Chapter 15 Then #3
“I’m the menace? You just towel-spanked me! Twice!”
Alex throws the towel over his head. “I’m the menace.”
“Maybe we’re both menaces.” I lean in and drag the towel off his face. And suddenly he’s there, much closer than I realized, and I’m staring at him. Our mouths only a few inches apart. A swallow works down my throat.
Alex lifts a hand, sweeps his thumb across the edge of my mouth, along my bottom lip. Every nerve in my body crackles. “Egg yolk,” he says. “You had some there.”
Embarrassment sweeps through me. I scowl up at him. “You’re just telling me?”
His gaze dances across my face. “Honestly, I didn’t notice, until you were this close.”
I realize I am close to him. Too close. I step back. Alex does, too.
For a moment, it’s awkwardly silent in the kitchen. Alex takes the towel from my hand, sets it aside, then steps beside me with a clean towel, drying the pans I’ve washed.
“I feel like we were talking about something,” he says. “But I’ve completely forgotten what that was.”
“Before my egg-yolk face distracted you?” I say tartly.
He glances my way. “Are you embarrassed?”
“Obviously!”
“Why?”
“Because I had egg yolk on my face! And you had to wipe it off!”
“It was endearing,” he says.
“Endearing.” I roll my eyes. “Sure.”
“Ted, can I inform you of something?”
“Inform away.” I pick up the last pan in the sink, add a squirt of dish soap, and start scrubbing.
“I am a physically affectionate guy.”
I fumble with the pan. “Not terribly Sagittarian of you.”
“Cancer moon,” he explains.
I peer up at him, genuinely surprised. “You are the first man I’ve ever met who knows this much about his star chart.”
“Trust me, I didn’t learn it voluntarily. My sister, Ari, went through an astrology phase. A very intense, impassioned phase.”
I smile. “Intense and impassioned, huh? Real surprised she’s related to you.”
Alex looks at me steadily, undeterred by my teasing. “Physical affection is big for me. And it has been pretty scarce for… quite a while.”
“I get that,” I tell him quietly. “Me, too.”
He holds my gaze for a beat longer. Heat creeps up my cheeks.
Slowly, he turns back to the pan, eyes on the towel as he dries it.
“So something like egg yolk on your mouth, I don’t see it how you do, as something to be embarrassed about.
I’m too busy being greedy for the chance to touch you.
Because it feels good. Because you seem to like it when I do, and that makes me feel good, too.
So if it really is just embarrassment that makes you regret a moment like that, I hope you know, on my side of things, that’s not where my mind is.
But… if it’s because me touching you makes you uncomfortable—”
“It doesn’t,” I blurt.
Alex glances my way, his expression tense, wary.
“It doesn’t,” I tell him, my voice calmer, meeting his eyes. “I do like it. It… feels good to me, too. Very good.”
His gaze holds mine. “I haven’t been friends with a woman in a long time. And you’re really fucking good at putting me at ease.” He clears his throat. “See inappropriate towel spanks from five minutes ago.”
My heart’s thudding in my chest.
“So,” he continues, “just… please tell me, if at any point I’m going too far, touching too much, okay?”
I nod. “I will. And same, with me? I know I hug. A lot. And that can be… a lot.”
Alex smiles slowly.
“What?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Just realizing, you are a bit of a cuddle bug.”
I set the pan down in the sink with a clunk. “Based on what?”
“On how you were snuggled up to me when I stayed over at your place.”
“You”—I point the scrubber at him—“were just as snuggled. You had your arm wrapped around me Wednesday night.”
“You,” he says smugly, “were glued to me Thursday morning.”
Fresh heat slams through my body. “Not when you woke up.”
His grin deepens. “Not when you thought I woke up.”
My jaw drops. “You menace!”
“That’s it!” He stabs a finger in the air. “That’s what we were talking about!”
Surprising myself, I have this urge to push. To demand. Why did he pretend to be asleep? Why did he let me lie there, glued to him (I was absolutely glued to him), staring at him like that?
Oh god, does he know I was staring at him? That thought wipes away any interest I had in pushing the conversation further.
“We were talking about,” he says, “being vengeful menaces.”
I turn the spigot on, rinsing the pan. “Vengeful? Us?”
Alex darts a smiling glance my way as he picks up another pan and starts to dry it. “What I was thinking about, then—”
“Before or after the towel spanks?”
He nudges me with his shoulder. I set the rinsed pan on the drying rack and turn off the water. “Sorry. You towel-spank when people are saucy. I get glib when they’re sincere. It’s a bad habit. Can I have a dish towel?”
“To spank me?”
“To dry the dishes,” I say neatly.
“Fine,” he sighs, then tosses me a towel.
“I was just thinking, for how much getting back at our exes was the reason we started spending time together, we haven’t spent much time talking or thinking about them.
It’s not what I expected, but… this feels way better. And I don’t mean just the touching.”
Touching. It’s an innocuous word but not the way he says it. Goose bumps bloom across my skin. I try to hide the shiver that ripples through me by reaching for a pan, then starting to dry it.
“What were you expecting from our hangouts?” I ask. “Toxic vent sessions in which we’d vilify our exes and judge them for jumping into a new relationship before the ink had dried on our divorce decrees?”
“Hmm.” He tips his head. “That does sound appealing.”
I laugh. “Yeah, that’s sort of what I’d expected, too. And I imagine a time will come for that. But for now…” I nudge his shoulder with mine. “I like this. It’s nice, to just push them, the sadness, all of it, out of our heads, and feel… almost happy?”
“Happy-ish,” he says.
I smile. “That,” I tell him. “Happy-ish.”