All six-three of him, curled in, quiet, one heavy arm crossing my stomach.
I looked down at the top of his head.
There was something strange and tender about this big physical force of a person folded against me like he just needed somewhere to land. The performance was completely gone. No grin, no angle, no calculation. Just Brett, breathing slowly, getting heavier by the minute.
I put my hand on the back of his head and stroked behind his ear.
“Seven days,” he murmured into my chest.
“A little less than six and a half,” I said.
He made a sound that might have been a laugh.
Then he was asleep.
I lay there in the dark listening to him breathe, my hand still resting on his head, thinking about how this had started as an exercise in teaching the jock a lesson.
It had become something considerably more complicated.
I turned the lamp off, closed my eyes, and whispered, “Good night.”
CHAPTER 6
BRETT
Sunday morning,I woke up tangled in Miles. His arm was across my chest, his chin tucked toward his own shoulder, breathing slowly and evenly. Still asleep.
He was really quite cute. I’d registered that before in a way I kept shoving into a drawer and sitting on. But up close in the early light, it was harder to be casual about. Lean and fit, shorter than me by about half a foot, with the kind of quiet physical confidence that had nothing to do with the gym and everything to do with just being comfortable in his own skin. His face was completely relaxed in sleep. No flat calm, no controlled expression. He was just a person.
A person I was feeling a lot for lately.
My face had been nuzzled somewhere between his chest and his armpit.
I gave him one small, private sniff before I could stop myself. I smelled something sweet underneath the faint overnight sweat. Clean and warm, and distinctly him. I committed it to memory for later.
Then I slipped out from under his arm, and left.
I couldn’t face him in the daylight. Not with the taste of him still sitting on my tongue. Not with the memory of his fingerworking inside me, that white-hot pressure against that spot that had made my whole nervous system short-circuit. Not with any of it sitting that fresh and unprocessed in my chest.
I went back to my dorm and crawled into bed. Occasionally, the memory would flash back, uninvited. The weight of him in my mouth. The smell of him. The low way he’d said “good boy” in the dark like it was the most natural thing in the world. My cage registered its opinion about all of this immediately and thoroughly. I tried to ignore it.
Miles texted around noon.
You okay?
I tapped a thumbs-up emoji and put my phone face-down.
On Monday, he texted again. Same reply. I could feel him being patient about it on the other end. Somehow, that was worse than if he’d pushed.
By Tuesday, I was going stir crazy in my own skull.
When Dane texted about meeting up for pool with the guys, I responded with a yes immediately.
Anything. Anywhere that wasn’t my own four walls and the low, persistent thrum between my legs, and the memory of Miles’ ceiling at two in the morning.
I grabbed my jacket and headed out.
The guys were exactly what I needed. They were loud and easy, uncomplicated, everyone talking over each other about nothing that mattered.