Total pages in book: 84
Estimated words: 80471 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80471 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
“Which is exactly where you can go after I make the bed. You need to take it easy to recover. What?” I asked at the narrowed look she shot me.
“I didn’t peg you for someone who makes their own bed,” she admitted.
“That’s fair,” I agreed. “I do have a cleaning lady who does… all the things,” I said, waving toward my clean apartment. “But I can’t call her up each time I need to strip the bed, if you know what I’m saying.”
“Gross,” she said, face scrunching up. “Though I guess it’s refreshing that you actually do clean them after your… extracurriculars. Or, you know, at all. I once knew a guy who had towels on his bare mattress. Towels,” she said, shuddering.
“You’ve got to raise your standards there, killer.”
“I wasn’t fucking him!” she said, mouth falling open in outrage. “I was actually there to bust a kneecap. But I would assume that at some point, he would try to bring a woman home to that. Gross.”
“Most of the women I’ve brought home have marveled at the fact that I have a headboard,” I admitted. “The bar is on the floor. What?” I asked as she looked at me, something odd in her gaze.
“I don’t have a headboard,” she admitted.
“So your head is just raw-dogging the wall when you’re getting fucked? You know, continuous brain damage might explain your surly personality,” I teased.
“Dick,” she said, but she was smiling. “But I thought I told you… no one comes to my apartment.”
I assumed she meant just guys from our organization. I didn’t think she meant… all men.
“Not even pretty girls in slinky lingerie?” I asked.
“I am forever going to regret telling you I banged a woman when I was fresh out of high school, aren’t I?”
“And I will be forever grateful to have that information,” I admitted.
“Typical guy,” she said, shaking her head at me. “And it was once,” she added. “Just to see if it was for me or not. Turns out, no matter what the homophobes try to say, it’s really not a choice.”
“Didn’t like eating pussy, Cin?” I asked, tilting my head to watch her. “I want to die buried between a gorgeous woman’s thighs.”
If I hadn’t been looking so closely, I might have missed the way desire burned in her eyes. Because it was gone before you could even blink. But it had been there.
No matter how much she was trying to act otherwise, Cinna wanted me as much as I wanted her.
With her recovering in my place for the foreseeable future, I couldn’t help but wonder how long it would take before the powder keg of our mutual desire finally exploded.
And what might be left in the wreckage.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cinna
My face healed first. The swelling lessened with each passing day, my eye opened up, and while there were still bruises smattered across my skin, I looked like myself again.
My wrist hurt like a bitch when I had to take off the brace, but when it was on, I slowly began to be able to use my hand in small ways. Pulling up the covers in bed, shooting off texts, or picking up light items.
It was the goddamn ribs that threatened to never get better.
Even when I thought they might be getting better, I would do something like turn too fast or raise my arm too high, and I’d feel like I was about to black out from the pain.
Still, I eased down and then off of the pain meds, not wanting to have a dependency to deal with when all of this was said and done.
Besides, the pain was… helpful in other ways.
Namely keeping me from doing something world-shatteringly stupid like climbing Davide like a tree the way my body had been begging me to do almost since I arrived in his apartment.
Objectively, it was time to go home.
I didn’t need Dav to bring me meds because I couldn’t get them for myself. Or to get me food. I was even managing to wash my own hair now. Though that was out of my steadfast determination not to be naked around him again because, quite frankly, I didn’t trust myself.
I didn’t understand my lack of self-control around him all of a sudden. I’d never been someone who struggled to control their baser instincts. Sex was, you know, fine. But it wasn’t like I was walking around thinking about it all of the time, eye-fucking hot men I came across on the street, waking up tangled in sheets from vivid dreams about them.
Not even Dav.
Until now.
I woke up with the tendrils of desire still clinging to me. And it only intensified. When I would come out and catch him fresh out of the shower, a towel draped scandalously low on his hips. When he got himself all dressed with that familiar tobacco, leather, and vanilla scent clinging to him from his cologne.