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“I didn’t agree to that.” I sniffed.
“Oh, baby, you will,” he replied, and the way he said it made me believe him. “Go open your present.”
He let me go, and I shot across the room to reach into the bag and pull out a clear zippered pouch with a set of folded white sheets. “These are really nice,” I said, glancing at the label and then up at him.
“Yes.” He confirmed, tugging them out of my hands to unzip the top and hold the package between us. “But how do they feel?”
My heart skipped because he cared enough to ask. Because he knew it mattered. A wave of nervousness rose inside me as I stared down into the folded white fabric. There were faint wide stripes on it, and every other one had a barely-there sheen.
What if I didn’t like them? What if the way they felt made my skin crawl? How could I tell him that? How could I recoil from something he’d bought just for me? I couldn’t tell him. I wouldn’t. I’d sleep on them even if they felt like sandpaper.
I’d never wanted to like something so badly. It never mattered before which textures I liked or didn’t because there was nothing emotional attached to them.
“Your old sheets are black,” he observed, glancing at the twin set. “Is white okay? I didn’t really think about the color. I was too worried about the fabric…” His voice trailed off. “Actually, no. I picked white on purpose.”
“You did? Why?”
“That night at the party, you had on a white T-shirt. I liked it. White is pure just like you.” He cleared his throat when I just stared. “But if you don’t?—”
Screw my nerves, I thought, sinking my entire hand into the package. Cool, soft fabric enveloped my hand all the way up to my wrist. I wiggled my fingers, rotated my wrist, and rubbed my palm against the thick stack.
Then I looked at Arsen and smiled, unfiltered joy lighting me up inside as though he’d just handed me my own personal sun. “I like them.”
He yanked the package with my hand still sandwiched inside, and I tumbled into his chest. “If you smile at me like that again, I’ll buy every set in the entire damn store,” he swore, then sealed the vow with a kiss.
The pack of sheets fell to the floor between us, and I clung to his waist while our mouths slid together. Every so often, he would move just right, and the coolness of his lip rings against my heated lips shot jolts of awareness down to my groin. The slight texture of his beard was not scratchy, just abrasive enough to add more sensation to the already devastating kiss.
In the past, there was always so much hesitation in me that it watered down any attraction I felt, but with Arsen, it was replaced with need so strong there was no room for anything else.
I whimpered against his tongue, and he responded by sucking mine into his mouth. When he released me, I latched on to his piercings, gently suckling them, the faint taste of metal coating my tongue.
When he finally lifted, the tops of his cheekbones were flushed and his eyes glittered in a way that made me feel like prey. But this man was no predator, and he proved it when he grasped my cheeks and swept his hot gaze over my features. “You are so goddamn beautiful to me.”
Or maybe he was a predator, the most skillful one to ever hunt, because his words brought me down. Right at his feet.
He stared longer, and I let him, never so comfortably uncomfortable with the unflinching attention of someone else. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him what he wanted so I could try and be whatever it was. But I said nothing because the way he stared reminded me of something he’d said. Everything you already are is perfectly enough.
After dropping a too-quick kiss against my mouth, he pulled back, bending to reach into the bag. “I got you a couple blankets too,” he said. “No comforter, though, because nothing in that place was good enough.”
Everything he said was like an arrow right through my heart. If he kept shooting arrows like this at me, my heart would be nothing but a gaping hole with beating flesh around it.
“We can go look tomorrow after our date that I will not be canceling.”
I nodded.
He smiled as if my inability to speak was cute. “The blankets I got are king-size, so they’ll be okay for tonight.”
“How’d you know what size to get?” I asked.
“If I was going to buy a new bed, it would be a king.”
“Well, you need one,” I commented, thinking of those long legs.
He could have pointed out that I wasn’t much smaller than him. He didn’t. Stepping closer he said, “I am bigger than you.”
Something inside me loosened. The part of me that felt so small was seen. But more than that… accepted.
“Anyway, these are the bougiest blankets I could find. I told the woman I wanted the softest thing she had.”
