Page 136 of Top Shelf
“What about you, Silas?”
Silas shakes his head, stare dead set on me.
“Well, I know I have nothing that’s more important than making my girl feel at home in her apartment,” Lucian declares with a clap of his hands, oblivious to the way my insides go all gooey when he refers to me ashis girl. “So let’s get this show on the road.”
Something deep in my chest wobbles unexpectedly.
I look between the three of them. At the casual certainty each of them bears. The complete lack of hesitation, like helping me rebuild pieces of myself is the most natural thing in the world.
“You really want to spend your Sunday painting my apartment?”
Lucian snorts. “Baby, we would help you bury a body if you asked us to.”
“Yeah, that’s not something I’m ever going to ask of you.”
Lucian shrugs, unperturbed.
“I think what Lucian is trying to say,” Ronan takes over, coming over to squeeze my shoulder, “is that there’s nothing else we’d rather do.”
Well, maybe a few things, but all of them involve you. Naked. Making those delectable little noises.
Silas presses the note into my hand, barely giving me time to read it all before he silences my splutter with his tongue. It quickly turns into a moan as I melt into his touch.Oh, how these men unravel me.
We only break apart at the clearing of a throat.
“As sexy as watching this is, getting hot and heavy in thepaint aisle might not be the wisest move,” Ronan remarks, side-eyeing an older lady gaping at us as though we’d started to strip naked in front of her.
Pressing my face into Silas’s chest to hide my embarrassment, my shoulders shake as I silently laugh.
“Ready to get out of here?” Lucian asks.
Looking up, I meet Silas’s gaze before nodding. “Yeah. Let’s go make my apartment a home.”
Paint rollers squeak softly against the walls while music hums through the apartment speakers, low enough to blend into the sound of laughter and shifting furniture.
For the first time since moving to Valehurst, this place actually feels alive.
The harsh white walls are disappearing beneath rich color, one careful stroke at a time. The muted green we picked for the living room wraps warmth around the space instantly, softening the sharp edges of the apartment until it no longer looks like some sterile show home my mother decorated because she’s got the emotional bandwidth of a psychopath.
It looks lived in.
More importantly, it feels likemine.Myspace.Mysanctuary.
Dressed in a pair of old, worn jean shorts and a white top I clearly haven’t worn since before I started college, based on how tight it is across the chest, I stand barefoot on the drop cloth near the center of the room holding a paint roller while staring at the wall. I still can’t fully believe it. The change that is currently unfolding before my eyes.
The color changeseverything.
And I’m not just talking about the walls or the vibe of theroom. I’m talking about how I perceive it. How I think about this place. It’s no longer my mother’s apartment that she’s forcing me to live in. No longer a place I’m just ‘staying’. Somewhere I don’t want to be.
Sunlight spills through the windows, catching against the wet paint and making the green glow softly. The shelves Ronan insisted I buy before we left the store are stacked near the hallway, waiting to be assembled later. A pile of mismatched throw pillows sits abandoned near the couch after Lucian declared half of them “ugly as sin” before immediately getting distracted and using them to start a wrestling match with Silas.
The apartment is chaos.
Warm, loud, messy chaos.
Somehow that makes it feel more like home than anything else ever has. Even my BSU apartment, where I was mostly by myself. The only other person to ever be there was Dylan.
“You’ve been staring at that wall for five straight minutes,” Ronan observes from where he’s rolling paint onto the far side of the room. “Changing your mind about the color?”
