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She looks relieved almost, happy to have something to do. “Tell me what to do.”

I eye my duffel on the floor. “There’s a med kit inside. You need to help me put the waterproof bandages on with waterproof tape.” I tug my shirt out of my pants, as she watches me. And I slowly peel it off my body.

While the tee-shirt is covering my face, I swear to fucking god I hear her let out this little chirping sound. A whimper almost. I yank it over my head and get a look at her, but she’s looking at her fingernails but her face is tomato red.

Fuck, that blush. It’s all over her chest now.

“You…” Her voice shakes a little. She clears her throat and takes a shaky breath. “You’ve got new ink. Nice.”

For a long second, the heat pulses between us and it takes all my fucking willpower not to tackle her onto the white rug and consummate this deal right this second.

“Thanks. I even got one for you.”

She blinks a few times, rapid and unsure. “You did?”

I nod. “Yeah. Right here.”

I glance down at my left shoulder. Right there, between the bravo company insignia and the deep blacks of my tribal tattoos, sits silhouetted kitty cat, black with its tail curled. Her favorite. The reason she got her nickname.

“No way,” she says, beaming. “You didn’t.”

Her sweet little fingers trace the edges of its tail, its ears. Her touch releases an instant throb of desire from my cock, making me so fucking hard that I can barely see straight. “Yeah. I got it on your birthday.”

“You didn’t say. You should’ve told me.”

“I didn’t want to tell you. I wanted to show you.”

“It looks really nice,” she says, eyes twinkling, dimples fucking blazing. “So pretty and unexpected.”

Fuck. Just like her. “Yeah. I thought you’d like it. But don’t get too much closer.”

Her eyes dart up to mine. “Why?”

Because I can smell your fucking wetness and I want to ram my meat into you without asking.“Because I haven’t showered in like, three days.”

Her eyelashes flutter as she raises a brow, holding a finger up as if to clear her thoughts, laughing a little. “Right. Okay. Bandages.”

I move to loosen the brass buckle on my belt, letting the loose ends hang open. She kneels down and opens the zipper on the duffel, carefully pulling out my tee-shirts, my camo pants and jacket and my boxers, until she finds the white bag with the red cross on the front.

But just as she’s grabbing it, I see the one thing in the world that I can’t let her find. It’s tucked in behind the medic kit. My journal, identical to the one I gave her, except mine is black.

Fuck.Fuck.

“I got it,” I say, trying to distract her. “Here, let me get it.”

“No, no you don’t. I’ve…” She picks it up to set it aside and two photos fall to the cream carpet.

The first is of her, in a pink sweater with miniature black cats all over it and sunglasses on her head as she sticks her tongue out at the camera. The second is of the two of us together, her in a yellow retro style bikini and me in swim trunks, from the summer my parents rented a cabin at the lake. She was self-conscious about the bathing suit. There were other girls around and Kat took to wearing one of my huge t-shirts whenever she went out to the beach. It broke my heart that she felt her body somehow didn’t measure up. She was soft curves and womanly hips before her time, but she was a goddess even then.

I got her to take off the t-shirt for the photo. Had to give her ten bucks but it was worth so much more.

She glances up at me, smiling, tongue pinned between her teeth. “Oh.”

She doesn’t seem pissed. And I’m fucking relieved. But before I can retrieve the journal, she sets it down and the pages fall open and there’s the rest of it.

My sketches. Of her.Naked.

Fucking hundreds of them.