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Both very different in terms of safety, smells, familiarity…but equally difficult nights, restless and fatigued.
I’m sitting on the center island, my legs dangling over the edge, when I hear a creaking noise. I pause, listening intently, and that’s when I realize Colton is coming back downstairs.
I panic, looking around for a quick solution.
But before I can move or hop off the counter or do anything, the light from the fridge door opening spears through the room, illuminating where Colton stands, staring into the fridge in nothing but a pair of sweats, his hair still damp from the shower.
I know I should say something, alert him to the fact I’m here, but for whatever reason, my tongue feels tied as I take in his silhouette. Long and trim and fit with lean muscle. The way his ass muscles round out just slightly over the top edge of his sweats.
Maybe I could suggest something for him to eat. There’s leftover pasta and chicken from the dinner I prepared for Teddy. Or I could ask him how his night went.
But before I can muster up the nerve to say anything, he grabs a bottle of beer and twists the top off, chugging a good half of it down in just a few seconds.
God, even the way he drinks beer is sexy. I don’t even like beer.
I must make some kind of noise because Colton turns then to look in my direction and startles when he sees me sitting there with a mug.
“Holy shit,” he says, bringing a free hand to his chest, the room plunging into darkness as the fridge door closes.
Then the bright, unflattering overhead lights flip on, and I cover my eyes, blinking a few times as my eyes attempt to adjust to the sudden overwhelming light flooding the room.
“What the hell are you doing?” Colton asks, his voice gruff and irritated.
“I’m just…having some tea,” I tell him, my eyes squinting tightly as I hold up my mug. “I’m sorry, I should have said something, but I just…didn’t.”
I bite my tongue, unwilling to tell him that the reason I stayed quiet is because I was too busy admiring his body. No matter what his reaction to me being down here is, that is surely to cause more of a problem.
He clears his throat. “Well, next time, alert me or something. Jesus, I almost shot out of my skin. What are you doing?”
“Drinking tea.”
“You said that already. I mean…are you having problems sleeping? Is the room okay?”
“The room is amazing,” I tell him, not wanting it to seem like I’m unhappy when I’ve only been in the house less than 12 hours. “It’s perfect. I just always have problems sleeping in new places. It’s all the new smells, I think. I’m too aware of the difference.”
He nods his head. “Yeah, I get that.”
For a second, Colton pauses, his eyes looking to the large doorway leading out of the kitchen, almost like he’s ready to head to bed.
But then he leans his hip against the island and continues speaking.
“When we moved here from Charleston, I struggled a bit, too,” he says. “You’d think a house near the Atlantic and a house near the Pacific would feel at least a somewhat similar, but…” He shakes his head. “It could not be more different. The air here has so much more salt in it and there’s a lot more smog, but that pluff mud smell is gone, and I didn’t realize how much I would notice the difference.”
My head tilts to the side. “What’s a pluff mud?”
Colton chuckles. “It’s…” He scratches the back of his neck. “Well, to be frank, it’s swamp smell.”
I wrinkle my nose. “And you miss that?”
He laughs again and nods his head. “It’s hard to explain, I guess. Some people say it smells like rotten eggs, but that’s not what I smell. To me, it’s more of a marshy, earthy kind of scent. Damp mud that’s mixed in with the tall grass.” He shrugs. “It’s a thing you love or you hate, and I didn’t realize I loved it until we’d left it behind.”
I nod. “I can get that. When I was a kid, we had this horrible couch that smelled like cigarette smoke, and every day I’d come home from school and roll my eyes at how much I hated it. Now, though…I don’t know, part of me misses it a little. Like, I would never want that couch back, but the nostalgia of that faint smoke smell, like when a smoker would sit right in front of me at the bar? Brings back a lot of memories.”
“That’s probably what it is,” Colton says, pointing his nearly empty beer bottle in my direction. “I don’t necessarily miss the smell, but not having it means life is different than it used to be, which is why it smelled so wonderful when we went home to Charleston for Christmas.”
He stares off into the distance, seeing some memory from the past with his family as he takes another sip of his beer.
“Did you have fun tonight?”
