“Why?”
“She’s Black, and my family just couldn’t deal. It wasn’t obvious stuff like my parents telling me I shouldn’t date a Black woman. It was lots of little things like my mother asking her if there was any way to tell ahead of time if a biracial baby would be more black or more white, or the time my brother Aaron told her that he had a Black friend at work and asked if they were related.”
Cooper sighed. “Well, honestly, in Wheatland that’s probably a reasonable question. I can’t imagine growing up Black in small-town Wyoming.”
I shot him a look, but I could tell he was joking. “Anyway, I hadn’t even deliberately introduced her to my family, they just heard about her and kept showing up wherever we were—the park, the Dairy Queen, the bowling alley. I honestly think that was what drove her away. I didn’t even get to a fourth date.”
There was a twinkle in Cooper’s eye I recognized. “What?” I asked him. “Go ahead and say whatever’s giving you that look.”
“Maybe she ditched you because you were taking her to the Dairy Queen, the park, and the bowling alley…”
I stared at him for a beat before attacking his ribs with my fingers. “Asshole.”
His laughter filled the small room. “What? It’s true. You take her to DQ and me to the fancy steak place? What gives?”
“I already told you. I like you.”
I kept tickling him even though it was making Nacho nervous. He pranced at the end of the bed until Cooper finally called uncle and made me stop.
Cooper’s eyes shone and his face was flushed. I wanted to jump his bones.
“I like you too,” he said softly. He crawled over to me and straddled my lap, sliding his arms around my neck and leaning in until our noses were touching. “And I’m awake enough now to show you how much.”
He kissed me then, and I thought maybe my life would never be the same. Now that I’d had a taste of Cooper Heath, how could I be satisfied with anything less? I didn’t really think it was the fact he was a man so much as the fact he was funny and sweet and giving. He was just… perfect. At least for me. And I never wanted this to end.
I’d also begun to notice how creative he was and how working with him made the videos we posted so much better than anything I’d done on my own.
“Come back to me,” he whispered against my lips. “You go away sometimes.”
“No,” I said, rolling us over until I had him pinned to the mattress. “I was only thinking about you and how perfect you are.”
His arms and legs wrapped around me. The warmth of his skin against mine was heavenly. “Oh, well then keep going.”
I reached around to drag a long finger up and down his crease, making him groan. “Want you,” I said between kisses.
His eyes locked on mine. “Do you want to fuck me?”
The slightly nervous knot in my stomach tightened. “Um, yeah? But… do you want that? Or…”
Cooper’s soft, relaxed smile was the answer. “Hell fucking yes I want that. I just didn’t want to rush you.”
I leaned in and sucked on the side of his neck while I thought it through to be sure I wasn’t feeling rushed. “I want it. I want you. Pretty badly. But… uh… I don’t have any supplies or anything.”
He shoved at me to get free. “I do. In the grocery stuff we didn’t unpack.” He jumped off the bed and raced out of the room. His round white butt glowed in the dark like a double moon. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, until, of course, he came back and I got to watch his semi-hard dick flopping around instead.
He leaped back onto the bed with a big gold box of condoms and two different kinds of lube. “Ta-da!”
“When did you sneak those in the cart, and how did I not see them?”
“Well, I think I understand now why you asked me why we were getting a box of K-Cups when we didn’t have that kind of coffee machine.”
I reached out to take the box from him and noticed my hands were shaking. Cooper noticed too.
“Babe. We don’t have to do this. I’m very, very happy sticking with what—”
“No! No. I want to have sex with you, this kind of sex with you, very badly. I’m just scared of messing up.”
Cooper put a hand on my knee. “You can’t really mess up.”
“Do you remember the first time my dad tried to show you how to feed a calf from a bottle?”
His face scrunched in confusion. “Um, yeah? But can we maybe not talk about your dad right now?”
“Hush. You were nervous because you’d never done it before. But you wanted to try it, right?”