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I liked being close to him when I slept too.
So even though his weight was making it even harder to breathe, I fell asleep quickly to his warm breath on my chest and my arms around his strong body.
And as I drifted off, I was all-too aware of a small little feeling that started in my chest, right under my ribcage, and spread outward until it enveloped my entire body. And that feeling was: right. Being with Paine, even after the worst night of my life, it felt right. It felt like it was where I was supposed to be.TwentyElsieSunday, I woke up alone like I did every morning. The only difference would be that the past two mornings I woke up alone but only because Paine was downstairs brewing coffee and making me breakfast. I learned this after waking up on Friday morning alone, achy, feeling whiny and pathetic. And when I reached for the bedside table for my sketch, it wasn't there. Now, despite the good ending to the shitty night before, my mind immediately went to the worse case scenario, making me throw the blanket over my head on a tear-less sob and wallow in my painful self-pity.
For all of, say, three minutes before I heard something clang down on the nightstand and the blanket got peeled back from my head. "You gonna come out of there to eat or am I going to have to get creative here?" he asked, moving to sit down beside me.
There was no ignoring the squeezing sensation of my heart in my chest when I looked up into those perfect light green eyes in that perfect chiseled face of his and realized he hadn't left me, that I was being a worrywart for no good reason.
"Eat?" I asked, my belly doing a painful twisting thing due to not having any dinner the night before and, no doubt, taking the prescribed pain medicine on an empty stomach.
"French toast," he offered. "And a side of fruit so you don't feel too guilty," he added with a smile as I moved as quickly as my screaming side would allow to sit up against the headboard.
"Gimme," I said, holding out my hands to him, fingers opening and closing rapidly in excitement.
Paine chuckled, grabbing the tray and putting it on my lap. Looking down at my tray stacked with four pieces of powder-coated deliciousness, a bowl of cantaloupe, strawberries, and grapes, and a cup of coffee made just how he knew I liked it, I almost felt a little teary-eyed. Almost. Okay, not almost. There was some definite glistening.
When I looked up at him to thank him, the sexy little smile he had on made the words slip away. "What?" I asked, wanting to be in on whatever was giving him that look.
"Glad we're over that bullshit shy thing," he observed and it was in that moment that I realized I had sat up in my bed completely freaking shirtless and the blanket was pooled around my waist. What can I say? I almost never went to bed naked. It hadn't even crossed my mind to cover up because I usually just... was covered up in the morning. "Don't," he said, shaking his head like he knew I was going to try to figure out how to move the tray whilst simultaneously try to cover my breasts... all with sore, wrapped hands and arms. "If it's a thing, I'll head back down..."
"No," I interrupted, my word too urgent but I didn't care. "Stay."
"That's better," he said, moving around the bed to climb in with me, planting a sweet kiss on my temple.
And, well, when I lifted up the pain medicine bottle to take one, I got my sketch. I unfolded it, trying to force my lips to stay in a straight line but when I saw a drawing of me in a karate gi with a black belt at my waist, I couldn't help it... I goofy grinned my face off.
Saturday morning I woke up alone too, but only because he had gone to grab muffins and coffee after the gym. My sketch was on my brown muffin bag- a simple picture of our hands holding each others, mine all fixed and flawless. I cut the side out of the bag and put it in my jewelry box.
Sunday, I woke up alone because, as Paine had told me the day before after an extremely long conversation on the phone with his mother, then it sounded like both of his sisters, his aunts and his grandmother, they had requested his presence to help set things up for dinner. And Paine, being the good son he was, didn't even pause to offer his help. So I sat up slowly, only wincing a little at the twinge in my ribs. They were feeling better. I didn't need the pain meds anymore and Paine had locked them up in my safe for me the night before. The picture was on a normal sheet of paper that he, I assumed, took out of the printer that I kept under the counter in the kitchen. It took up the entire page and I figured he must have gotten up super early because it was extremely intricate. He'd drawn what, I imagined, was his mother's house and he'd drawn every single person who was supposed to be present at dinner: I saw us, Shooter and Amelia, Breaker and Alex, his mother, two women his mother's age who I took to be his aunts, two younger women who I guessed were his sisters, his grandmother, and... Enzo. Enzo was going to be at dinner?
