Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
The storm had lasted for three days. Seventy-two hours. Four thousand three hundred and twenty minutes.
Tarmek had counted every single one.
She'd left it next to the sink. Not in the sink. Not in the dishwasher. Next to it. Like the dishwasher was too far away. Like the extra four inches of movement was simply beyond human—or in her case, delightfully chaotic human—capacity.
He picked up the mug. He washed it by hand because the dishwasher wouldn't run until evening, and he couldn't look at the evidence of her for another twelve hours. He dried it with the designated mug towel and put it back on the second shelf in the cabinet in the striped mug section.
Order restored.
He turned around and found her sweater draped over one of the kitchen chairs.
The purple sweater that was too big for her and kept slipping off one shoulder and had a small hole near the hem that she'd patched with embroidery thread in a completely different color, some kind of orange that clashed beautifully and made his eye twitch every time he looked at it.
He picked up the sweater. It smelled like her—paint and chai and something warm he couldn't identify but had started dreaming about. He folded it and set it on the chair properly, adjusted the angle twice.
This is fine, he told himself. This is manageable. This is—
A sound drifted from somewhere in the condo.
Soft, melodic, utterly devastating. She was singing again.
Edie sang constantly. While cooking. While sketching.
Even while brushing her teeth, which he only knew because he'd walked past the bathroom yesterday and heard her humming through a mouthful of toothpaste.
She didn't have a great voice, but she sang with complete, unselfconscious joy. She sang like music was just something her body did naturally, the same way it breathed or left catastrophic messes everywhere she went.
Right now she was singing something about yellow submarines. The melody floated through the cabin, punctuated by the sound of running water and the clatter of what was probably his organized bathroom cabinet being systematically reorganized.
He gripped the edge of the counter and forced himself to breathe.
Four thousand three hundred and twenty-two minutes.
The problem wasn't that she was messy. He could handle mess. He had a system. He could clean and reorganize. He could restore order from chaos with the same methodical precision he brought to everything else in his life. The problem was that he didn't want to.
Every time he picked up one of her abandoned mugs, he thought about her lips on the rim.
Every time he folded one of her sweaters, he imagined what she'd look like taking it off.
Every time he straightened her scattered art supplies, he remembered the way she bit her bottom lip when she was concentrating and the way her tongue poked out slightly when she was working on something difficult.
His thoughts had become increasingly... problematic.
Filthy, even.
He'd been trying to do his morning workout routine yesterday, and she'd wandered into the room to grab something from her bag. She was wearing leggings that fit like a second skin and she bent over to dig through the chaos.
His routine was a carefully calibrated series of exercises designed to maintain flexibility and core strength that he'd performed hundreds of times.
This time he lost count of his reps. He just stopped mid-crunch and stared like a particularly depraved gargoyle until she'd found whatever she was looking for and bounced out of the room with a cheerful "Sorry, carry on! "
Carry on. As if his brain hadn't completely short-circuited. As if he wasn't going to need to add thirty minutes to his cold shower routine just to function like a normal person.
She was destroying him. Systematically. Cheerfully. Probably without even realizing it.
The singing stopped, and the bathroom went quiet. Then he heard her footsteps in the hallway, that distinctive rhythm she had because she walked on her toes like someone who was perpetually about to break into dance.
He forced himself to focus on the coffee maker. Beans in the grinder. Water in the reservoir. Everything measured. Everything controlled.
The footsteps got closer.
"Morning!" Her voice was bright and sleep-rough, impossible to ignore.
He turned around to offer a civilized greeting like a normal person who lived with a houseguest and had normal, appropriate houseguest thoughts. The words died in his throat.
She was wearing his shirt.
His shirt. A soft navy henley that he'd left in the laundry room two days ago because it needed to go in the delicates cycle and he hadn't run that load yet.
The fabric hung past her hips, the sleeves were rolled up to her elbows, and the collar was sliding off one freckled shoulder in a way that made his mouth go dry.
She was wearing tiny sleep shorts, so small they barely peeked out from under the hem of his shirt, exposing miles and miles of pale, paint-flecked leg.
Her hair was a wild red explosion, curls going every direction, pillow-creased on one side. No makeup. Just her, soft and rumpled and wearing his clothes like they belonged to her. Something possessive roared to life in his chest.
Mine, his orc instincts insisted. She's wearing my things. She's in my home. She's—
"You okay?" She tilted her head, frowning slightly. "You look like you swallowed a wasp."
He opened his mouth, then closed it. He tried to remember how breathing worked.
"Coffee," he managed finally, his voice rough.
"Ooh, perfect." She padded past him, close enough that he could smell her—soap and sleep and that indefinable warmth—and reached up to open the mug cabinet.
"I need caffeine before I can function. I was up way too late working on the central composition piece.
I think I finally cracked the transition from the dynamic movement section to the—"
She kept talking. The words washed over him without registering because she was stretching up on her toes to reach the shelf, and the movement made his shirt ride up to reveal the curve of her waist. There was a small paint stain on her hip that had probably transferred from her hand while she worked, and he wanted to put his mouth on it.
He wanted to put his mouth on a lot of things.
"—might need to adjust the color palette, because I realized that the green I was planning doesn't quite match the official team colors, and I was thinking maybe a slightly darker emerald with gold accents instead of the yellow I originally—are you listening?"
No. He was not listening. He was standing very still and gripping the counter behind him hard enough that his knuckles ached, using every ounce of discipline he'd developed over a lifetime of elite athletic training to keep himself rooted in place.
"Emerald with gold," he repeated. "Sounds. Good."
She squinted at him. "Did you sleep okay? You seem weird."
"I'm fine."
"You're doing that thing with your jaw again. The clenchy thing."
"I don't do a thing with my jaw."
"You absolutely do. It's like—" She put down her mug and demonstrated, exaggerating the tension in her face until she looked like an angry cartoon character. "This. You're doing this."
Despite the wanting, the frustration, and the complete collapse of his carefully structured existence, he felt his lips twitch.
"I don't look like that."
"You totally look like that. All the time. Every time I leave a cup somewhere. Every time I reorganize something. Every time I exist, basically."
"That's not—"
"It's fine." She grinned, bright and impish, and picked up her coffee. "I think it's cute."
Cute. She thought his psychological torment was cute.
He watched her take a sip of coffee, watched her eyes close in appreciation, and watched her throat move as she swallowed. The collar of his shirt—his shirt—slipped another inch off her shoulder.
Four thousand three hundred and twenty-four minutes.
She wandered towards the refrigerator, mug in hand, still talking about color theory and contrast ratios and things he should have been paying attention to because they involved his team and his arena and his professional responsibilities.
But then she opened the fridge and bent over slightly to examine the contents, giving him a perfect view of those tiny shorts stretching across curves that he had absolutely no business looking at.
Look away, he told himself. She's a guest. She's a colleague. She's temporary.
"Do you have any yogurt that isn't arranged in a weird little formation?" she asked, still bent over, still completely destroying his ability to form coherent thought.
"They're sorted by expiration date."
"Of course they are." She grabbed one from the back—the wrong one, a peach that didn't expire for another week when she should have taken the strawberry that was closer to its date—and straightened up. "You're impossible, you know that?"
"I've been told."
"By who? Your label maker?"
"My coach. My trainer. My—" He stopped, and took a breath. "Everyone, generally."
She laughed, that warm sound that seemed to fill the entire kitchen, and leaned against the counter to eat her yogurt. His shirt gaped slightly at the neckline, revealing the delicate architecture of her collarbone, and he had to look away.
His gaze landed on the refrigerator.
Specifically, on the team magnets. He had one from every team they played and he'd organized them last night after she'd gone to bed.
They were color-coded into a precise gradient with reds on the left, oranges in the middle-left, yellows in the center, greens in the middle-right, blues and purples on the right. A perfectly satisfying rainbow.
Now there was a gap where the green magnets should have been. And his favorite magnet, the small Emerald Enforcers logo that he'd gotten from a charity event three years ago, had been moved to the completely wrong side, nestled among the oranges like it belonged there.