Page 33 of The Girlfriend's Guide to Dating a Biker
I followed his gaze and cringed at the chaos of my living room where my dual monitors sat surrounded by empty coffee cups and Post-it notes covered in code snippets.
Normally, I’d blurt an apology and make an excuse for the mess, but I didn’t bother with Jake. I mean, I’d just told the man he was my default setting, and he hadn’t bolted. Some dirty coffee cups weren’t going to scare him away.
“I’m going to change,” I said.
He brought his gaze back to me, running it down my body, over the clothes I was wearing. “Why?”
“Okay, so just to give you a little peek inside a woman’s brain,” I said as his eyes met mine again. “We don’t sleep next to a man in the clothes we wear to emotionally spiral and eat our feelings.”
His brows pulled together. “That what you did tonight?”
“Yes. Obviously. This is what women do when they like a guy and have no idea what the hell they’re doing. We spiral. We overanalyse. We eat brie. And we do all of that in our emotional support T-shirt that is absolutely not meant to be worn when said guy sleeps over.”
He didn’t laugh. Didn’t smirk. He just watched me, his gaze softening at the edges like he was seeing every sharp, messy, neurotic part of me and filing it under shit he liked.
“I like knowing that,” he said, all low gravel and raw truth. “That you spiralled. That you gave a shit. And I like that you didn’t play it cool. You let me see it, and that means something to me.” He paused. “You don’t need to change.”
I stared at him, speechless.
Guys didn’t usually talk like that to me. They didn’t talk about things that mattered.
I’d dated polished, charming, hyper-ambitious men who could talk for hours about startups and strategy but didn’t know how to say this means something to me.
Jake just said it. Like honesty wasn’t a risk, but a baseline. And it knocked the air out of me in the gentlest way. So yeah. I panicked a little.
My mouth jumped in like it’d been waiting for my brain to emotionally collapse. “This shirt says, ‘I attended a JavaScript summit and all I got was this T-shirt.’ There’s nothing sexy about that. I can’t wear?—”
Jake took a step closer and silenced me with a finger to my mouth. “It’s sexy because it’s yours.”
Cue internal overheating.
“But,” I pressed, waving a hand between us, “it’s covered in coffee stains and anxiety sweat. Surely your standards are higher.”
He leaned in and brought his mouth to my ear. “Darlin’, you could wear a bin bag and I’d still be hard.”
OH. OKAY.
“I—okay—wow—great—um—bed, then?” I said, my voice glitching like fluster.exe just crashed my processor.
He gave me that smirk of his. The one that said he knew exactly what he was doing to my organs. “Lead the way.”
I took him into my bedroom where he shrugged off his jacket while I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth for the second time tonight. I may have been about to sleep next to Jake wearing this old T-shirt, but there was no way I would be doing that with anything but fresh breath.
I may have also washed my face while I was in there.
Okay, okay. I did almost a full skin routine.
And yes, I was absolutely stalling. I was about to sleep next to a man who looked like sin incarnate. While wearing a dirty, oversized T-shirt and ugly sleep shorts. I was making sure that my face at least looked good.
When I came out, he was sitting on the edge of my bed barefoot, and I couldn’t deny just how much I liked seeing him in my bedroom with his shoes off. There was something about a barefoot man in my personal space.
Shoes meant leaving. Barefoot meant he was staying.
It meant he was comfortable. Settled. Soft and casual in a way he didn’t show the world.
The secret cavewoman part of me was strutting: “His feet are on my floor. His scent is in my air. He has touched down on my territory. We are mated now.”
I know. I hear it too. I sound like a girl who just practiced signing his last name with hers in five different handwriting styles. Someone please reboot me. Cavewoman.exe just overrode all my emotional firewalls and installed a mating protocol I did not consent to.
