Page 35 of More Than Scars
I loved sprawling out with my head against his leg and his fingers in my hair. I loved how excited he got when a team was racing the clock and the way he cheered when the team he was rooting for won a challenge. I loved sharing a quiet day at home alone with him. Whether Tony had it planned in advance or whether he decided to dip out after listening to Pressley and I debate which show to watch, I owed him a thank you.
I loved…
The words spun through my head in a crazy corkscrew loop that left me twitching beneath his fingers.
“Bowie, you okay?”
His voice smoothed out the shockwaves a little, though I hated putting that note of worry in it.
“Yeah, I, um…”
Stammering was always a tell. He’d figured that out early and always pressed until I spilled my guts. I couldn’t just blurt outI love you, he’d probably scoot away and head for the kitchen to whip up a bunch of stuff it would take us days to eat. If stammering was my tell, cooking was his. The roast he’d thrown in the crockpot was simple, like he couldn’t wait to park himself on the couch with me. If I tossed out theI love youcard, he’d probably spend the rest of the day in the kitchen.
Since I couldn’t come up with an excuse that would get him to drop it, I sat up and spun, throwing one leg over him until I was straddling his lap. Kisses were far easier than conversations right now, and I hadn’t gotten enough of them last night. His fingers in my hair tugged just a little as we made out, and I was well aware of the fact that he was hard beneath me.
“Bowie…” he hissed, breaking the kiss enough to tug my hair back until my throat was bared. “You’re killing me.”
“Killing myself too,” I groaned, shifting my hips as I went right back to kissing him.
His hand landed on my lap just heavy enough to make me moan, so I retaliated by squirming again and earning a squeeze. I was gonna come just frotting against him, and I was totally fine with that. Apparently, I wasn’t rocking enough, because he started to rock me to the pace that he wanted me to move, and I groaned as I completely lost it. His hands were everywhere his lips weren’t as I flew apart in his arms, shuddering against him, which threw him over the edge too.
“Now I’m really curious to know which bit of food porn brought that on,” he groaned, fingertips lightly stroking my back through my t-shirt. “Because I’m going to have to duplicate that recipe.”
“The lobster,” I moaned, out of breath and draped against him.
“Which one?”
“All of them.”
His laughter shook me until I eased off him and flopped on my back on the couch. “I’m just going to lie here and become one with the fabric.”
“After I clean us up.”
Dinner ended up being at half-past ten, because that was when I finally woke up. I didn’t even remember him coming back from the bathroom, I just dropped off hard.
“Are you ready for tomorrow?” He asked across a candlelit table, the meat so tender that we didn’t even need knives.
“Can I be blunt?”
“Of course.”
“We’re not exactly going to be going into the studio with a game plan,” I admitted. “You kinda dropped it on us on short notice, and if we’re going to be laying down tracks, we should have had some kind of rank list prepared for the songs we are the most ready to record and the ones we need to do our final tweaks on before we record them. That way we could plan how we want to structure our rehearsal time for after we’re done recording, or before. None of us are going into this with any idea of how things are gonna go, and that’s kinda scary. We’re going to need to sort those things out tomorrow.”
“I fucked up, didn’t I?” Pressley asked, a grim look on his face.
I hated seeing that look because I knew that meant he was beating himself up. “Just a little. It’s cool that you wanted to surprise us though, like, that really had us hyped up last night. But when you asked me about today, it suddenly dawned on me that the band should have had a planning session of some sort before we went in there. I should, um, probably text them and pose those questions.”
Maybe it wasn’t the best timing, but I shot the questions to the rest of my bandmates by text, figuring they were probably still awake too. The emojis I got back were varying degrees of horrified and sobbing.
“I take it they’re up?”
“Oh yeah,” I said and turned my phone so he could see the emojis.
“Ouch.”
I put the phone face down on the table and stared at him through the flickering flames. “Sorry.”
“No, I’m the one who’s sorry. It’s one thing to have heard all the songs and felt that they are recording ready and another to look at it from a creator’s point of view and consider that there might still be some things you’d like to change about them.”