Page 66 of Bounced!

I had never once told him that.

“How’d you know?” I asked.

“I’ve been watching you drink it for years, Dante. You think I don’t pay attention?” He set the mug on the nightstand, which was apparently on my side now, a thing that had been decided in the night without a vote. “Steeped four minutes, no milk. I had to guess on the honey. I did a little. You can yell at me if it’s wrong.”

It wasn’t wrong. Of course it wasn’t wrong. The man who couldn’t work a dating app had clocked my tea order across a bar and warmed a mug and guessed the honey perfectly. He stood there in his underwear waiting to be told he’d gotten it right. I sat up against his headboard and thought, Oh, no. I’m in so much trouble. He’s actually sweet.

“It’s right,” I said.

The relief on his face was indecent.

He made too much breakfast after that.

That was the next thing.

I heard him back in the kitchen while I sipped my tea, the sounds of a man who fed people for a living, cooking for a man he was finally getting to feed. When I stepped out of the bedroom, he’d made enough eggs, bacon, and toast for a work crew or a wedding—or a siege. He stood at the stove in an apron that read in faded script, “KISS THE COOK,” a joke somebody’d given him years ago. He acted a little embarrassed, by the apron and the abundance and the wanting to do it all.

“I didn’t know what you eat,” he said. “So I made everything.”

“I can see that.”

“You’re a big guy. I’m a big guy. Big guys need fuel. I wasn’t going to hand you one egg like some bird. Sorry, too cannibalistic?” He grinned sheepishly and slid a plate in front of me. There was so much food piled on that plate that three men couldn’t have finished it all. “Eat. Please. It makes me happy to watch you eat. Is that weird? That’s probably weird.”

It was a little weird.

It was also the most disarming thing anybody had said or done in a decade. I sat at his kitchen island, the one he built, in the house he built, and I ate a ridiculous mountain of food while a giant wearing tighty-whities and a KISS THE COOK apron watched me do it with open, undisguised delight. I understood that I might spend a good portion of the rest of my life being ambushed by this man’s sweetness, and that I had no defense against it, absolutely none.

We ended up back in the bed after breakfast.

Not for that.

Well, not only for that.

We tangled up again in the good morning light, full and warm and unhurried. His hand moved slowly up and down my back. Then he went quiet in a way I felt. I lifted my head to catch him staring at his hand on my back, my arm stretched across his chest. Sunlight streamed in full now, honest and unhurried. Against the dark of me, his skin was pale and freckled and gray-furred. Against the pale of him, mine was deep and smooth. He was staring at where our bodies met, like a man who couldn’t believe he got to keep it.

“I can’t stop looking at it,” he breathed.

“I noticed.”

“Look at us, though.” His thumb dragged across my shoulder. “That’s the best-looking thing I’ve ever seen, right there. I keep putting my hand on you just to watch it.”

“You’re staring.”

“I’m appreciating. There’s a difference. It’s a real distinction.”

“That’s my line.”

“I’m stealing it . . . or liberating it. That sounds better. It was being oppressed.” He grinned and did it again, dragged his hand down my back just to see the dark under his pale, easy and unhurried, no ghost of anybody’s old voice anywhere. “I’m going to stare at you for years, Dante Pierce. Fair warning. I’m going to be insufferable about it. I waited two fucking years. I get to stare now.”

“You built the whole thing up in your head.”

“I built my house, but I’m renovating my morning schedule around this exact view.” He kissed the spot on my shoulder he’d been staring at. “Sue me.”

So I let him look.

God help me.

I lay there in the honest morning light and let a man map the difference of us with his eyes and his hands and his ridiculous, open heart. The thing I’d carried like a stone my whole life, the thing I’d braced to have to defend against or apologize for or manage, he held up to the window like Mama’s good silver, turning it to catch the light, delighted and so damn sweet.