Chapter 16
There’s something wrong with me.
I actually slept. Like a full seven or eight hours, or something absolutely wild. But it’s insanely early still, and I have to get going soon.
Could have been from the way Ben wrecked me—mind, body, and soul—with that dicking down last night, but who really knows? Maybe it’s because his bed is actually so comfortable that my body just gave in. Or perhaps it’s because something about him makes a lot of my anxiety melt away and instead I’m left with a different set of distracting butterflies in my stomach.
The only problem is, well, everything about that.
My fingers trace a figure eight into the soft sheets, again and again, until finally my eyes crack open and I blink the sleep away from my vision. There’s some morning light slipping through the seam of the curtains and I turn to the side, looking over the rumpled sheets where Ben had been laying. I reach out, palm skimming the fabric, and it’s still warmer than everywhere else.
I sigh, the twist of my anxiety loosening the hold it has on my stomach. When I raise my arms up and stretch, back bowing, the soreness of my muscles is just barely there. It feels strangely good as I point my toes before collapsing back against the bed.
Mrrrp.
I sit up quickly, gaze falling to the curled up fluff of Pebbles’s fur where he picks his head up and gives me a sleepy blink before yawning.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to disturb you.” I rake my nails over his head all the way to his spine, repeating when he nuzzles into my touch. “How’d you get in here, huh? Your dad shut the door on you last night.”
Pebbles just leans into my hand, front paws uncurling and stretching out in the space he’d claimed between the pillows. His eyes drop closed and his quiet purr fills the silence, looking content as I stroke through his sleek fur. And I’ve never been more envious of a cat in my life.
“You wanna come with me? Not, like, home with me—though can’t say I’ve never thought about it, because I have. My apartment isn’t very cat friendly, and I imagine you’re pretty spoiled here. Yeah? Does he spoil you, Pebbles?” I scratch under his chin, and his face tips up with delight. “You’d probably be sad without him.”
I scoop under Pebbles’s stomach, banding my arm around him and holding him close as I scoot off the edge of the bed. The floor is fucking freezing, but it helps wake me up that last little bit. I tug down the hem of Ben’s shirt that he slipped over my head last night when I whined about not being able to sleep if I was naked.
After an unnerving trip to the bathroom to pee while Pebbles stares at me from the floor, I kiss his head. “Let’s go see what Daddy’s up to.”
He’s surprisingly content being carried as I walk us down the hallway, even when I pause at the sight in the kitchen of Ben cooking breakfast at the stove with his back to us. He’s got his apron on again, but no shirt, just the broad expanse of his back on display. My gaze flits over the numbers inked between his shoulder blades and the ones curving under his ribs. I’ve never been more interested in numerology.
Stepping quietly, I slide up behind him and hold out one of Pebbles’s paws to press into his back.
His reaction is exactly what I was looking for.
“Shit!” Ben flinches, whipping around with the spatula in his hand. I immediately step back, lest we get smacked with the hot utensil.
A splatter of scrambled eggs lands on Pebbles’s head, who immediately is pawing and licking at himself to catch a bite.
“Jesus Christ.” A sigh deflates his tense shoulders. “I need to put a bell on you or something.”
“You want to buy me a collar? I’d be down to wear one for you. Never done that before, but it sounds hot.”
His eyes roll, but there’s heat in the depth of that friendly brown as his gaze flicks down my body, all the way to my painted toes. He takes a step forward to bridge our gap, but then his grip tightens on the spatula and he turns back around to the stove where the skillet is sizzling.
“You’re young, I’m sure there’s a lot you haven’t done.”
I don’t know why that stings, but it does. Not like it isn’t true.
“Good thing I have such an experienced teacher, then.” I lower Pebbles to the floor, and he skitters off around the corner of the island to sit at his food and water bowls, taking the cue to eat his own breakfast.
Ben snorts. “There is plenty of shit I haven’t explored yet,” he says, moving the skillet off the burner and killing the flame. “I spent too long in a marriage with a wife who didn’t love me. And that hindered me in every aspect of my life.”
“Why didn’t you separate sooner?”
He’s plating the eggs and some crispy bacon as I peer around his shoulder, my fingers grazing the bare skin of his back just above the dark blue pajama pants. I track the way he arranges everything on the plate so carefully, adding a scoop of fresh berries to round it out.
“Because I was desperate for it to work out. Like I could somehow convince her that she was in love with me just like I was with her.”
The quiet drop of his voice hurts my heart. Actual, physical pain.
I rub my fingers over my breastbone, like I can soothe it away.
“Did…did she ever love you? In the beginning?”
“If you asked me that two years ago, I probably would have said yes. But today, I’m pretty confident she never did.”
Ben turns and hands me a plate and fork before grabbing his own and nudging me to sit at the island. I hop onto the stool next to him as he settles down, swiveling in my seat so I’m turned toward him, enough that my knee presses into his thigh.
“But you loved her?” I ask, picking up a slice of bacon and crunching down on it. It’s crispy and on the edge of burnt, exactly the way I like it. “Mmm.”
“I think I was more in love with the idea of her. She was a childhood friend, and I connected a lot of her to memories of my father, something I was desperate to have when he passed away.”
Something settles in my stomach thick and heavy, and it’s not the bacon.
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” he says while stabbing through two raspberries and bringing them up to his mouth. He chews carefully before saying more. “He’s been gone a long time now, but it still feels like yesterday sometimes.”
And here I am, having burned the bridges with both my parents and so glad for it. But there can be many types of family dynamics, and this is just where the dice have landed for me. Envy beats hard in my chest until I take a bite of the eggs, and they’re cheesy fluffy goodness.
“I fucking love breakfast.”
“Really?”
“Well”—I pause, taking another bite—“maybe it’s just your cooking. You could have sat a steak in front of me and I probably would have said I love dinner, despite it only being nine in the morning. I bet you can cook the hell out of a steak. Oh, we should have steak and eggs sometime. That’s a bomb breakfast. I don’t even actually eat breakfast all that often. But breakfast for dinner? Revolutionary. Even these berries taste better than usual. Did you sprinkle some crack on these?” I take a second bite of a strawberry, the juice running down my chin.
Ben reaches out and takes hold of my jaw, meeting me halfway as he brings me close and darts his tongue out to lick up my chin. He murmurs against my lips, “Why don’t you eat breakfast that often?”
My tongue swipes over my lip, brushing his. There’s still peppermint toothpaste lingering on his breath, and I’m acutely aware that I haven’t brushed my teeth at all. But he doesn’t seem to care as he presses our lips together in a kiss that tastes as sweet as it is slow.
When we part, he lifts a piece of bacon from his plate and holds it up to my mouth.
I take a bite, savoring the smoky crunch.
“Never have. Started in high school when my mother wanted me to lose weight all the time, and it was the easiest meal to skip. Carried on in college when skipping it saved me money, though I’m sure I spent more on all the junk food I was never allowed to have to more than make up for it.”
“Well, expect me to feed you breakfast from now on. It’s the most important meal of the day.”
I squint at him, taking the rest of the bacon from his grasp and watching as he takes a bite from another strip. “You’ve said that before, in a different context, though.”
He lets his gaze drop to where his shirt covers my body, legs entirely bare to him. I’m so tempted to spread my knees and let him have his fill of my pussy, too.
But I’m actually sore, like he shoved a battering ram inside me last night.
“Like I said,” Ben takes another bite, “most important meal of the day.”
I roll my eyes and turn back to my plate, finishing my eggs.
Ben’s phone buzzes on the counter next to the stove where he left it, and we both look up. He starts to stand when there’s a knock at the door, and he changes direction.
“That would be your coffee.”
I blink. “My coffee?”
“I ordered some coffee for us. We both have to get going soon, I’m sure,” he says, all nonchalant like that isn’t one of the single most panty-dropping sentences he could have said. And I’m not wearing panties.
He greets the dasher at the door and retrieves the drink carrier. I’m so focused on the fact that there’s a precious iced coffee walking toward me, that I don’t even see that Pebbles has jumped up onto the island, trying to steal the rest of my bacon until Ben shoos him away.
“One cold brew with three pumps vanilla and three pumps caramel.”
I take the drink as he hands it over, staring down at the cold foam on top.
“When you asked about my coffee order the other day, I don’t know why I didn’t expect you to remember it.”
Ben returns to the seat beside me, taking the lid off his drink, the steam rising from it in an inviting way. He throws me a confused look, brows bunching together as he finishes the rest of his food.
“Why not?”
Taking a drink, my eyes flutter as the sweet drink hits every one of my taste buds and has me sitting up straight. I lick my lip before taking another sip.
“Well, I’ve said before I’ve only dated—been—with dumb boys. I don’t have the best track record of choosing prospects, even when I go from one extreme to the other. And one has to think, maybe it’s me that’s actually the problem.” I shrug, pushing my empty plate forward and setting the drink down only to drag his cup closer so I can steal a sip from it, too. “But when we’re standing in line at a coffee shop and I’ve just said what I’d like to order only for him to repeat the entirely wrong thing to the barista, maybe it’s not just me.”
His eyebrows fly up, jaw going slack before it tightens up and his gaze smolders with intensity as he places a hand on my knee. The warm press of his palm somehow makes me shiver, my skin tingling with anticipation as he grips my leg with strength and comfort.
“You deserve to be heard—to be remembered. Know your worth, little bird.”
The words swirl in my brain and when I take a sip of his drink, the sweetness and warmth wrap tightly around me.
“I’d like to say I know, but I’m not sure I do. I never seem to learn my lesson.”
“And now?”
“Now what?”
“Now that you’re here—with me. What are you learning?” His thumb drags up the inside of my knee, climbing higher on my thigh until my heartbeat ticks up a notch, my mouth running dry.
Ben leans in, taking the cup from my hand to set it out of the way. His nose brushes over mine, lips ghosting over my jaw up to my ear. His breath blows over me and I nearly convulse off the stool, but his other hand spreads over my waist and he catches the movement of my body with ease.
“Tell me,” he demands with a soft drop of his voice that I feel everywhere as his teeth tease the lobe of my ear, his beard scratching over my neck.
“I’m learning what it feels like to be wanted. Listened to. Worshipped.”
“As you should be. Everyone else who’s had you at the tip of their fingers is an idiot for watching you walk away.”
His lips press into the skin below my ear as he drags my body closer, in between the spread of his thighs until there isn’t anywhere else to go unless I want to climb over his lap.
The way those words curl around me is criminal.
Hooking my hand over the bridge of his arm, I shift forward until my feet touch the floor again. As I stand up between his thighs to lean into the crook of his neck, his lips and fingers drag the collar of my borrowed shirt down my shoulder with a slowness that has me sighing.
“Maybe I’m the idiot for leaving,” I say, without meaning the words at all.
His lips flutter along my skin, paving a line back up my throat that has searing heat scoring through my bones. Then his hand shifts from holding onto my thigh to wrap around my neck, each one of his fingers laying delicately as he pushes me back just enough to look at me.
“Everything you’ve done has led our paths to cross, and I will always be thankful for that.”
I like to think I will, too.
His thumb swipes back and forth over the side of my throat, and I blink away the fog that’s taken harbor in my brain.
“Where do you go in that head of yours?”
“Most of the time? Nowhere good.”
“Well, I’ll be here waiting whenever you come back. Just tell me what you need.”
“I appreciate that,” I say, before reaching around him and grabbing my coffee.
“I appreciate that you didn’t leave this morning before I woke up,” Ben says pointedly. “Normally I wake up at seven and head to the gym and am in the office by nine, but I set my alarm for five-thirty today just in case you tried to pull a fast one again.”
“You set your alarm for five-thirty? That’s disgusting.”
He laughs. “You didn’t even budge when it went off.”
“Why were you so obsessed with walking me out the door today?”
He gets up from his seat, collecting our empty plates and putting them in the sink. “I wanted to make sure you got your money. I forgot to give it to you yesterday before we got busy.”
Once we got back to his apartment, we were a little occupied I guess.
Ben pulls out his wallet and presses six hundred dollars cash into my palm.
Suddenly, it feels like I’m holding all I’m worth right in my hand, even if it’s not the truth.