Page 55 of Daddies' Holiday Toy
I force myself to inhale slowly, but it doesn’t help.
My pulse is still galloping a mile a minute inside my skull now that I’m trapped in an enclosed place with nowhere left to go.
I feel him before I hear him, the subtle shift in the air around me as he moves.
“Guess…it’s just us,” Liam murmurs, his voice deep and still maddeningly casual as he grabs the coffee pot off the burner again to pour more into his mug.
I glance over just enough to catch him in my peripheral vision.
He looks too good in that dark thermal.
Waytoo good.
His hair is beginning to have a light wave to it after air-drying in the cabin’s heat, and my fingers twitch with the urge to thread through the thick lengths to see if they’re as soft as they look.
It takes herculean effort to drag my eyes back down to my tea, stopping myself before my thoughts get away from me again.
“Looks like it. Breakfast was good, you should have some.”
Miraculously, my voice somehow sounds normal.
You’d never know that my heart’s still trying to beat its way out of my ribs by the sound of it.
I stir my teabag around for no reason except to give my hands something to do.
“They’ll probably be gone a while,” I mumble. More to myself than him.
“Probably,” he says.
Silence stretches out between us.
It’s not uncomfortable exactly, but it feels oppressive all the same.
Clearly we’re both avoiding the topic and neither one of us wants to commit to actually rehashing it now that we’re both sober.
My brain scrambles for some neutral topics, but every thought gets tangled in the reel of last night.
My brain won’t stop replaying my humiliating teasing in high definition.
The weight of his gaze, even when it’s not directly on me, makes it impossible to focus.
Finally, I clear my throat.
Oh, fuck it.
“Um. So. About last night…”
He tilts his head slowly, turning toward me.
“I’m sorry if I…made things weird.” My cheeks warm instantly, a fresh wave of humiliation washing over me. “I was drinking more than I should have and I?—”
“You don’t have to apologize,” he says, gentle but firm. “It’s fine.”
It most certainly isnotfine. “I just…I don’t ever let people see me like that.”
“What do you mean?”
My nails drum against the side of my mug. “Drunk. Out of control. I’m not much of a partier and even less so around friends.”
