21. Sock Thief
SOCK THIEF
JUNIE
And it has nothing to do with the way he said mine this afternoon as though I’m his personal forgone conclusion.
Mine.
It echoes through my mind like every forbidden fantasy come to life.
He’s a distraction—that’s the only reason I’m making so much noise while preparing my tea.
It’s definitely not because I want to wake him up.
The only reason I’m even making my tea over here in the first place is because he has better water—mine tastes like rust or copper or some other mineral I can’t name.
Fuck.
He’s coming. Everything I wanted and feared in one sexy package.
I hear him—the specific cadence of his footsteps. I’ve memorized the footfalls of a man who’s determined to ruin my sleep indefinitely because even his presence still gives me butterflies.
He stops in the doorway—my breath stops in my throat.
A smile peels across my lips, knowing the first thing he’ll see are his socks pulled up to my knees, so I’m thankful I still have my back to him. “Before you say anything, your socks were in the laundry room, and I thought it would be warmer out.”
One heartbeat.
A puff of air that sounds like it hisses through his teeth.
Then his voice. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”
God, that low timbre does unspeakable things to my self-control.
“You were thinking it.”
“I was thinking you made your tea without asking if I wanted any.”
Painstakingly slowly, I turn to face him. “You want chamomile tea?”
He shrugs. “No, but the principle stands. Maybe I just wanted to know you were here.”
Cole moves to the cabinet, and I step aside to give him room at the kettle, while we do the thing we’ve been doing for weeks now—occupying his kitchen at odd hours, moving around each other with the practiced ease of two people who innately know each other’s floor plan.
He reaches past me for a mug, and his arm grazes mine.
Goose bumps rise to the surface of my skin. His hand pauses in midair, his gaze memorizing my flesh.
“Can’t sleep?” he asks. His voice, if possible, has dropped another register.
“I was asleep. Then I wasn’t. Then I decided tea was a better option than lying there doing a full forensic analysis of every conversation I’ve had in the last twenty-four hours.”
There. Honest without being in your face.
And Hudson thinks I’m emotionally stunted. If that’s not personal growth, I don’t know what is.
“Did the forensic analysis reach any conclusions?”
I take a slow sip of chamomile. “Jury’s still out.”
He leans against the counter opposite me with his arms crossed.
The kitchen is too small for the both of us when he looks at me like that, like he’s waiting for the verdict with considerably more patience than I have and has no problem intimidating the jury if they don’t come to a satisfactory conclusion.
“You said mine,” I snap, then clamp my mouth shut and suck in both lips to bite on them. Hard. My mouth has always run on its own agenda. “At the drafting table. You said, I want you there as mine. It’s a lot to process after years of being pushed away.”
Jesus, Junie. Get control of your mouth!
“I did.” His smile says a million things while his gaze is dangerously close to incinerating my thin pajamas if he steps even an inch closer.
My heart rate increases in steady beats that get more aggressive with each second that passes.
Slowly, he uncrosses his arms, then he’s gripping the counter on either side of his hips so tightly that his knuckles instantly turn white.
“Well, okay then. This isn’t frustrating at all.”
He can’t just drop a bomb and then decide he doesn’t want to talk about it. And he’s been doing it all evening—answering in the minimum number of words that technically constitute an answer while I do all the work of constructing the actual conversation.
“Cole.” His name flies from my lips with all the snark and sass he knows me for.
“Junie.” My name flies from his lips like a lash from a whip.
Shit. He’s not holding on to his control any better than I am.
But I’m done letting him steer this ship. I’m done waiting for him to make a decision where I’m concerned. He either wants me or he doesn’t, and since I’ve spent years under the impression that he most certainly does not want me, I now have nothing to lose.
“I’m going to say something.” My voice is clear and smooth. “And you’ll have the opportunity to either respond or stand there doing what you’ve always done, which, by the way, has gotten us nowhere, so I’m really going to need you to choose the first one.”
I’m actively choosing vulnerability for the first time in my life, and a flicker of recognition moves behind his eyes. The faintest hint of a dimple. “Go ahead.”
I set my mug on the counter. I need both hands for this. Or at least, I need to not spill the tea when my nerves inevitably take over.
“I showed up here with an exit strategy, but I’ve…
stopped running,” I say. “I told you I couldn’t do the in-between anymore, and I meant it, but somewhere between the ring…
” My thumb instinctively moves to it. “Our meetings on the porch and you going to fix Frank’s gutters because you couldn’t sit still—I’m learning to…
stay in the moment, not run from it. I don’t know exactly when it started.
I just know that I’m here, now, in whatever this is, with you. ”
I run my knuckles over my chest. My heart is being fucking annoying with its mismatched beats and uncomfortable throbbing. He clocks the movement, the way he always does—intensely.
“And.” I slide an inch away from him, and my thoughts clear.
“I just think you should know that because you keep warning me away, telling me I don’t have the full story yet.
Every time you do, I say okay. And I mean that, Cole.
But I’m not a patient woman, and I’m not waiting until our story is perfect before I decide.
Life has taught me that it will never be perfect, so I made a decision based on the knowledge I have. And, Cole?”
His stare lifts from my lips to my eyes.
“My decision is clear. I know what I want.”
The truth behind my declaration is like drawing a line in the sand. I laid down the gauntlet, but I won’t cross the line until he does.
“That might be the bravest thing you’ve ever said to me,” he says.
“It’s going to be the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever said to you if you don’t—”
He crosses to me in three steps.
His hands come up to my face the way they did in my apartment—cupped, deliberate, like I’m something he’s been coveting for a long time and has finally decided to take.
“I’ve already decided too.” His thumb drags along my jaw. “In case that wasn’t obvious.”
My pulse has lost its rhythm.
I scoff, grasping hold of my snark with both hands—just in case. “Your communication style leaves a lot of room for interpretation.”
He chuckles, and his warm, minty breath hits my face like a kiss and a warning.
“Noted.” His mouth finds the corner of mine—just the border of a kiss—the pressure of almost. “Is this interpretation clear enough?”
“Getting there,” I rasp. “I might need further clarification though.”
He ghosts his lips over mine. Our eyes are wide open. This kiss is different.
Turns out, kissing Cole Whittaker when I’m not furious at him is a completely different experience.
Our first kiss was desperation and six years of quiet craving. This—this is a slow masterclass in seduction. This is a man who has decided to take his time and doesn’t care that I’m vibrating out of my own skin.
His hands move from my face to my hair to my waist. Each transition is deliberate, like he’s learning each piece of me before he moves onto the next, and I have the disorienting sense of being truly paid attention to.
I’ve been looked at. I’ve been wanted. I’ve never been studied. “Cole.”
“Hmm,” he says against the sensitive skin of my neck.
I moan and angle my head to the side to give him better access.
“If you stop this time, if you pull away and hide from me again, I will put Ex-Lax in every caffeinated beverage in this house for the remainder of my time here.”
He laughs against my throat—a full-bodied sound. The real one I’ve only heard a handful of times since he left Boston. It’s low and startled and genuine.
Then he lifts me onto the counter and steps between my knees. His laughter fades into something else entirely.
It’s there in his gaze.
The fire.
The chemistry.
The combustible lust.
“I’m not stopping this time, Junie.” He’s so confident, so…sure.
“G-good.” My words tremble past my lips as my hands find the back of his neck. “Just establishing terms.”
“Noted.” Then he kisses me like a man signing his life away, and I stop the war of words I use as protection because there’s no version of what’s currently happening to my nervous system that knows what to do with words.
He breathes heavily against my ear as his calloused hands slide under the hem of my shirt. Skin to skin. His wounds to mine.
“Stop thinking so hard.” He sucks the lobe of my ear into his mouth and bites down hard enough to evoke a full-body shudder.
“I’m always thinking.”
“Stop.”
My body immediately listens to his command, but my mouth is incapable of following directions.
“You stop.”
He leans back just far enough to look at me, and I immediately resent the distance. His hair is slightly wrecked—I did that. His eyes are dark and focused so intently on me that I don’t notice his hands sliding up my ribcage until his thumbs skim the underside of my breast.
“Hi,” he says with a crooked smile that settles the fears inside me.
It shouldn’t work. It’s one word. And yet, it dismantles the hesitations calculating in the back of my mind.
“Hi.” My version is shyer, quieter, needier.
I hold my breath as he leans in to kiss me again, and this time I stop trying to maintain the running monologue that usually keeps me a safe distance from my own feelings. Because distance is something Cole and I have had, and now, I fully understand why it will never work.