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I knew I should shower, but I did not want to wash Jay off me. Not yet.
I tied the robe around me, returning to the bedroom then walking toward the windows exposing a view only money could buy. A lot of money. My bedroom view was a brick wall and a corner of the sidewalk where I’d seen drunk girls popping a squat too many times to count. And my apartment was not cheap.
I’d always loved the ocean. Spent as much time as I could with my toes in the sand, which wasn’t often. I’d always dreamed of earning enough money to buy myself a cottage on the beach somewhere. But I’d only be able to afford that if I left L.A., which was never going to happen. So I’d have to make do with Jay’s view, for as long as I had it.
I stood there watching the ocean for a long time, captivated by the beauty of it, a bit envious that Jay woke up to this every single day. It was then that I realized the daylight was illuminating the room I’d entered in darkness last night, showing me things I’d been too delirious and sex craved to take note of.
Turning, my eyes moved over the room I’d spent the best night of my life in. The bed was mussed, charcoal sheets tangled with a black comforter. Everything in the room was black. The side tables, sleek marble, the lamps sitting on top of the table. The four-poster bed was made of a thick black steel, which made it masculine, foreboding and romantic at the same time. My stomach dipped at the very thought of what those posts were used for. I ached to find out what they were used for.
The hardwood floor was the same shade of dark wood as it was throughout the house. It was warm beneath my bare feet, even though everything about the room screamed cold.
There was a black, plush sofa at the end of the bed with light gray pillows scattered expertly. I wondered who had done that. Jay did not strike me as a man who fluffed pillows.
Directly in front of the sofa, on the wall between the two windows boasting views of the Pacific Ocean, were floor to ceiling bookshelves.
I trailed my fingers along the dust free surfaces, looking at the spines of the books. If Jay was not going to open himself to me, then I would find out about him in other ways. People’s reading habits revealed a lot about them. Whether they were romantic, cynical, hopeful, hopeless, educated or looking for something. For help. Answers. Faith.
The books scattered around my apartment where histories of major fashion houses, books on style. Then there were psychological books exploring mental health. Steamy romances with dog eared pages. Books on positivity that had barely been opened. Language and travel books worn and stained with coffee from France, wine from Italy, food from Spain.
Jay’s shelves were orderly. Color coded. Which didn’t surprise me. But the names on the spines did shock me.
Frost. Wordsworth. Whitman. Keats. Angelou. Plath. My fingers trailed along books written by the most famous poets of our time. All of their collected works in front of me. In Jay’s bedroom. The man who was the antithesis of romance, had some of the most romantic works in the world sitting in his bedroom.
I pulled out a book by Yeats. My fingers flicked through the pages, looking for one of my favorite poems of all time. I wasn’t exactly a poem kind of girl, but everyone was a Yeats kind of girl.
I stopped when I found “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”.
My eyes skimmed over the familiar words as the magic of the poem drifted off the page. I’d stumbled upon this poem when I first came to L.A., scouring second hand bookstores for some smutty romance—I couldn’t afford even a brand-new book back then—I’d found a tattered copy of Yeats. Had bought it on instinct and poured over the words. The line “But, I, being poor, have only my dreams”, had resonated with me so deeply that I’d torn the poem from the book and carried it around in my wallet. Since then, I’d earned more and achieved many of my dreams, that torn poem traveling with me everywhere.
“Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams,” a deep voice murmured from behind me.
I jumped, turning to see Jay standing inches away from me. I hadn’t heard him come in, nothing in my body had alerted me to his presence.
He was dressed in shorts and a tee. Both black. His hair was mussed, a thin sheen of sweat covering his body. I’d had his naked body pressed against mine all night last night, had run my hands over the taut, muscled skin. But seeing it in stark daylight was something different entirely. His arms were sculpted. Ripped. Not in that ‘I eat steroids like Lucky Charms’ kind of way, but in the natural, ‘I work hard on my body and could kill a guy with my bare hands’ type of way.
