“In bed. Stay.”
“I’m not a dog, Wyatt.”
I glanced at her. “I’m bringing you breakfast in bed.”
Silence.
“But I need to pee.”
I pointed at the bathroom door without turning around. "Make it quick. Gotta get you fed and back to your truck quick enough that you can reasonably call in sick today."
Heard her get up, then she snickered under her breath. “Are you trying to say you fucked me so hard I have to call in a sick day?”
I snorted. “You’ve got an awfully dirty mouth for a girl who just lost her virginity last night.”
She didn’t respond; instead, she padded past me and I made the mistake of looking.
Long dirty blonde hair down her shoulders, sleep-warm skin, the curve of her waist into her hips and then the specific shapeof her ass. I turned back to the stove and stared very hard at the eggs.
Jesus.
I was so done for.
The bathroom door clicked shut. I stood there with a spatula in my hand and thought about Ethan again—not the guilt this time, just the general memory of him—his laugh, the way he'd have absolutely eviscerated me for this situation, the things he would have said that I'd never be able to unhear.
You've got it bad, Holt.
I did not have it bad. This was an arrangement. A stupid, ill-advised arrangement that I had agreed to for reasons that made less sense every hour, and it was going to stay an arrangement, and in approximately forty minutes Haven was going to drive her truck out from behind my house and go home and I was going to go to work.
The toilet flushed.
The bathroom door opened.
She padded back past me toward the bed, hair over one shoulder now, completely unbothered. I watched her climb back under the covers and pull them up to her chest and pick up her phone like she owned the place.
I plated the eggs.
Bad, Holt. Real bad.
I carried both plates over and sat on the edge of the bed and handed her hers.
She did this thing—grabbed the edge of the blanket with her chin to keep it up while she took the plate with both hands—and nearly lost the whole thing. Caught it at the last second. Settled the plate in her lap and the blanket across her chest and looked up at me like she dared me to comment.
I didn't comment.
"Thank you," she said.
"Mm."
She took a bite of the eggs and her eyes closed for a second. "Okay. These are really good."
“They’re just eggs,” I said.
“Well, they’re good eggs.”
I watched her eat and drank my coffee and tried to remember the last time I'd had someone in my bed for breakfast. It had been a while. Long enough that I'd stopped thinking about it as something that happened to me.
She shifted and the blanket slipped. My eyes darted down to her chest—couldn’t help it—and she bit her lip. “This is what happens when you tell me to stay naked in your bed.”
