Page 53 of Badd Ass
“Is he always up at this hour?” she asked, glancing at my alarm clock, which read 5:48am.
I nodded. “He sleeps maybe four hours a night max. He’ll go to bed at one or two and be up again ready to go at five or six. Usually, though, he goes to bed at three or four and wakes up at seven or eight.” I shucked my shoes and jacket, setting them aside. “He’s always going, doing, studying, reading. He’s exhausting, is what he is.”
There was an awkward moment, then. Mara stood just inside my room, the door closed behind her, her zip fleece in one hand, purse in the other, staring around my room, at the bed, at me, looking unsure.
Like, where do you start when it comes to just literally, physically sleeping with someone? How do you approach it? It’s weird.
I slid off my socks and tossed them in the hamper near my closet, then approached Mara slowly. “Hey, look, this doesn’t have to be weird or awkward, okay?”
She tilted her head to the side and made a face. “Yeah, well, it already is, isn’t it? I mean, what do you wear to bed? Which side are you sleeping on? Do you brush your teeth before bed? How am I going to take off my makeup?”
“I usually wear nothing or just underwear to bed, but I can go with shorts if it’ll make you more comfortable. I usually end up on the left side of the bed, but I’m fine with whatever you’re comfortable with. We have a bunch of extra toothbrushes around, and Bast’s wife has a bunch of girly makeup shit in the bathroom, so I’m sure if you poked around you’d find what you need.” I grinned. “Anything else?”
She frowned. “I can’t justpoke aroundanother woman’s makeup, especially one I’ve never met. That’s…it’s…anathema.”
I shrugged. “She won’t mind—she’s cool. Plus, she and Bast are in Baja on their honeymoon, so it’s not like she’ll ever know anyway.”
“I’m not rifling through your sister-in-law’s makeup collection. I’ll just wash my face with soap and water.”
“Suit yourself.” I went to my bureau and pulled out one of my faded, worn, washed a million times Navy T-shirts, handed it to her. “You get changed while I find a toothbrush for you.”
It had been weird at first, getting used to having a woman living with us. Dru had stuffed our once-bare medicine cabinet in the bathroom with all sorts of weird shit, and our bathroom towels were all folded all the time, and she’d bought a fancy toilet paper holder instead of just leaving the roll on the back of the toilet where it had been for as long as I could remember, and I had to remember to knock if the door was closed. And there were bras hanging from Bast’s bedroom doorknob, panties on the floor of his room, tampon and pad wrappers in the bathroom garbage—and therewasa bathroom garbage in the first place. She bought all sorts of food we never stocked, did the dishes for no reason whatsoever, vacuumed, dusted even—don’t get me wrong, for an apartment filled with a bunch of bachelors, we were plenty clean. I’m former military, so I’ve got that stereotypical neat-and-orderly bug, and Bast had been in charge of the rest of us growing up and he hated mess and dirt, so it wasn’t like we were a bunch of slobs. But we were dudes, and we lived a dude life in a dude’s pad.
Then Dru moved in and all that changed. For the better, mostly, but she did yell at us when we left the toilet seat up in the middle of the night or missed the bowl. It’s kind of impressive, honestly, how easily she fit herself into our life, surrounded by a bunch of guys. The other brothers lived over the studio a block or so down, but this was the home base for all of us, so often as not there’d be someone passed out on the couch or playing Xbox or making food, since Dru had taken over grocery shopping and kept this place stocked like a restaurant.
I changed into my shorts and then browsed in the medicine cabinet for a new toothbrush; I found one, and, conveniently, several little white packages that said “makeup remover pads” right beside them. After pissing, brushing my own teeth, and washing my hands, I snagged one and brought it and the toothbrush to Mara.
“Look what I found!” I said, showing her. “She’s got like four of these packages in there, so Ireallydon’t think it’s a big deal if you use some.”
And then it registered what I was seeing: Amarantha, wearing my favorite Navy shirt, looking sleepy and sexy and gorgeous…and just so perfect and so right, so natural in my environment, lounging on my bed scrolling through her phone. The way she was lounging left it obvious that she wasn’t wearing a damn thing under the T-shirt, which didn’t help me in my determination that we were just going to go to sleep, and nothing else.
She looked up at me as I came in, and gave me that cute, quirky, lopsided grin. “Thanks. Taking off makeup without remover is tricky.” She eyed me, then. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
The emotion I was feeling was hard to pinpoint. Soft…tender, possessive, comforted…all of those at once, and more I didn’t have the words for.
I let my gaze linger. “Just…you,” I said. “In my bed, in my shirt, looking incredible.”
She blushed. “There you go with that flattery again.”
“It’s also just having you here, like this. It’s….” I trailed off, hunting for the right words.
“Comfortingly domestic, in a bizarre and unfamiliar sort of way?”
“Exactly.”
She sat up. “I may look like the picture of confidence and cool, collected, adult rationality, but inside, my heart is going like this…” she patted her chest over her heart in a quick rhythm. “And I’m not at all cool or collected.”
I sat on the bed beside her, pressed her hand over my heart; her hand was warm and smooth and soft. “Feel that?” My heart was hammering like drum. “You’re not the only one, babe.”
She gazed up at me, her hand still on my heart. “Why are we being so weird about this? We’re just sleeping.”
“I know. I was wondering the same thing. It’s stupid for me to be nervous about this, but I am.” I laughed. “Put me in the back of an airplane with a backpack and a rifle, about to drop thirty thousand feet and attack a bunch of bad guys who’d love to kill me…and my heart will be steady as a rock. Not so much as a single missed beat. But this? Going to bed with a woman I’ve already slept with, a woman I like more than anyone I’ve ever met in my life, and I’m—I’m like a boy about to kiss a girl for the first time.”
She laughed and sank against me, putting her arms around my waist and her cheek to my chest. “How do you always know what to say to reassure me?”
I could only shrug, my breath stolen by the soft, sweet tenderness of Mara with her arms around me, nuzzling against me, whispering to me. Feeling like she belonged here.
She just held on for a long moment, and then stood up, taking the makeup remover and toothbrush. “Be right back.”
