“Sorry,” he said. “Some of the rest are, uh . . .”
For you. He thought of the idea he’d had for her Christmas present, the general sketches he’d done already. Of you. He thought of a loose pencil sketch of her profile he’d worked on idly weeks ago, back when they’d been called into Dolores’ office and Lauren had said having falling snow in the Snow Globe would be magical. He drew people all the time. If she went through the whole sketchbook, she’d see pictures he’d done of his housemates, of random customers at a local coffee shop, of celebrities. But the one of her had been different, and he worried she’d know it right away just by looking at it.
“Pornographic?” she asked, and he almost choked.
“Private.”
“Ah,” she said, flushing a little. “Right. Sorry.”
He still hadn’t released her wrist. Her pulse jumped beneath his fingertips. “You really think I’d put all my pornographic drawings in the same notebook as that little penguin guy? There’s gotta be a separation of church and state.”
“So in this scenario, pornography is . . . church? Or state?”
“Okay,” he said. “Bad example.”
He stroked his thumb along the back of her hand, half because he wanted to and half to see if she’d pull away. When she didn’t, he cleared his throat. “Lauren . . .”
Clearly, they were on a similar wavelength, because she cut him off before he could get another word out. “About last night,” she said. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”
He didn’t know what she’d meant to say, but he could tell from the way she clenched her eyes shut for a moment that it hadn’t been that. He didn’t even bother trying to hide the grin that cracked over his face. “Same here.”
“I think some of that is because it feels . . . unfinished.”
He drew his brows together in mock confusion. “I thought you finished?”
She rolled her eyes, smacking him playfully on the arm. “You know what I mean,” she said. “Unless you don’t, in which case welcome to the most embarrassing moment of my life.”
Truthfully, Asa wasn’t completely sure he did understand where Lauren was going with all this. But he didn’t want to say the wrong thing and spook her. He caught her by the hips to draw her closer, until she was standing between his knees.
“If you’re asking if I’d like to do it again,” he said. “The answer is emphatically yes.”
She pushed at his shoulders, her fingers digging into his T-shirt. “Not like we have to do exactly the same stuff . . .”
“Oh, we can change it up,” he said, sliding his hands around the warm, bare skin of her waist under her shirt. “Like this time I’d really, really like to see you naked.”
He pressed his lips to the hollow of her throat, tugging gently at the collar of her shirt with his teeth.
“Um,” she said. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to undo your buttons with my mouth,” he said. “It’s a very sexy move if you’d stop ruining the moment and let me do it.”
She threaded her hands in his hair, pulling slightly so his head tilted back to look up at her. “You’re going to ruin my shirt. Or choke on a button.”
“Well, I see which one of those you prioritized.” He smiled, realizing he was also perfectly happy just doing this. Teasing Lauren, making her laugh, enjoying the rare privilege it felt like just to be able to touch her.
But then Lauren was reaching up to undo her top button, and he was more than happy to do this. She unbuttoned the second, then the third, all the way to the bottom until her shirt gaped open, revealing pale, smooth skin.
He parted the two sides of the shirt, his hands running up the dip of her waist to her rib cage to just under her breasts. Her bra was blush pink and simple, two cotton triangles that did nothing to hide the hard points of her nipples underneath. She shuddered when he brushed his thumbs across, her fingers tightening in his hair.
“I bet you have three of this exact bra,” he said, pushing one of the triangles of fabric aside to reveal the swell of her breast, the tight pink bud of her nipple. God, she was beautiful. He wished he were enough of an artist to do justice to this image of her, half undone. He knew it was an image that would live in his head forever.
“I bet,” he said, leaning in to take her gently between his teeth, swirling his tongue around her nipple. “You wear them under all your white shirts, because they don’t show through.”