Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 143382 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 717(@200wpm)___ 574(@250wpm)___ 478(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 143382 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 717(@200wpm)___ 574(@250wpm)___ 478(@300wpm)
Seriously primo taste in film.
“Do you wanna talk about it?” I offered quietly.
He looked me dead in the eye. “That my ex is borderline stalking me?”
I gave him Harlow’s stretched-and-turned-down-lips face.
He looked at it, it seemed to lighten his mood, then his mood took a hit when he leaned forward, pulled his phone out of his back pocket and scowled at it.
He did some things to the screen with his thumb and put it to his ear.
I didn’t know if she said anything, I just knew he spoke pretty quickly upon putting the phone to his ear, and what he said was, “My next step is a protective order. Not sure your rep will take that hit when it gets out. And I promise you, it’ll get out. Your choice. And you know that’s not an empty threat.” He then tossed his phone on the bedside table and said to me, “Your gelato is melting.”
I spooned some up and told him, “Your bedroom is da bomb.”
“Da bomb?”
“Da bomb,” I confirmed.
His lips twitched, and he spooned up his own ice cream.
“Though I now get why you’re so fit, because I think your living room is in Phoenix, but your bedroom is in Hawaii,” I quipped.
He started laughing.
Good.
I made him laugh.
“That’s the longest hall in history,” I kept going for it. “If he was alive, Louis the Fourteenth would be jealous as all hell.”
He shoved pillows behind him, rested against his headboard, yanked my back against his chest, stretched his legs out, and said, “Shut up, Jess.”
He then started the movie.
I shut up, and somehow we both managed to eat ice cream in his bed with me using him as my cushion (I saw how he did it, he held his bowl in the hand with the arm around me, and used his free one to dip into the creamy deliciousness, performing a minor miracle by not dripping any on him…or me).
When we were finished, he put the bowls aside, and I was pleased beyond measure when he relaxed against me and started laughing at the movie.
It was such a good choice, my selection of 21 Jump Street after didn’t compare, but Eric didn’t complain.
Though I fell asleep, curled into his side, my head on his chest, my arm around his abs, in his bed, about halfway through it.
And Eric didn’t wake me to send me home.
NINE
TINKERBELL
My eyes opened, only to take in a slate-gray pillowcase.
My pillowcases were white.
I sat up and realized I was in Eric’s bed, in his killer bedroom that was decorated in navy, gray and black with touches of hunter green. I wasn’t under the covers, but a super soft throw was covering me.
And Eric wasn’t there.
I checked his smart home unit on his nightstand and saw it was around my normal waking-up time, ten to eight.
Eric being an early riser (as I categorized anyone who woke up before me) wasn’t a surprise.
Fortunately, he couldn’t vanish like he had before since I was at his house.
Time to find him.
First things first, I got out of bed and hit his bathroom.
After I took care of business and moved to the double basin decked out with a black marble countertop, I saw beside the unused basin a new electric toothbrush head, the toothbrush upstanding beside it, some toothpaste, and last, a tube of cleanser and tub of moisturizer that were a brand so far out of my price range, it wasn’t funny.
There was also a note.
I washed my hands, dried them and nabbed the note.
J-
Sadie forgot to take these after she and Hector stayed with me.
If you need them, I don’t think she’ll mind.
X
I didn’t think that “X” was a riff on a signature.
I thought it was a kiss.
Or I decided I was going to take it as a kiss.
And it was good to know he didn’t have expensive facial products hanging around for all his babes who fell asleep watching movies with him (or other). But instead, this was Sadie’s (by the by, she was a Rock Chick, and Hector was OG Hot Bunch, they lived in Denver).
It was better to know that he knew a girl who slept in her makeup would think it was priority one to get rid of it when she woke up.
Of course, he’d been married.
But it meant he paid attention to the stuff that might seem small to him, but was important to a woman.
The gooey feeling was back, I was still uncertain about it, but my teeth and face were not uncertain about being brushed, cleansed and moisturized.
That accomplished, I wandered down the hall, already seeing him sitting on a stool at his island at the end of it.
Since he was watching me walk to him, and he looked hot wearing blue lounge pants and a gray long-sleeved shirt that hugged his torso in all the right places, I couldn’t tear my eyes from him in order to assuage my curiosity and peruse the abundance of rooms that sat along this hall.