“As… wonderful,” he says, screwing up his nose and showing me just a flash of the little boy he used to be, “as that sounds, we can do better than getting cold and wet in the middle of a smelly field.”
“Maybe so, but I need you to know that I would be just as happy as long as I was with you.”
He smiles at me. The sight of his pure happiness at my words makes my chest feel too small.
“Are you still up for this weekend?” he asks, steering the conversation back to the here and now.
“As long as nothing changes with Sara, yeah. I’m ready for a few days of forgetting about real life.”
Toby’s phone vibrates on the bedside table and he spins around.
“Shit, I’m going to be late again.”
“Nico?” I ask.
“Yeah. I never thought I’d see the day when he was the one waiting for me.
He has one last spoonful before he leaves me with the plate and quickly rummages around his room and drags on his uniform.
“Shouldn’t Stella be at school today?” I ask, my eyes trailing him around the room and in and out of the bathroom.
“Yeah, but I told her about this weekend and she clearly has plans.”
“Christ, she’s going to take me for another waxing session, isn’t she?” I ask, squeezing my thighs together as I think about my last experience in that salon in Lovell before my disaster shift at Foxes that I never want to think about ever again.
His eyes roll down my body as if he’s imagining me laid out naked before some unforgiving woman rips all my hair from my skin.
“Maybe, but I guess you don’t have long to wait to find out.”
I glance at my own phone and realise just how late it is.
Abandoning the cheesecake in the middle of the bed, I walk shamelessly naked toward Toby as his eyes eat up every inch of me.
“Have a good day, schoolboy,” I breathe, reaching up on my toes, my breasts brushing his jacket and sending a shiver racing down my spine. “I’ll be here waiting to see what you’ve got up your sleeve for me this time.”
“Tonight can’t come soon enough, Demon. Try not to get into too much trouble with my sister.”
“I can’t make any promises.”
I brush my lips across his in the most teasing of kisses before I dart away and out of his grasp before he can deepen it.
“Later, bad boy,” I purr, kicking the bathroom door closed behind me.
“Tease,” he shouts.
“You love it.”
“I love you.” I still in the middle of the bathroom as his words rock the ground I’m standing on.
He hasn’t said those words since that night I begged him not to and they slipped out anyway. I might not have been ready to hear them back then. But my reaction right now is the proof I needed to remind myself of just how much I’ve grown in the past few weeks. I’ve been to hell and back, and I feel like an entirely different person.
I’ve shed my naïve skin, I’ve stopped viewing the world through rose-tinted glasses, and I couldn’t be happier with my new life, even if it is full of blood, pain, and destruction. Everything about it just seems right.
A door slams somewhere in the flat, and I quickly realise that I never said anything in response.
I let out a sigh, trying to imagine how he left feeling. I guess I’ll just have to make it up to him this weekend.
* * *