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“I very much doubt that.”
“Let’s start with the timing issue. You want sex at night and early in the morning, so logically it makes sense for me to sleep over.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I’m afraid I’ll like it too much. “You’ll snore.”
“I don’t snore.”
“You’ll take up the whole bed.”
“It’s a big bed, and you’re a small woman. There’s plenty of room.”
“I’m not small.”
“Compared to me, you are.”
“Compared to you, Big Bird is small.”
He smiled. “So I can sleep over.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She imagined sleeping in Caleb’s arms. Rousing to consciousness surrounded by the smell of him, and snuggling against his warm body in the night. And then heard Henry screaming awake. Maaaaa-ma!
The cognitive dissonance made her dizzy. Or maybe that was Caleb. He was kind of stubbly this late in the day, like a very hot pirate.
“I don’t want you here in the morning when Henry wakes up. It would confuse him.”
“So I won’t sleep over when Henry’s home, but I can sleep over on the weekends.”
“No.”
“You mean ‘yes,’ right? Because we’re negotiating, and that means you’re supposed to make some compromises. Plus, you don’t have a leg to stand on here.”
She sighed. This discussion was absurd, but as much as she’d like to pretend it wasn’t happening, it was. She’d have to bend on something if she wanted to come to an agreement with him. She had to come to an agreement with him if she ever wanted to have sex with him again. She had to have sex with him again, or she’d curl up in a ball and die.
“Fine. Yes. You can sleep over on the weekends, theoretically. You’re not sleeping over tonight, though.”
“Excellent. See, we can do this.” He grinned, and she looked around for something to throw at his head. Nothing available but her naked body. She’d save that for a later stage of the negotiations.
All business again, Caleb carried on. “Next point. I want getting-to-know-you conversations. You don’t. I’ll stipulate you can ask me any question you like, at any time, and I’ll answer it.”
“I don’t want to ask you questions.” She really didn’t. Much. She refused to be curious about Caleb. She didn’t want to hear all his stories, including the story of that scar on his hip that looked like it must have been horrifically painful to acquire. She didn’t wonder what he did to stay in such amazing physical shape or how he’d gotten to be so good with kids. Where he lived, house or apartment. She bet he had a house. He seemed like a house kind of guy. How he’d decorated it. If he’d ever been married. What his bed looked like.
Shit.
“Asking me questions is your prerogative,” he said. “But you have to give me a chance here. How about you let me ask you personal questions, but you only have to answer two out of three?”
“That’s ridiculous. I’m not a game show.”
“Or you let me ask them for half an hour a day, but that’s all?”
She crossed her arms. “No.”
