Chapter Sixteen
We’d returned with drinks, made our excuses, and - after another round of hand-crushing - entertained ourselves people-watching until it seemed like an acceptable time to leave. Walking back to the room from the elevator, something dawned on me.
“You know this is the first time we’ll have actually slept together,” I pointed out when the bedroom door closed behind us.
Kai turned to smile at me. “Do you snore?” he teased.
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Do you have violent night terrors?”
He made a thoughtful face. “Not in a while. You’ll know it’s happening if I start kicking you relentlessly while screaming.”
I snorted. “Yes, that ought to give it away.”
Kai stepped closer, slipping an arm around my waist and pulling me in to him. “Are you beginning to regret not asking for the room with the twin beds?”
Carefully, I traced the pad of my thumb across his cheekbone. “Maybe adjoining rooms, we wouldn’t want it to look scandalous.”
He nodded, then dipped his head in close until his lips just brushed against mine. Instinctively I found myself leaning into him, trying to follow his mouth with my own.
Strong fingers, kneading up my spine. My body shuddered, as Kai’s hands slipped down from my shoulder-blades to the small of my back, then worked their way up again. “You only have to do that for two hours more,” I told him, my eyes closed. Heard him chuckle.
“Are you tired?” he purred next to my ear. I felt his smile twist, at my grunted yes. “Has it been a terribly long day for you?”
I made a breathy uh-huh noise in my throat, too caught up in the sensations of his impromptu massage to find real words.
Only to be jolted out of it rudely by a slap on my ass.
“In that case you should brush your teeth, then, so we can go to bed.”
I flinched away, feeling outraged; glared at the look of amusement on his grinning face.
“I don’t know if this is what they taught you at military boot-camp, but out here in the real world it would be considered kinda rude,” I scolded, as I pushed past him and into the bathroom.
“I didn’t go to military boot-camp,” he replied, volume increasing as I closed the door in his face.
“Well you should have!” I shouted back, pointedly. Then grumbled to myself over the sound of him laughing.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed when I opened the door again, stripped down to his briefs. Black against his tan. I’d been ready to continue our playful bickering, but the sight of him undressed pushed any thought of that out of my mind.
“That was quick,” he observed.
I shrugged in reply. “I’ve brushed my teeth before, this wasn’t my first time.”
Kai grinned. “Such wisdom and experience.”
I gave him a big, toothy smile. “Yeah,” I added, “I’m kinda a big deal when it comes to mouth stuff.”
His grin became a smirk. “That’s one of the things I like about you.”
Shaking my head in mock-dismay, I started to pull off my tie and unbutton my shirt. I could see Kai watching me in the mirror.
“Aren’t you going to brush your teeth, then?”
He shrugged. “The view is better here.”
I pushed the shirt down my shoulders and pulled it off, then began unbuckling my belt. “The view in here will very soon be one of me in bed. Which you’d be very welcome to join, if only you weren’t procrastinating right now.”
Sighing, he pushed himself up. “Fine, fine. But try not to fall asleep before I’m out, okay?”
Pointedly, I glanced at my watch. “It’s a ticking countdown,” I warned. Then laughed as he dashed into the bathroom.
We’d joked about it, but the thought of actually sleeping in the same bed as Kai - falling asleep, not sleeping together - felt like a milestone.
It’d been a good while since I’d been bedmates with another guy, and frankly that hadn’t been the most comfortable of situations as things with my ex deteriorated.
Toward the end of the relationship I’d usually finish up the inevitable bottle of wine and then be asleep by ten, eleven at the latest. He’d half-wake me as he crawled in at two or three in the morning, and then I’d be out to work before his alarm went off the next day.
It was a routine, but one that seemed more about making sharing a bedroom manageable when it was with someone you didn’t particularly look forward to seeing any more. Kai wasn’t my ex, of course, but just the idea of having someone else alongside me was making my palms itch.
Then there were the practical considerations. Which side of the bed did he prefer to sleep on, for a start? Hanging my pants over the back of a chair, I decided I’d just take the side I usually would have, and rely on the fact that Kai was probably too nice to actually say anything about it.
“You’re still awake,” he observed when he clicked off the bathroom light a few minutes later.
I looked up from my phone. “Forced myself, just to be polite,” I told him.
He smiled. “You’re the perfect gentleman.”
Laughing, I raised an eyebrow. “I think if we asked Chuck, he’d say that was you, not me.”
Kai gave an exaggerated grimace. “Do we have to talk about Chuck while we’re in bed?”
I looked pointedly at the empty spot alongside me. “Well, if we’re being precise, only one of us is in the bed right now.”
“True, true,” he conceded, then pushed his briefs down his legs and slipped under the covers. “Better?”
His hands eased their way over my chest, then down my stomach. Came to a halt at the waistband of my boxer-briefs.
“Tate, why do you have underwear on?”
I shrugged, or at least as best I could while lying down. “I didn’t want to seem presumptuous,” I explained.
Kai covered his eyes with his hand. “Presumptuous? You fed me your load on this exact bed this afternoon. I think we’re probably past it being ‘presumptuous’ for you to sleep naked next to me.”
I giggled. “So I didn’t need to bring my Bugs Bunny pajamas, either?”
He dug his fingers under the waistband of my boxers and tugged them down my legs. “At this point, I honestly wouldn’t put it past you to have a pair.” He waited for me to pull my knees up, so he could slip the fabric over my feet. “Ugh, there, much better.”
My underwear landed in an unceremonious heap somewhere in the corner of the room.
“You’ll have to remember those later,” I told him, “else you owe me a new pair.”
He snorted. “You can have a pair of mine. I’ll fill the front up with precum and everything.”
“Gross,” I replied, but my dick gave a little lurch at the thought of it all the same.
He eased one strong arm around my shoulders, and before I realized what was happening he was drawing me in against him. It was not an unpleasant sensation.
“So was having me along tonight as terrible as you expected it to be?” Kai asked, voice quieter.
I traced tiny circles with my fingertips on his chest. “No, not at all. And I never said it would be terrible to have you there. I was worried you’d be bored, is all.”
“So conscientious,” Kai observed.
“Positively saintly,” I replied, mock-serious.
His hand gently stroked my shoulder as we lay in silence for a while. Then, out of the blue: “Have we been dating?”
I blinked. “I mean,” I started, then paused. “Well. You told people we were. This evening, I mean.”
Another silence. “Sure, but that was for then, and this is now, just between the two of us. We never discussed it before, I know. I just don’t know how you see this, and I’m... curious.”
‘Curious’ was a loaded word. It hadn’t escaped me that Kai hadn’t said exactly how he saw us together.
Yes, he’d told the people at the gala tonight one thing, but he’d also just made clear that was very much a situation-specific answer.
For all I knew now, the reality in his mind was entirely different.
There was a part of me that felt like it wasn’t up to me to decide, anyway.
As though, through some unwritten rule of the game we were playing, he was the hotter, younger, generally more appealing one of the two of us.
That, in turn, left it down to him to decide just how serious all this was.
What sort of name it was allowed to take.
I knew if I tried to explain that to him, though, Kai would just call it stupid and needlessly self-deprecating, and it wouldn’t get me any closer to an answer. That was a problem, because right now an answer was something I didn’t have. Nothing more, at least, than a gut feeling.
It was fun being with him. The sex was incredible, yes, but it was more than that. Kai could be serious when he needed to be, and playful at other times, and he could make me laugh just as enthusiastically as he could make me cum.
That was great, but it was also terrifying.
I knew from cold, painful experience what it was like to give in to soft and tender feelings for someone else.
To trust them, and come to rely on them in your life; then to realize that they were probably never the person your brain saw them as.
And then, even though you were fully aware they weren’t perfect and that they couldn’t ever be, suddenly they were taken away from you.
A sense of loss, one that’s just as much for the fantasy that took root as the real, flesh and blood person you were with.
I couldn’t argue with the fact that breaking up with my ex had been a good thing overall, but I wasn’t under any illusion that rushing back into that situation would be any more preferable.
No matter how tempting it might be to trust Kai and take everything that was said and done at face value.
“This wasn’t meant to be a rocket science sort of question,” he said, interrupting my thoughts. “It didn’t need a PowerPoint.”
I smiled, small and tight, as I let my fingers drift through the tangles of his hair. “Overthinking,” I admitted.
“I would never have guessed,” he teased. “We don’t have to talk about this stuff, if it makes you uncomfortable. I was just curious, is all.”
The perfect escape route, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to take it. Doing so would’ve seemed unfair.
“I’m not trying to be intentionally evasive,” I told him, “I promise I’m not. And you’re right, talking about all this does make me feel uncomfortable, but I’m not saying that means we shouldn’t ever talk about it.”
Kai lifted his head to look across me, at the clock on the nightstand. “What time is your first session tomorrow?” he asked.
I grimaced. “Nine. They’d better have a lot of coffee.”
He settled back down next to me. “Then how about we table this whole topic until later - a soon-later, not a much-later-later - so you can get some sleep, and I can dream about the waffles I’m going to order from room service while you’re in a presentation.”
“Hey,” I protested, nudging him in the ribs.
Kai laughed. “I’m here for the dick and the in-room dining, I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear,” he joked, then rolled to the side to click off the light.
“Well, shit,” I told the darkened room. “Now I want waffles.”