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He smiled at me, let me go, leaned to grab the bag of food, handed it to me, and ordered, “You warm this up. I’ll order some sweet shit to be delivered.”
Oh my God!
How nice!
Still, I said, “You don’t have to. I probably shouldn’t self-soothe through food.”
Though, there wasn’t any “probably” about it. This very fact had been drilled into my brain what felt like all my life (hi, Mom!).
“You’ve had a rough night,” he stated. “So I’m gonna get you some ice cream, chocolate and cookies.”
Oh yeah.
Totally nice.
But the blazing question of the night was…
Why?
Lamentably, as this brought us full circle, it made me ask, “Why are you being so nice?”
I thought it was a pertinent question, considering all he’d said to me the night before.
What I wasn’t ready for was him leaning deep into me so his nose was not even an inch from mine, doing this framing my face with his big, calloused hands, and his deep voice dropping to a rough, heady whisper.
“I was a dick last night and spewed a bunch of shit I shouldn’t have said for reasons I’ll explain later. Things are too heavy for you now to get into the heavy of all that, and I’ll warn you, Harlow, it’s heavy. But I’ll explain. We’ll work it out. And then we’ll figure it out. Just not now. Now is about food and me getting you to a place where you feel safe after what you saw done to your apartment.”
I didn’t hesitate even a second to say, “I don’t think it’s possible not to feel safe when I’m with you.”
After I said that, the next instant, I didn’t know whether to pull away and run as fast as I could or throw myself at him and hold on as hard as I could, because the burn seared into me from a fire that raged deep in his eyes. This happened at the same time his hold on my cheeks tightened, just a little, but it was there, and it was meaningful.
Then his hands glided down to cup my jaw. In doing this, his fingers were so long, they snagged in my hair. Liking both, my nipples pebbled, then somewhere south pulsed as he dipped his head and scraped his evening scruff against my cheek so his lips were at my ear (and…yeah, another pulse and a harder pebble!).
“But we’ll clear one thing up right now,” he said softly there.
I was listening so hard, I feared my eardrums would explode.
“I like you, Harlow.”
What?
“But, why?—?”
I stopped speaking abruptly when his whiskers scraped back across my cheek, and now he was so close, the tip of his nose brushed mine.
I couldn’t help it, that felt so nice, and all I could see was so beautiful, I let out a little sigh.
“My head’s fucked up about something,” he whispered. “I took that out on you. It was uncool.” Another tip-of-the-nose brush, which elicited another sigh. “And you did right, baby. You reamed my ass about it, in your way. I hurt you, and it wrecked me that I did, but you didn’t let me pull that shit. Now I gotta work to fix it, and I’m gonna do that, mi pequeña Lolita. I promise.”
Mi pequeña Lolita.
Why were those the three most beautiful words I’d ever heard in my life?
Not to mention the whole “and it wrecked me that I did.”
I didn’t want him to feel that, but about this, I also did.
“Okay?” he asked.