Page 79 of Marked By Shadows
I thought about that for a few minutes. “Wonder why.”
“That’s why I need to research. But that’s for another day. Right now, it’s bedtime since we have a convention to attend tomorrow.” Alex dragged himself up and turned off the light. I sighed and rolled over to center myself on the bed and in his arms, which is where I was happiest at that moment.
Chapter 23
Waking up to the tickle of Alex’s beard on my face made me sigh.
“Is that a good sigh or a bad sigh?” Alex asked. “I brought you coffee.”
“Remind me again that you’re not a morning person?” I growled at him.
“I think everyone in the world is more of a morning person than you before coffee.” The scent of coffee made me open my eyes and stare up at him. He had obviously been awake awhile since his hair was tamed and he was fully dressed.
“And here I thought you were offering me morning sex,” I said.
“Before coffee? Do I look suicidal to you?”
I couldn’t help but smile as he did know me well. The years of being rolled over for a good time had long passed, and oddly, I didn’t miss them at all. I preferred a quiet morning of snuggles, coffee, and crafts to porn star style morning sex. Maybe I was getting prudish in my old age, twenty-three wasn’t all that old, but I wanted to be awake enough to appreciate the man in my bed.
“See there’s a crack in the grump. Drink your coffee. As much as I’d like to skip breakfast with the group and do our own thing today, we have that costume thing to get details on. Never realized how antisocial I can be until we got here,” Alex held the cup out until I sat up and took it from him. The first sip was heaven as usual. The smooth, creamy vanilla flavor with a hint of butterscotch, rolling over my tongue and down my throat made me close my eyes and breathe. The scent helped too. Coffee and Alex.
“You smell good today,” I said to him.
“I don’t smell good other days?” He quipped.
“Not what I meant.”
“Mhmm. I dug out the body wash stuff Lukas gave me instead of just using yours. Felt bad always using your stuff. Didn’t want to use it up.”
“You don’t smell like Lukas. He uses cologne.”
“But I mix well with your coffee is what you’re telling me?”
“Yep,” I said into the cup. “I’d totally be down for morning sex with you… after coffee.”
Alex laughed. He leaned forward to kiss me, which I allowed despite the niggle in the back of my brain about my own morning breath. “Drink your coffee.”
I settled into the cup of creamy butterscotch coffee, and after about ten minutes dragged my lazy ass downstairs to the bathroom to shower and clean up. Alex refilled my coffee cup as he danced around the house, organizing and cleaning as was becoming his habit. His tastes in music were a bit more eclectic than mine as I’d learned on the drive. He could appreciate pop music and had even added a few songs to his playlist that came from the Top 40 stations, but in general he preferred rock. As I combed my hair and washed my face, Bad Wolves’ remake of the song “Zombie” by the Cranberries rolled on repeat between a handful of Adele R&B and Lewis Capaldi’s heartbreak stuff. Alex only had a few dance songs in his mix, like Bruno Mars, Jason Derulo, and even the duet of Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran, which I knew he’d got from listening to me play it, while the rest of his picks slid from the grunge of classic Nirvana to the nonstop angst of Three Days Grace.
Alex sang along unabashedly, his voice while good and pleasant, lacked training of any kind. I suspected if he had training, he might actually be the sort of phenomenal that made people superstars. He wasn’t casually good like a lot of people were, but that firm and confident tenor strength of a lot of rock greats. It never ceased to stun me at how good he was at so many random things without really trying. A true jack-of-all-trades, I supposed.
His tone became a little breathy after a while, sounding a bit like he was running or something. Not really possible in the small space. I finished cleaning up and returned to the main area to find him following along with some sort of kickboxing exercise video on my computer. He had the sound off and was just following their moves to the beat of his own music. It all looked like he’d done it before, with no jerkiness of movement or hesitation. Punch, kick, squat.
“Hey,” he said a little breathless. “I’m so out of shape.”
“You look good to me,” I said letting my gaze roll over him. Sure he was still thin and needed to put on more muscle, but I suspected it wouldn’t be a challenge for him to get back to tip-top shape now that he had stable living conditions. I’d never been into gym bunnies or drawn to every man with a six pack of abs. I liked my men scruffy with something to hold on to. Feeding Alex back to a normal weight was on the top of my list for more than one reason.
He grinned, stopped, and ran his hand over his beard. “I’ll have to find a gym or something back home. Used to run every day, or hike with a giant backpack. We had a couple routines too, random stuff we did to keep in shape while we were waiting on orders. Our troop was never one to sit around with our thumbs up our asses. I think the ghost tours helped. Running around NOLA chasing after ghosts and hauling boxes for you. What a way to keep in shape.”
“We need to run away from ghosts, not toward them,” I told him as I rinsed my cup in the sink.
“You might be in the wrong profession.”
“Jerk. I’m a craft shop owner. You said so yourself.”
“And a legendary tour guide of the most haunted city in the world,” Alex said.
“I think that might actually be Paris, but you’d have to Google it.”