This chapter has a song! Go press play, then come back and tell me you didn't fall for him too…
Ethan asks me what I want to do today.
Nobody in this loft asks me things. Alex tells me to sit down and eat, and I…sit down and eat. Colt puts a hand somewhere on me, and I go where the hand goes. Ethan lies on his side at eleven in the morning with his head propped on one fist and asks me what I want to do today, like the day is a menu, like I’m the person who gets handed one.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
I don’t. What I have instead is a body keeping notes, and I lie there and read the entries while he waits.
Colt’s grip on my hips, where he meant to get his name into the bone.
Ethan’s fingers on my ribs, counting them like he was looking for the way in.
Alex’s palm at the small of my back, turning me onto my side the way you’d straighten something on a shelf.
The soreness between my legs keeps time, low and insistent, a second pulse. Three pairs of hands and one body that still answers to me.
The room smells like him, bergamot at the top of it and the salt of skin underneath, and the sheets are still damp in the place where I’ve been. His chest is warm against my back and his breath comes slow at the nape of my neck, the even rhythm of a man who has already decided he’s keeping me. His fingers found my freckles. Shoulders, collarbone, the bridge of my nose, each one pressed once, like he’s signing something.
Claiming.
“Morning, angel.”
His voice is still rough with sleep, gravel in it, and my stomach does that thing where it thinks it’s on a rollercoaster. He turns me onto my back, and the light transforms his hair to gold and his eyes to deep blue, just as it always does with him. The smudged cherry lipstick remained in the center of his lower lip as he didn’t care to remove it. He doesn’t smile. He looks at me the way you look at a page you have to get down before somebody takes the book away.
“You’re real.”
He lets out a laugh, low, and the sound goes through his chest into mine. “So are you.”
His thumb brushes the mole under my left eye, then the one below my lip. “Punctuation marks. On a love letter no one else will ever read.”
I should find that ridiculous. It is ridiculous. My throat goes dry anyway.
