With Love, from Cold World(97)

“Take this off,” she said, pushing impatiently at the hem of his shirt.

He had it over his head in a single fluid motion. “You telling me what to do?”

There was a mischievous tilt to her mouth, but something shy around her eyes. “Is that a problem?”

“No problem here.”

“Good,” she said. He was only wearing the gym shorts he wore around the house, and the light brush of her fingertips under the waistband shot straight to his dick. “Now these.”

It wasn’t long before he was completely naked, even as she was still fully dressed in the casual long-sleeved shirt and leggings she’d worn to come over. He leaned in, partially because he wanted to speak directly into her ear, and partially because he enjoyed the way her self-control cracked the closer he got, the way she trembled at his breath on her cheek.

“You might want to lock the door,” he said. “To preserve my modesty.”

A brief, embarrassed streak of color shot across her cheeks—whether because she was remembering the last time they’d gotten caught out, or because she felt bad she hadn’t considered it happening again, he didn’t know. But she turned the lock in the doorknob and switched off the brighter overhead light until the room was lit only by his desk lamp. By the time she was leaning against the door, she seemed to have gotten over that momentary lapse.

He didn’t know that he was over it yet. He didn’t know if he’d be able to explain it to her, the effect she had on him. One of the first things he’d noticed about Lauren was that, despite how guarded she could be, her emotions really played across her face. And even in moments like this one, he found it so appealing, so fucking hot, the way he could see her vacillate between vulnerability one minute, taking control and getting off on the power the next. Even in the last week, she’d opened up so much with him, and the sex was mind-blowing but it wasn’t even about the sex. It was about the way he sensed her trusting him.

Loving him.

She stepped forward, reaching for him, but he gently encircled her wrists to keep her hands at her sides.

“I love you, too,” he said. “I just wanted to clear that up.”

Her dark eyes searched his. “Really?”

“Is that so hard to believe?”

“Well, it is hard . . .”

Asa felt his eyebrows shoot up into his hairline as she pressed her pelvis into his. “Lauren Fox, was that a dirty joke?”

She dropped her forehead to his chest, the exhale of her breath a warm pulse on his bare skin. “I’m nervous,” she whispered. “I joke when I get nervous.”

He released her wrists to cradle her cheeks, tilting her face up. If he thought about it too much, he could get intimidated, too—about what this meant for them, about where they would go from here—but all that disappeared when he looked into the deep brown of her eyes.

“Don’t be nervous,” he said, pressing a soft kiss to the corner of her mouth, then catching her lower lip between his teeth. “This is the easy part.”



* * *



? ? ?

They woke up late on Christmas morning. For once in his life, the draw of staying in bed was greater than the promise of presents, but Lauren was adorably excited by the stocking full of candy John gave her. Asa knew it was the dollar store stocking with Lauren’s name written on it in Sharpie, identical to the ones John had propped on the couch for the rest of the housemates, and not so much the candy, which he’d probably end up eating most of.

They FaceTimed with Elliot, who grudgingly agreed that Kiki could open their waffle maker if she promised to clean it immediately afterward. “Don’t forget the whisk we had to throw away after the alfredo sauce,” they said. “Don’t just soak it and think that’s the same as scrubbing.”

It took a few batches for Kiki to get the settings right, but then they had golden brown waffles and more presents to open, mainly useful things for the house or low-cost novelty gifts like a Betty & Veronica for Kiki or a set of guitar picks with lewd sayings on them that Asa had custom-ordered for John from an Etsy shop. John was almost as easily embarrassed by that kind of thing as Lauren was, so between the two of them there were a lot of pink cheeks as they passed the guitar picks around.

All told, it was the best Christmas that Asa had ever had. Later that night, when they were alone in his room planning to watch a movie, he tried again to get Lauren to tell him her favorite.

“No guilty pleasures here,” he said, “only pleasures. I’ll watch whatever. You a Muppet Christmas fan? More of a Hallmark kind of girl? Has there ever been a Muppet Hallmark crossover event?”

He was already pulling up a few streaming sites, starting to search, but Lauren reached over to close the laptop. “What happens after the presentations?” she asked.

There was something about the way the question was framed—the presumption that something would happen after—that clenched around his heart like an icy fist. “What do you mean?”

Lauren tucked her hair behind her ear. “If Dolores likes our ideas, then we’ll be working together to implement them. But if she doesn’t . . . or worse, if she goes with something Daniel comes up with . . .”

“Then everything goes back to the way it was,” Asa said. “Only now we have each other. Right?”