I mean, I was all for it eventually. It scared me, made me nervous too.
I’d seen him without a shirt on. He was all brawny and big, and I’d bet he wasn’t lazy at all. I bet he liked being on top.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, I needed not to think about that.
“Rhodes,” I whispered.
“Hmm?”
“In the same bed?”
“I’d rather not sleep on the floor, angel, but I will if you’re not good with it.”
I blinked, and my heart thumped in response.
“Don’t think you want to either. There might be mice running around still. They are nocturnal.”
I was still taking turns looking up at the ceiling and down at the floor when he led us into his bedroom. He didn’t flip on the light, but the moon through his window was huge and bright, illuminating everything with just the right amount to not wake me up too much more than talking about mice and bats had.
Fuck. I was relieved when he closed the door behind him and moved toward the bed, still holding my hand. He pulled the bedspread aside and murmured, “Take this side.”
I did, plopping down on the edge and watching him as he unbuttoned his shirt. When he was almost done, he jerked it out from where it had been stuffed into his pants, finished with the buttons, and shrugged it off. Right in front of me.
I sat there. My mouth went a little dry at the way his undershirt clung to the thick muscles of his upper body. “Are you showering?” I asked without even meaning to.
“Too tired,” he replied softly, folding the shirt and setting it into a hamper I hadn’t spotted in the corner of his room. I wanted to look around… but he was stripping.
Rhodes went for his pants then, undoing the tab, then the zipper, and pulling it down…
That’s when I glanced up to meet his eyes. He was looking right at me. Busted. I smiled just as he started tugging his pants down his long legs.
“Did you find the hunters?” I asked, hoping my throat sounded husky from sleep and not for another reason.
I was weak and I flicked my gaze down.
He was a boxers guy.
Part of me had expected him to be a tighty-whities type of man, but he wasn’t.
His boxers were dark and short. His thighs were everything I had expected them to be. Someone didn’t skip leg day and hadn’t. Ever.
I swallowed to make sure my mouth was shut.
“Yes. They wandered too far from their campsite, but we found them,” he answered.
He bent down and pulled off his socks, and I swore there was something about his bare feet just visible that seemed more intimate than if he’d been standing there buck naked.
Drawing my legs up, I snuck them under the sheet and the heavy comforter, drawing it up as he pulled his other sock off, still watching me. I was doing this. Sleeping in his bed. Still not sure what any of this meant or where it was going but… going along with it.
He had been so nice to me lately for a reason, I understood now. Maybe he’d been distant because of his mom, maybe he’d finally just decided I was decent. I had no clue what drove him to this point now, of leading me to his room.
Yet it didn’t matter.
My mom used to say that most of the time, when you’re on a trail, you get to a point where another one branches off from it, and you have to choose which way you want to go. What you want to see. And I knew in that moment, that I had to make another decision.
For a tiny, brief moment, I wondered if this was fast. I’d been with someone for fourteen years, and it had been almost a year and a half since we’d split up. Should I give myself more time?
But in another tiny, brief moment, I came to my decision.
When you lose enough, you learn to take happiness where you can find it. You don’t wait for it to be handed to you. You don’t expect it in big firework-like displays.
You take it in small moments, and sometimes those come shaped in a two-hundred-and-fortyish pound man going above and beyond. I wanted to understand what was happening. I needed to.
So before I could think twice about what I was doing, what I was setting myself up for, I asked him, “Rhodes?”
“Yes?”
“Why didn’t you call or text me while you were gone?”
I was pretty sure I could hear my heart beating it was so loud in the silence that came right after my question. Just this thud, thud, thud that rang between my ears as he stood there, looking in my direction. Part of me didn’t expect him to answer until he finally repeated in surprise, “Why?”
Maybe I should’ve saved the question for when it wasn’t three in the morning, but we were here, and I might as well get it out. “Yeah. Why? I thought… I thought there was something going on with us, but then I didn’t hear from you.” I pressed my lips together. “Now I’m in your bed and I’m confused with what’s going on. If it means anything.”