Page 15 of Wide-Eyed
This was why I wasn’t expecting to find him in the kitchen now.
Half naked.
Mike was bent over the faucet, drinking from the stream. I never thought the inability to use a glass would be sexy, but when I got an eyeful of Mike’s biceps, bunched up as he leaned over the sink, I froze in the doorway.
He was only wearing jeans, no shirt, so his massive shoulders and bare back were right there.
I couldn’t stop staring.
Mike turned the water off and straightened, doing a double take when he saw me. Dark hair curled and swirled over his pectorals and down his gently rounded belly before disappearing into his waistband. For the first time in my life, I didn’t notice the details of what a man was wearing—like the style or the cut of his jeans. I had only one thought in my head.
Holy dad bod.
“Hi,” I said awkwardly.
He dragged the back of his hand over his mouth, and I swear, my knees nearly buckled.
All of the many thoughts that rolled around my head making endless and constant noise stilled then, and one lone thought pushed to the forefront of my brain: I want to lick him like a popsicle.
Sometimes it felt like my brain was my own personal troll that I carried around with me, one that I couldn’t get rid of by silencing notifications or logging off. I would be living my life, existing happily, and then a terrible and negative thought would intrude and ruin everything. When I was younger, these thoughts came to me in my mother’s voice. Now, they were mine. I didn’t know when that had changed—I tried not to think about it.
As I was staring at Mike, thinking about licking him from navel to clavicle, my brain chose to make space for a second thought, this one loud, and not in my voice. In Mike’s.
She’s not my type. Too much banana for one milkshake.
It wasn’t new to hear myself be described this way. It wasn’t even the meanest thing someone had said about me this week. But it was the first time I’d fantasized about licking the culprit.
“Alyssa. Stop staring at me.”
Guiltily, I jerked my eyes up to his face.
Then his words permeated through all the mental images of licking.
“My name isn’t Alyssa.”
He frowned, skin collecting in creases over his nose. He was only in his late twenties, too early for frown lines, and they didn’t suit him. The man was made to smile, not frown. A frown looked like an ill-fitted suit on him.
“Is Lyssa your full name?”
Maybe it was the shirtlessness, maybe it was the fact that his feet were bare on the parquet floor—it was low-key surreal that a man with such a huge personality had something as mundane and human as toes—but I told him the truth.
“My full name is Lysander.”
The grooves over his nose deepened. “Ly-what?”
“Lysander. You know, the bland-but-intense gentleman in love with Hermia but bewitched to fall in love with Helena? He eventually marries Hermia and they live boringly ever after.”
“What?” he repeated.
“It’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“Oh. I think I saw that once. Worst three hours of my life.”
I nodded. “A lot of live productions get caught up in being overly faithful to the text. Shakespeare was writing for an audience of bored Elizabethans who didn’t have heat or whatever, so they wanted to stand in the warm theater for as long as possible. If he were writing for today’s attention spans, you bet he’d have punched things up.” I leaned against the doorframe and added lightly, “My mom thinks that’s a sacrilegious thing to say.”
“Of course she does.” He studied me. “She named you Lysander.”
“It’s also Greek for liberator.”
