top of his damp head, his hair adorably in disarray and still dripping so that, as she stands there, a droplet of water falls from a piece in the front and slides down his forehead all the way to the tip of his nose.
His eyelashes have clumped from the water into black spikes that somehow, impossibly, make his blue eyes look even more blue.
Piper forgets what she’s doing. She forgets her own name.
He’s looking at her—she can feel him looking at her—but gravity, presumably, has taken hold of her own gaze, dragging it down past a mouth that might be curving in a smirk, to the tendons of his neck, the glistening hollow of his throat.
Steam rushes out around him to bead across Piper’s flushed cheeks, making them dew damp.
“Ummm,” she says, but the sentence fades into nothing.
His broad shoulders are so slick. The impulse to reach out, to run her fingertips across the delicious curve and then bring them, damp, to her mouth, hits her like a fever. Spreads from her face all the way down her body.
Piper shakes herself.
“Okay, you know what? No.” Through sheer willpower she takes a step back.
It’s completely indecent that she can smell her own body wash on his skin. There are stray bubbles sliding, lovingly, down the plane of his left pec.
Piper doesn’t believe in Santa, but it certainly feels like there’s some cosmic seasonal punishment going on. That the universe is saddling her with a cruel anti-Christmas gift so much worse than coal.
She throws her hands up in surrender. “Fine. Fine.”
Scott frowns.
“Is something wrong?” He crosses his arms in what she recognizes as a self-protective gesture, but it doesn’t matter because the action makes his biceps bulge and a vein in his forearm pop.
And, no. Nope.
Piper marches into her bedroom, pulls Scott’s half-opened illicit mail out from under her bed, and then returns to present it to him. The only way out, clearly, is through.
“Here,” she says, but then has to wait for him to put down the glass and cardboard he’s already holding on the side of her sink before he can take it.
Piper, in an act of superhuman strength, does not check to see if the towel around his waist budged when he twisted.
Scott takes the box when his hands are free and stares down at it.
“Am I supposed to know what to do with this?”
“It’s your . . .”
He already knows, Piper. He came to the comedy show.
She raises her eyebrows meaningfully and then, when that still doesn’t work, finishes with a desperate “Toy.”
“My toy?” He shakes his head a little, clearly not following, before pushing open the package with his opposite hand.
Piper doesn’t breathe while he looks into the box, tugging at what’s left of the plastic outer wrapper. She waits for him to realize what she’s done: not just accidentally invaded his privacy and broken federal law, but made a joke out of it.
Finally, the moment of understanding she’s been dreading dawns, and Scott’s eyes go wide.
Piper can’t handle his impending disappointment or anger—or worse, the way he’s going to try to cover it up to be kind. She brings her hand up to physically shield her eyes.
“I’m really, really sorry. I should have returned your package as soon as I noticed my mistake. And you have no reason to be ashamed of what you purchased. Sex toys are a normal, healthy part of exploring pleasure—”
“Piper.” Scott says her name like he’s choking on it.
“Yes?” She lowers her hand but keeps her eyes slightly slitted. She hasn’t forgotten that he’s still mostly naked.
“I have to tell you something.” He sounds very serious suddenly, his eyes focused and intent on hers.
“As much as I appreciate—and, frankly, agree with—that little speech, this”—he reaches into the box and pulls the now fully uncovered item out into the open—“is a percussion massager.”
“Oh. I mean, definitely call it whatever you want.”
Piper’s never heard of that kind, but to each their own. Scott is an ER doctor. Maybe he’s most comfortable using clinical terms.
He starts laughing, taking the box out to show her the now fully revealed picture on the front. “No, listen, it’s like a knock-off Theragun. You use it to relax sore muscles.”
To be honest, it still sounds like a sex toy.
But now that it’s fully revealed right in front of her, Piper actually has seen that kind of thing before.
Mae’s husband Thom uses one on his calves after he runs sometimes.
She’s not fully convinced someone couldn’t use it for masturbation, but it would be an off-brand application and perhaps painful.
“Oh.” She deflates. Honestly? It’s kind of a letdown. “Is it all right with you if I don’t change the joke?”
Scott’s really laughing now, leaning forward so his forehead almost brushes her shoulder. And even though the sound is as lovely as the rest of him, Piper can only handle so much rippling muscle.
She’s hot with embarrassment and the steam pouring out of her bathroom, where, she bets, the spider has probably already made a break for it.
“I don’t want to be rude, but I’m gonna have to ask you to put your clothes on now. You can’t be sweet and smart and sensitive and think that I’m funny, and then also be hot and wet and scantily clad in my home. I have a rule.”
Piper could keep going. She has things to say, now that she knows he’s 3A, about the way he always brings in her trash cans every time it’s raining, but she doesn’t get the chance because he’s smiling again—brilliant, full teeth—and cutting her off.
“Piper,” he says, and he’s looking at her with such unguarded fondness. “I know what I want for Christmas.”
“Congratulations?” She wants that for him, she really does. But also? She’s a little annoyed that her rant is having, apparently, zero dampening effect.
But then Scott leans over, wraps his big hand very gently around her elbow, and kisses her.
His mouth is warm from the shower, and it’s like Piper can feel the heat coming off his whole body, spreading into hers from the point of contact at their lips.
It takes her a moment to get over the shock of it—but when he nips her lower lip very gently between his teeth, she relaxes against him, the thin fabric of her shirt absorbing some of the water off his chest.
And Scott must take that as a sign to pull her closer, because his hand migrates from her elbow to her lower back, and the other comes up, carefully, to cup her jaw.
There’s an echo of the ER in it for a moment, the way he’s careful with her.
The question—the faint “Is this okay?”—fades from his lips as she wraps her arms around his neck and threads her fingers through the damp strands of his hair.
Piper isn’t aware, exactly, of him walking her backward into the bathroom, steering her, turning her around until the shock of the cold porcelain at the curved edge of the sink meets her back and she lets out a little yelp.
Scott fixes that, locking his hands under her thighs and lifting her up until she’s sitting on the countertop, her butt knocking over a bottle of setting spray expensive enough that she’d stop to right it if the kiss was even 1 percent less spectacular.
He tastes like pumpkin pie, warm spice and sweet vanilla, and like days, weeks, months of distant longing finally, finally released.
Piper spreads her legs, an invitation, and Scott steps forward. Then it’s only his towel and the thin, pilling fabric of her sweatpants between them.
She explores the expanse of his bare back, her hands slipping a little before finding purchase in the divot where his neck meets his shoulders.
Her nose gets wet when she presses it beneath his jaw, nuzzling a little, catching her breath.
She’ll have to amend her working theory about being single at Christmas.
As it turns out, meet-cutes on December 24 might be rare. But when they do happen?
Oh, baby. Worth it.