AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“—that we close your laptop for the week, and then when we go back to L.A., we can double down on the rules and get back to normal.”
I hate to admit it, but I think he has a point. “You want to get rid of the rules also?”
He frowns in thought for a minute. “Where we can, yeah. But I want you to feel comfortable and safe, so we can stick to them if you want. But it might be difficult while trying to sell the relationship in public.”
“I always feel safe with you, Derek,” I say before I can stop myself. But it’s true and I’m not sorry that he knows it. “We could completely dump the rules out the window and I’d still feel that way.”
His sharp blue eyes bore into me, and the air feels thick. “I’m glad to hear it. And since we’re on the same page…I think we can share this bed.”
I cut my eyes to where his hand is denting the comforter. “How can we share it without…”
He lifts a brow at where I let my sentence dangle.
“Accidentally touching! That’s all I was thinking. Not sex. I wasn’t thinking about having sex with you at all. Sex never even entered my train of thought. Ever. Not even back when we were having it.”
Somehow his entire body is a smirk. “You’re saying the wordsexa lot.”
“It really feels like it, doesn’t it?” I grimace. “Now we definitely can’t share that bed.”
He laughs and unfolds his big body like the wordsexnever fazed him. Probably because he’s had plenty of it over the years, unlike me who hasn’t touched a man in three whole turns around the sun. Jeez, I should fix that.
But not with him!
“We used to sleep together, Nora, that’s a fact and not something we have to be ashamed of. Open communication now.” He grins at me from where he’s standing beside the bed, and it makes my knees feel like they’re made of banana pudding.
“What are you doing?” I ask as I watch him add an extra blanket to the bed and then toss his pillow to the opposite end.
“This is how we can share a bed without touching. I’ll sleep on top of the comforter, and you can sleep under it. And just for added measure, we’ll sleep feet to face.”
“You mean sixty—”
“Don’tfinish that sentence,” he warns, and the serious note to his voice has me thinking maybe he’s not so unaffected after all.
“Okay,” Derek says, stepping back into the hotel suite after leaving ten minutes ago to find some food.
The heavy door falls shut behind him and if he thinks it’s uncomfortable that I’ve ventured to the bed while he was gone, he doesn’t show it.
I, however, pop up off the pillow like a guilty jack-in-the-box, because lying horizontal while he’s in the same vicinity as me feels wrong. Wrong in that it feels amazing, and I want to tug him down beside me and see if all the extra muscle he’s put on feels different while he’s lying on top of me or not.
Derek walks toward the bed and I sit up straight. Puritan posture.
“I thought you might be hungry, so I got you something too.” He raises two bowls in the air as he approaches the bed. The mattress dips almost obscenely when Derek settles onto it, tipping me toward him. I’m resisting the urge to shape-shift into a marble and roll onto him.
He pauses and looks around curiously. “What’s different in here?”He all but sniffs the air. “Ah—you moved the décor around and grouped it all by color.”
“It happened before I could stop it,” I say.
“As it usually does.”
I straighten in defense. “When I feel out of sorts, organizing helps me relax.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
A soft grin. “My apartment in college had never been so clean and organized than when we were dating. And yours is like that now, I noticed. But the color component is new.”
“What can I say, I’ve evolved.” I run my finger over a wrinkle in the bedding. “Is it…annoying that I do that?”
