Chapter 10 #3
He grins again, reaching over and plucking the hairbrush from my lap. “Checked your streaming services while you were in the shower. I wanted to see what you liked so I could pick a movie. I thought you could use a quiet night.”
I narrow my eyes, mostly to keep him from seeing just how much I like the idea of a quiet night. With him. “Some people would call that snooping.”
“Some people would,” he agrees. “But none of those people are me.”
“So what would you call it?”
Drew leans over and kisses my cheek, adjusting the heating pad across my lap as my skin goes warm right in the spot his lips touched. “I would call it getting to know the woman I can’t stop thinking about. I think I might be obsessed with you.”
I scoff. “Obsessed with me? I’m a prickly lawyer with a near pathological need to help and a body that stages a full-scale rebellion at least once a month that can only be fixed by s—” I cut myself off before I say surgery, not ready to explain what I’ll be doing not too long from now.
Drew’s face turns curious, but I plow ahead, hoping he’ll move past it.
“Anyway, if even half of what the internet says is true, beautiful women throw themselves at you on the regular, and more often than not, one of them ends up in your bed.”
Drew’s face turns serious, his hands coming to rest on my knees and his eyes steady on mine. “I haven’t had a woman in my bed in a long time.”
“How long?” I ask, setting my half-empty plate on the coffee table, unable to look away from his golden gaze.
“Six months,” he says simply, pushing his hands forward, his fingers finding the spaces between mine.
When he curls his fingers around, joining our hands together, my heart thrashes wildly, everything about this moment too much.
Or not enough. I can’t quite figure out which, but I like it.
Too much probably, but I don’t do one thing to make it stop.
“Since the night I won a Super Bowl and met a gorgeous lawyer with pretty purple toes and eyes that look like a storm and entire worlds hidden beneath her surface just waiting to be discovered. There may have been a lot of women before, but there aren’t anymore because none of them are you.
” Drew looks down at our joined hands and back up at me.
“I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now, but it’s like you’re dug inside me, Catie, in a way no one else ever has been before.
I don’t know what it means, and I think I’m probably no good for anyone, but I can’t make myself forget about you and I don’t want to stay away.
I know I fucked up before and I have no idea where to start, but I think maybe we can start right here, because here, with you, is the only place I want to be. ”
Drew’s words hit me in the chest. Burrow there. Become a part of me. Because even though I tell myself I prefer to be alone, I think maybe here is the only place I want to be too.
With him.
I don’t know what to do about that, and I don’t have the brain space to figure it out right now, so I reach for a little levity.
I’m not avoiding the heavy stuff. I’m saving it for later.
Probably.
“Well, you do make a killer omelet, and you’re not terrible to look at either.
You nailed the proper soda-to-ice ratio in my drink, and you figured out two heating pads are better than one when my cramps try and kill me from the inside out.
Also, I read through the estate planning questionnaire you sent back to me, and you list yourself as owner of six random and unrelated businesses and a host of other weird and hard-to-value assets you haven’t planned for at all, so maybe we can start there, too, because I think you need me pretty badly. ”
A shadow crosses Drew’s face, but it’s gone too fast for me to clock it, his lips turning up in his signature smirk.
Pushing up from the coffee table, he slides onto the couch and slots himself behind me, his body pressed to mine.
It’s ridiculous how much I like it, and before I realize what’s happening, he drags my hairbrush through my hair, and it feels so good I very nearly purr like a fucking cat.
I resist my kneejerk urge to tell him I can do this by myself.
That I’ve been brushing my own hair since I was five and saw how overwhelmed my mom was with twins and a newborn baby, so I figured out how to do it on my own to take something off her plate.
And for the first time in my entire adult life, I admit to myself two things I’ve never let myself think before.
Sometimes I’m really not fine, and it feels better when I don’t have to do everything all alone.
Drew leans forward until his lips are close to my ear, his warm breath fluttering deliciously over my skin when he speaks. “I’m not sure I know how to need anyone,” he says quietly, continuing to work the brush through my tangled strands. “But I think I would like to learn how to need you.”
We’re not so different, I realize, as I settle back against him, soaking in this little act of care that for me feels so very huge. And I think maybe I would like to learn how to need him too.