I’m making noises that I’ve never heard from myself in my life.
He lays me out and strips off the rest of my clothes. I’m dizzy, my vision blurring, my body humming. Hot breath tickles my thighs. Alex pushes my legs up to bent and spreads them wide. “Is this okay?” he whispers.
“I’ve been checked recently!” I blurt. Then, mortified, I shut my eyes and squeeze my lips shut.
“Good to know.” He chuckles. “Not what I meant, but thanks for the safety check.”
I shake my head, looking down. “I just meant that I went to the doctor more recently than I was with someone else.”
He exhales against me. “Me too. For the record. I scheduled an appointment the week after you slept in my bed.”
“That’s almost presumptuous,” I say lightly.
“It was incredibly presumptuous, and also a desperate attempt at wish fulfillment.”
He puts his mouth on me with no further preamble, and I spend the next few minutes cursing and gasping and thinking this is the best birthday anyone’s had, ever. I fall off a cliff one minute later, having completely lost any sense of control over my own body’s pleasure. It’s in his hands now. Which is just as terrifying as it is beguiling.
Afterward, Alex crawls up beside me. In between kisses brushed along my jawline, he has the audacity to ask, verbatim, “Want another?”
I am so stunned that all I can think to say is, “Are you running a deal?”
He rumbles out a laugh. “Well, it is your birthday.” He reaches for his nightstand and grabs a condom out of the drawer.
“Alex?” I ask softly as he puts it on.
“Yeah?” he half groans.
“I want to use the condom, but I also wanted you to know I have an IUD.”
He looks back up at me, leaning most of his weight on one elbow, searching my face. “Okay,” he whispers hoarsely. “Thanks for telling me.”
“And—I’m sorry I didn’t say this the other day, but I’m not going to sleep with anybody else while we’re … while this is…”
He settles back against me and murmurs, “I’m not going to sleep with anyone else, either. And condoms are great.” My spine arches and I gasp faintly as his teeth slip against my earlobe. “It’s just you and me, Casey. We can make it be however you want.”
Oddly, that might be the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me.
The spaces between our bodies shrink, and Alex wraps me up, memorizing the shape of me under his hands. He kisses me until I’m gasping for breath. His scratchy voice rumbles against my jaw. “Though, you still have to tell me what you want.”
“I can show you.”
I roll myself on top of him, push against his chest, and let our bodies join. Alex mutters something unintelligible under his breath as the whole of me sinks onto him. His thumbs hook onto my waist and his fingers spread across my back. We watch each other beneath half-closed eyes as I find a rhythm.
I marvel over the way his lashes flutter when my hips finally still.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Um. Do you want to grab some breakfast?” Alex asks the next morning, only once my stomach finishes its growling marathon. It’s the first either of us have spoken today. We’ve been lazily awake for twenty minutes, drowsy eyed and spooning, shifting every few minutes to tug our bodies closer, burrow deeper into the sheets and each other. But we stayed silent the whole time, as if we both knew our first words would break the spell.
Lying there, bracketed by Alex’s arms and legs, shivering under his warm breath tickling my neck, I can’t think of a single reason why I shouldn’t say yes to breakfast. So, I do.
After we get up, I change into the clothes I wore to dinner last night. Alex slips on jeans and a dark blue sweatshirt from a cancer fundraiser 5K in Boston.
I point at it. “You run?”
He grabs his On Clouds, slips them on. “Every morning, if I can.”
“So, you literally wake up and choose violence.”
Alex makes a show of stretching. He props one foot on his nightstand and bends his hands toward it. “McBurney YMCA before breakfast to work up our appetites?”
I throw a pillow at his head, and he laughs as he ducks into the bathroom.
I spend my unobserved moments surveying his apartment. From what I gather, Alex is utilitarian, like an army guy or a minimalist, his furniture sparse but high-end. The couch he had on back order has finally appeared; it looks like it came from Pottery Barn or Restoration Hardware. Same vibe with his kitchenette; there’s a Le Creuset Dutch oven sitting on his electric hot plate. Even his bedding is linen. It’s so comfortable, I’d put money on the whole set being an Italian import.
It’s like Alex doesn’t have a clue how not to shop rich, even when the things he’s buying are in complete dissonance with the rest of his lifestyle. He’s living in a tiny apartment in the heart of the city, where everyone’s existence is transient, held together by tape and tomorrow’s paycheck. But Alex is out here buying the type of extravagant home goods that feel like he’s putting down roots.
Two framed photos sit on the dresser in his bedroom. The first is Alex as a kid, maybe ten or so years old, standing between two Korean kids, one girl and one boy, both a few years older than him. The second is clearly Alex as a baby in his mother’s arms; she’s sitting in a wicker chair on a small apartment porch, smiling softly at the camera.
His mother is gorgeous—just like Alex—but to me he looks more like his father.
A minute later, he comes out of the bathroom wearing his glasses, and my brain short-circuits.
This … is going to be a problem.
I point at his face. “Glasses.”
The corner of his mouth pulls up on one side. He pushes the glasses in question up the bridge of his nose—OH MY GOD, CUT IT OUT WITH THE EROTICA—and says, “I slept in my contacts last night and my eyes were hurting.”
I nod. Stand. “I wouldn’t want you to be in pain.”
I’m in pain. He’s so hot. Must find a way to break his glasses in the interest of my personal sanity.
If Alex knows what I’m thinking, the only indication he gives me is in his smirk. “Need to pee before we leave?” he asks. “I’m not sure you got up enough times last night to take care of that.”
“I have a small bladder, okay?”
Alex grins. “Okay. Want to check on the state of the cosmos?”
“Sure thing, Skywalker.”
He follows me to the balcony, and I kneel down to poke at the soil. It rained yesterday morning, so we don’t water the flowers. I’m actually impressed with how well they’re faring, considering it’s almost November and this alley gets only a few hours of sunlight per day.
“Have you smelled them?” I ask.
“No.”
I nod toward the flowers. Alex kneels and leans in, taking a big, purposeful whiff. He smiles and laughs a little. “They smell like chocolate.”
“Don’t be fooled. They’re toxic to eat.”
He looks at me and raises an eyebrow. “Up until this very moment, I wasn’t convinced you weren’t in league with the Garden Girl editor in chief.”