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He came with a growl, everything turning wet and slow and dreamy.
“Fuuuck,” I muttered, face in the pillow again.
“Mmm,” Rhys agreed, sliding out of me and collapsing onto his back. “Okay, let’s try this again. What do you want to do today?”
“Shhh,” I said, and put a shaking hand over his mouth. But my eyes had drifted closed again in the afterglow and I think I covered his chin instead.
* * *
—
Hours later, we had finally dragged ourselves out of bed, cleaned up, and Rhys had made me drink another cup of coffee. It was a much better start to the morning than my previous effort.
“Maybe today’s the day,” Rhys said, pouring himself another bowl of cereal. I didn’t know why he bothered eating cereal at all. It only kept him full for about fifteen minutes.
“Maybe it’s not,” I replied hopefully.
“Babe, come on. If we had a bed in the guest room then people could come visit.” In the natural pause that lived between that sentence and the next was the realization that I didn’t have anyone who would be coming to visit and it would mean Rhys’s family could come. “You could invite Grin to come stay,” Rhys soldiered on. “I want to meet him.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
The truth was that Rhys just cared more about stuff like furniture than I did. I’d moved in with a duffel bag and two boxes of shabby paperbacks. One drawer, three hangers, and one and a half shelves of the bookcase were all I had taken up then, or since. Everything else was Rhys’s. I liked the feeling of having his things all around me. I liked seeing bits of his life. The signed concert posters and albums he’d worked on, the art and knickknacks he’d brought back from all over the world.
He’d mentioned that we could pick out all new furniture together when I moved in. Even if I didn’t hate shopping, which I did, all of his stuff was perfectly nice and nearly new, and it would be ridiculously wasteful to get rid of it. But the second bedroom, which had been a dumping ground for Rhys’s extra instruments and whatever didn’t fit elsewhere, was the one unfurnished spot in the house, and Rhys had been trying to get me to go shopping for months.
“Okay, fine,” I grumbled.
“Great!”
Rhys sprang into action as he always did when there was a task at hand. He cleaned up the cereal bowls by inhaling the rest of mine and had his shoes on and his keys in hand before I’d even made it upstairs to brush my teeth. Finally, we made it to Rhys’s truck and though I grumbled about shopping, once we were driving and I rolled my window down, it was a beautiful day.
The wind whipped my curls into a tangle, and I zoned out watching the patterns of shadow the sun made on the side of the road.
“One store, okay?” I said as Rhys pulled into a parking lot. It came out sounding grouchy, and I snapped my jaw shut.
But Rhys just said, “Aye aye, captain,” and smiled at me.
I trailed behind him as he wove through the store to the bedroom furniture.
“Okay, what are you envisioning?” Rhys asked.
“Uh. Whatever, really,” I said. “A bed?”
“What style do you want?”
“I don’t really care.” I pressed my shoulder into Rhys’s, and he slid his fingers into my hair and gave my curls a little tug.
“Okay,” he said, walking to a bedroom set. “How about this?”
I stared at it.
“It’s . . . it’s . . .” I couldn’t supply an appropriately horrified word.
“Wicker. See? You do care. So show me something you like better.”
I wandered through dressers and side tables and lamps and came to a stop next to a set that seemed inoffensive.
“Maybe this one?”
Rhys nodded. “I like it. Medium wood’s versatile and can go with light or dark, it’s not too large, so it’ll fit in the guest room fine and won’t make it look so small. One thing, though.”
“Hmm?”
“We have to try the bed. Just to make sure it’s the best quality for our future guests. I don’t want to embarrass you with subpar accommodations when all your many friends come to visit.”
He said this with the utmost seriousness, and I slugged him. He collapsed backward onto the bed, his large frame taking up most of it, and pulled me after him. I glanced around but no one was paying any attention to us.
“Okay, so they’ll wake up in this bed, and they’ll see that side table and go and get their stuff out of that dresser.” He pointed as he talked. “Think they’ll like it?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I think all my many, many hypothetical friends will really love this bedroom set.”
“We don’t have to get a set, you know. We can mix and match, and—” I pushed him back down on the mattress. “Okay, bedroom set it is. Let’s get out of here. They can deliver it.”
