“Just checking.”
“You didn’t check me out while I was asleep?”
“I prefer to check out women who are conscious.”
I still stared at him. “This sleeping with a man thing is a novel experience,” I said. “Thanks for being my first.” I blinked my eyes at him like I’d seen women in old movies do.
He groaned. “Sometimes I could strangle you.”
I tossed the covers back, sat up, and swung my feet over the side of the bed. “What’s the plan for today?” I asked. “I’m guessing we’re going to bait the trap by looking normal but being anything but normal.”
“You couldn’t be normal if you tried.” But he didn’t say it like most people said it. He said it with something akin to admiration in his voice, and that did things to my insides that I couldn’t fully understand.
“Thank you.”
He chuckled. “You’re welcome.”
I stood up and stretched, getting ready to walk to the bathroom.
“Shelly!” he said loudly, covering his eyes with his forearm.
I spun back around to face him. “What?”
“You said you had on shorts!” he said, then he groaned into that forearm. “Jesus,” he whispered. The muscle in his jaw ticked.
I looked down. “I do have on shorts.”
“Those are not shorts, Shelly.” He didn’t move his arm, so he didn’t take a second look. “If I can see your ass cheeks, you can’t call them shorts. Holy fuckballs,” he said, as he not so discreetly adjusted his dick again. “And you can’t wear them again while you’re here. Throw them in the trash. Get rid of them.”
“Oh, you’re a butt guy, huh?” I rolled my eyes at him. “You men are so predictable.”
“There’s a certain law of decency, Shelly,” he said slowly, like he was hell-bent on explaining something to me that I couldn’t understand. “When you’re a guest in somebody’s house, you have to follow their rules.”
“Oh.” I thought for a minute. “It’s really not my fault that your dick is hard.”
I raised my eyebrows at him and stared at his groin until he grabbed the pillow I’d been sleeping on and shoved it in his midsection. “Go get dressed or something,” he grumbled. “And stop talking about my dick!” He dropped his voice down to a grumble I almost didn’t hear. “And I just woke up, damn it.”
“You always wake up like that?” I asked, just because I was curious.
He finally lifted his head and glared at me. “Seriously, Shelly? Do we have to do this right now?”
“When would be a better time?”
He heaved a sigh and swiped his hand down his face. “Okay, Shelly.” He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. “Occasionally, I wake up hard. Occasionally, my dick gets hard for no reason. Every now and then, my dick gets hard when a beautiful woman is standing in my bedroom wearing nothing but underwear. Sometimes, when I smell your cherry lip balm, I think about kissing you and then my dick gets hard. And now…” He lifted the pillow I’d slept on to his nose. “…now my fucking pillow smells like that perfume you wear.” He looked down at his lap. “And my dick is hard. Fuck.”
I said nothing.
“And for the first time ever, she’s quiet,” he said on a low, annoyed breath. “And I have never, ever spent this much time talking about my dick and its unfortunate propensity for getting hard at inopportune moments.”
“Do you read a lot?” I asked.
He swiped his hand down his face again. “Why do you ask?”
“Occasionally, you toss out big words that most people don’t know.”
“Do you know them?” He was nearly growling now.
“Yes.”