The answer is already in my mouth before I can stop it. “Unfortunately.”
His grin turns almost boyish for a second, so familiar it hurts. “That’s my favorite kind.”
I shake my head and look down into the cup because otherwise I’m going to do something reckless like kiss him hard enough to spill coffee on both of us and call it his fault. He uses the opportunity to let his eyes drag over me openly now, returning the stare with interest that has nothing polite in it.
“You look very pleased with yourself,” I say.
“I am.” His gaze lands on my mouth again. “You walked out of that bathroom smiling.”
“That was private.”
“Nothing about you smiling because of me has ever felt private.”
The line is so shameless and so sincere under the tease that it steals whatever smart answer I had.
“Also,” he adds, “you’re still walking a little carefully.”
I choke on my coffee. He actually laughs this time, full and delighted and entirely too happy about my suffering.
“I hate you,” I mutter, wiping at my mouth with the back of my hand.
“No, you don’t.”
“No, I really do in this exact moment.”
His grin doesn’t fade. “Liar.”
I set the cup down before I throw it at him and take a step into his space instead, pushing him back into the counter with one hand on his chest. He lets me. Of course, he lets me. The bastard likes it when I remember I’ve got teeth too.
“You are disgustingly smug,” I tell him.
“And you’re very pretty when you’re trying to intimidate me.”
“Trying?”
He looks down at my hand splayed over his chest, then back up at me with pure amusement. “You’re using one hand and a hangover.”
I narrow my eyes.
He leans in until his mouth is just beside my ear. “If you want me on my knees before breakfast,” he murmurs, “you’re going to have to ask better than that.”
The sound I make is deeply unkingly.
He smiles against my skin like a man who already knows he’s won the morning.
The familiarity of it all nearly breaks me open again. The easy filth. The rhythm of the teasing. The way we slide from tenderness to mockery to want and back without ever losing the thread. It feels so old and so immediate that, for one dangerous second, I forget there were eight missing years at all.
Then he kisses the side of my jaw softly, as if to make up for the dirtier line, and the whole room goes warm.
“Drink your coffee,” he says. “You look like you need strength for whatever terrible ideas you’re about to have.”
I look at him, at the stupid grin still playing at his mouth, at the shadows of old pain and new peace somehow coexisting in that face and can’t stop my own smile this time.
“You are absolutely one of my terrible ideas,” I say.
He tips his cup in a mock toast. “And still your favorite.”
I hate how easily I laugh.
