And he will, even if it might kill him.
They get ready for bed, circling each other, him shedding his shirt, but leaving on his shorts, her tying her hair up at the top of her head, disappearing into the bathroom to put on sleep shorts and a tank top, her face washed clean and a little shiny from her lotion.
She turns down the covers of her bed and slides beneath them and after standing on the other side of the bed, staring down at her, finally he lets out a sigh and follows.
He’s right.
Her bed is not that big.
Full-sized, clearly made for one person, barely enough room to leave any space between them.
“So,” she whispers into the dark, “as torturous as you expected?”
“Way worse,” he murmurs, turning to face her, bracing his head up on his hand, looking down over her upturned face.
“Sorry.”
Xavier lets out a quiet laugh. “No, you’re not.”
“No, I’m not.”
“I’m not either.”
“You do love being right.”
“I do.”
He collapses down to the pillows and buries his face in her neck, hiding from it all.
“If we’re going to suffer, might as well do it right,” he says, his mouth nearly pressed up against her ear, a strong arm reaching around her waist and pulling her in close. “We can at least have this, can’t we?”
“We can.”
“I was right about something else.”
“About what?”
“How good you’d feel curled up against me.”
Groaning, she nuzzles her face against his shoulder. “You can’t just say things like that.”
“What, you want me to lie? These curves have been murdering me since the day we met. I’ve thought about them way too much.”
With the slightest pressure against the firm planes of his chest, she pushes him onto his back, resting her chin at his sternum as his hands slide down from her waist to her hips, fingertips tantalizingly close to drifting lower and starting something they both agreed not to.
“I’ve thought about you too, you know?”
“Yeah?”
“About what it would feel like to have your hands on me, about what it would feel like to have you . . .”
“What did you think about? Was it what I told you when we were texting? That I could die between your thighs?” he asks, lifting his hands from her, skipping over more dangerous territory, his hands landing on the backs of her thighs. “Yeah,that’d be a hell of a way to go.” Her legs shift against each other with a groan, his grip firm against her hips, his thumbs pressing into the warm skin just above the elastic band of her pajama shorts. “Easy there.”
“Sorry,” she says and she looks away from him, her bottom lip caught between her teeth.
“What? You shy all of a sudden? You weren’t shy just a little bit ago.”
“It feels different now.”
