He’s almost too afraid to speak in case it pulls her out of the reverie, but it feels wrong not to say something when she sounds likethis. “You have a really beautiful voice.”
She buries her nose in his neck, and he hopes the compliment feels the way he intended, without any of the baggage from her career. “Thank you.”
And then she keeps singing until the song changes.
The evening is already too nice. His nerves have settled, so there’s only the soft course of adrenaline through his veins that never seems to quiet when he’s around her.
“Your place isn’t how I pictured it,” she says.
“Ah, so you’ve pictured it?” he says, and she nudges him. “Not enough Freud posters watching us?”
“He’d probably love that, the perv.” She cranes her neck, as though still taking stock of the room. “So your new apartment will need space for all the records. Probably a better sound system.”
“I don’t know, I don’t hate how cozy this is right now.”
He almost regrets that word,cozy, because of how relationship adjacent it sounds. But it doesn’t push her away.
Instead she leans into his chest, her nose right at his sternum, and inhales. It’s the third time she’s done it, and now he’s almost certain: she’s breathing him in.
“What are you doing?” he asks with a laugh.
“Okay. You’re going to think I’m weird,” she says, still pressed against his chest, the sound a little muffled.
“Already do.”
“The way you smell here, it’s like, I don’t know…everything good bottled up in the world. It just instantly makes me feel calm. Safe.”
Nick has to fight the urge to stagger backward, her words knocking the breath out of him.
He makes her feel safe. God, that’s…that’s something he’s not sure he’s earned. Something he wants to honor with every fiber of his being.
With a finger under her chin, he tips her face upward, mouth softly sliding over hers. This kiss is tender, lazier than the way they kissed at her house or during either of those rushed hookups. Wholly new.
“I really like you,” she says, and with the tremble of her voice, maybe now it’s her turn to be nervous. “You have no idea how much. Being around you makes me really fucking happy. Just like, ridiculously giddy. I think maybe I’d forgotten I could feel that way.”
“Me too,” he says, a hand getting lost in her hair. “I haven’t felt this comfortable around someone in a long time. You just…you completely surprised me. In the best possible way.”
He’s not sure how to put the rest of it into words when the truth is that she makes him feel all those things a hundredfold. He assumed any of this intimacy would be an uphill climbfollowing the divorce, but it sneaked up on him, told him that maybe, just maybe, it could be easy.
Maybe hecanbe her something, after all.
Ramona swallows hard, as though preparing to say something that scares her. “You make me want to be honest,” she continues, and then her gaze drops to the floor. “And I’m not sure I’ve ever really enjoyed…”
His brow furrows as he tries to fill in the blank. “Sex?” he says, though surely that must be wrong. She certainly seemed to enjoy his mouth on her.
“In the traditional sense, yes.”
Oh.
“Ramona,” he says. “We don’t have to. I know I made that joke about seeing you naked, but we don’t have to do anything but this, if that’s what you prefer.”
“No—that’s the thing. I want to.Fuck, I want to. We just…” She grasps his arm a little harder, as though seeking out an anchor.Safe.She finds him safe, and maybe that shouldn’t be the hottest thing he’s ever heard, but somehow it is. “Maybe we could go slow.”
He skims his hand along her cheek, thumb tracing her lips. “You already know I love taking my time with you.”
“And…and we could talk.”
He draws her closer to kiss her jaw. Her neck. “I love talking to you.”
