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“Ah. Right.” That explained why he hadn’t answered my text. See? He had been busy—with work.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been missing me.” There was a smile in his voice that made me feel all wobbly inside.
“You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you?”
“I would. It’d be nice to think you missed me.”
I swallowed, brushing a bit of yarn fluff off my couch. “You don’t think we’ve been spending too much time together?”
“Too much for who?”
“Whom.”
“Christ almighty.” His laugh was deep and rumbly. “Tell you what,” he said, growing serious again. “Instead of overanalyzing everything, how about we try being straight with each other?”
“Okay,” I agreed. Even though the odds of me being able to do anything of the sort were vanishingly small. Overanalyzing was my specialty.
“So if I say I want to see you, and you don’t feel like it that night, all you have to do is tell me that. And it goes both ways. If you ever want to see me, all you have to do is say so. And I promise to tell you if I’m not up for it. But the important part is that neither of us reads too much into anything or gets our feelings hurt without talking about it first.”
It was like he knew exactly how much time I’d spent reading too much into the fact that I hadn’t heard from him all day. He probably did, damn him.
“What do you say?” he asked. “Do we have a deal?”
“Sure, I can do that.” Why not? I could try, anyway. Although it seemed like the kind of thing that sounded great in theory but was a lot harder to implement in practice.
“Great. So if, for example, you’d spent the whole day fantasizing about my sexual prowess, you could tell me that.” His voice was smug and lightly teasing. “Because this is a judgment-free zone. A safe space, if you will.”
I laughed even though he wasn’t all that far off the mark. “You caught me. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing. Because I have nothing better to do than sit around thinking about your penis all day.”
“It does have magical healing properties. That’s been scientifically proven.”
“I’m pretty sure the jury’s still out on that. We haven’t collected enough data to reach a valid conclusion.”
“So what you’re saying is we need to repeat the experiment?”
“Exactly.” Somehow I managed to keep my voice steady despite the giddy fluttering in my stomach. “If we want the science to be solid, we’ll need to replicate the same results in a series of independent experiments.”
“How many, exactly?” There was a roughness to his voice that had nothing to do with exhaustion, and it made my insides go all melty.
“Hard to say. But I imagine it’d have to be a lot.”
“So like an ongoing thing? The sort of experiment that doesn’t have an end date.”
I bit my lip, both nervous and excited. “I suppose so.”
“I like the sound of that.”
“Me too,” I admitted, my voice high and faint.
“In that case, maybe I should come over?”
“I think you should.”Yes, please. Hurry. Before I expire.
“I’m already on my way.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-THREE
DONAL
