When he reached for the dishes, I finally managed to shock myself out of my stupor. "No, please, sit. You're the guest. I got this," I assured him, going to reach to take them out of his hands, only to have them pulled back. He gave me a head shake, then moved across my apartment. And started washing the dishes.
Maybe this wasn't a big deal to the average woman. Surely men washed dishes all the time. But it was shocking to me. It had always just been my mom and me. We did the dishes. There were never any men around to do them. I had never lived with a guy full-time, so there was no way to see one of them washing dishes.
I guess, in my head, I had a mental block about the entire phenomena.
I never could have known it was one of the sexiest sights I had ever seen.
I guess maybe a bit of that stemmed from knowing a lot of man-children. Ones who didn't know how to do their own laundry, couldn't even turn on an iron if they needed to, had never gotten on their hands and knees to scrub that base part of the toilet seemingly only women knew needed to be cleaned as well.
So seeing Cam doing housework, yeah, let's just say it was working for me. Then again, everything about Cam seemed to work for me.
Since his back was to me, I went ahead and eye-banged him, watching the way his biceps tensed as he scrubbed, the way his back muscles shifted under his shirt.
The only thing better would be if he was willing to wash my dishes shirtless.
It would never happen, of course. But a woman could dream.
I wasn't entirely sure how long I continued to stare at him after he turned back around. I seemed to be in some sort of daze about the whole thing.
So I watched as he dried his hands on a dishrag. I watched as he laced that dishrag back over the handle of the range. I watched as he leaned back against the counter.
It was only when a noise broke through the silence of the room that I shocked back out of it.
A clearing of the throat.
My gaze shot up, caught, guilty as all sin.
His lips were quirked up at one end, his eyes bright, playful almost. If badass biker guys could be called playful.
"I, ah, I've never seen a man wash a dish before," I admitted. "Literally never. That was like seeing a unicorn in person. I know unicorns aren't real, but right up until two minutes ago, I was pretty sure that men who washed dishes weren't real either. I am happy to be wrong. And even happier not to have any dishes to wash tonight. So thank you for that," I told him, hoping that if I just prattled on for long enough he might magically forget that I had been staring at him like a complete creep.
To that, he shrugged, waving at the half-eaten tray of baked ziti.
"Is that your way of saying the cooks don't clean?" I asked. Then, to his blank face, "You know... like from The Fast and the Furious." To that, I got an eye roll and head shake. "Hey now, it might not be a thinking sort of movie, but that doesn't mean it is not worth referencing every now and again. Don't give me that look. I couldn't help my teenage obsession with the bald, muscled man known as Vin Diesel. I saw The Chronicles of Riddick in the theater like four times. Which was a big deal since there was never any money for luxuries like that. But I went to the matinees and paid with babysitting money I had earned. Don't try to tell me you didn't have some extremely embarrassing - in retrospect - obsessions when you were younger. I bet... I bet it was all those Adam Sandler movies."
Was that during his teens? I wasn't exactly sure how old he was. Older than me, for sure. But it was so much harder to tell with men to whom time treated much more kindly.
Maybe he was thirty-five. Maybe he was forty.
"Or were you one of those annoying kids who only liked movies from prior decades to make themselves seem so much more worldly and important? God, I hated those guys. You know... like the ones who looked down on you when you liked Christina Aguilera because all they listened to was that depressing nineties grunge or alt rock stuff."
Somewhere in my rant, he turned to grab spoons, making his way back toward me, fiddling with his laptop for a second before dropping down beside me as the credits started.
I hadn't looked up quickly enough to see the screen before the movie started to play. Who wanted to look at a TV when you had Cam next to you, leaning forward to snag the dessert, which so conveniently made the back of his shirt side up?