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I pressed myself flat against his back and slipped my arms underneath him, holding on. I wasn’t sure what I was doing exactly, but he was mine and I wanted him the way he was, and I wanted him to feel it.
“Thank you.” My voice sounded weird, thick and tight like I was holding something back, but I felt like I wasn’t for once. Like I was being as real and honest as I could. “For buying me all those things. No one buys me things. No one does nice things for me.”
“I know,” he said, softly, finding my arms underneath him, pretzeling us up another layer. “You’re very sweet and very polite. But you don’t have to keep thanking me for things. This is the bare minimum. The least you deserve. And you have such an aversion to kindness I know it’s killing you a little, so I’ll be careful. But I need you to take what I give you. And I need you to try and get used to it. Because I plan to spoil the hell out of you, and I don’t want it to hurt.”
“I don’t—”
“Don’t tell me you don’t need to be spoiled, because you do. You need to let people do nice things for you sometimes. Everyone deserves that. You deserve it so much more than most people. But that stuff isn’t spoiling you, it’s just making sure you’re okay. And it makes me so fucking happy to be the one in charge of making sure you’re okay.”
I didn’t know how to answer that, I could barely start the process of questioning it, really. My brain was stuck on slow mode and was probably going to be there awhile. I bent down and kissed his shoulder again instead. Let him think I was being sweet when I was really… whatever I was.
“If it helps, all this money came from my asshole parents. They set up an account when I moved out, and I barely make a dent in it every month, even with all the books I buy. You won’t either.”
I thought about that— people that didn’t want him around, didn’t listen, didn’t pay attention and lost all his stuff, handing over money he could spend however he wanted. How somehow they broke him so bad that what he wanted was to buy a hundred toothbrushes and make sure I didn’t feel any of those things.
I’d have killed for that setup, maybe literally. A payoff in exchange for never seeing my mom again, sign me up. But it still made me mad anybody thought there was a price they could pay for not being right to their kid. Especially him. He deserved all the toothbrushes and all the books and if what he was actually asking for was just for me to let him be nice to me… well, I guess I could work on that.
“Yeah. Helps a little.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
So, maybe after Caleb got up to go to the kitchen, I took another shower. And brushed my teeth. And put on deodorant. And shaved even though I couldn’t grow a beard to save my life. And spent a ridiculous amount of time pulling open packages and unfolding cardboard and tossing out random mystery plastic pieces and pulling on the nicest socks and tshirt and briefs I’d ever owned, and nineteen years was a lot of years to not own nice things butknowthey were better, and you know what? They really were.
I stood there staring at my reflection in the closet doors, feeling like a spoiled, sleazy fraud— but a hot one. All the grungy shit I owned was stained and stretched out, even straight out of the laundry, but this shit fit me nice. Just made me feel… well packed everywhere.
My ass looked luscious and my arms looked huge, and I swear my calves looked bigger when my socks hit just right instead of sagging down. And those weren’t exactly trouble areas to begin with.
None of that shit was a big deal, not really, I knew that… But it was. I was pretty sure I looked like an actual different person.
I honestly wanted to walk out into the kitchen wearing just that, all clean and new and showing off, and I knew he’d fucking like it too. But I was so afraid of looking stupid— or worse, getting everything dirty— that I just didn’t move at all until he finally came back to see what was taking me so long and caught me being in love with myself in the mirror.
“Damn, that ass,” he said in a slow drawl from the doorway, and I turned to look at him. “You look good in everything.”
I looked back at my reflection and reached behind and gave myself a jiggle. “Were you thinking about me in my jock when you were fucking me so hard?” I asked him.
He smirked. “Kind of. Some of it.”
“What about the rest?”
“The rest just…” He shrugged, coming in and walking up behind me, wrapping his arms around me in the mirror and we looked like some kind of fucked up prom photo or something, and I wanted to shove him off, except I didn’t. It was pretty rapidly becoming not even a little annoying when he touched me, and I wasn’t sure what to make of that. “The rest just nothing,” he finally said. “Just feeling you. Enjoying you. Listening to you.” He grinned. “You’re loud.”
“Sorry. Your neighbors.”
“I don’t care. Let them hear. Were you thinking about… something?”
“When you were ramming me?”
He snorted. “Yeah.”
I shook my head. It wasn’t like I fantasized about celebrities or beaches or anything normally, but sometimes my mind wandered. With him though… it didn’t fucking dare. “Just brainwaves,” I finally said. “Just… you.”
“Good.” He let go and walked over to the dresser, pulling the second drawer open. “I put some stuff in here. Just tshirts and sweats and things. To sleep in or whatever. If you want.”
“Thought you weren’t trying to dress me,” I said, looking at the stacks of mildly worn out tshirts and gym shorts and sweatpants that didn’t really look anything like my worn out shit. Still had a lot of life left in it, and man, he really did have a lot of stuff.
“I’m not.” He smiled. “But you do look good in my clothes.”
* * *
