He rested warm hands on my shoulders. “Me, too,” he admitted. “But I have you to look out for me.”
“How?” I wanted to know.
He smiled. “Because I know you’ll be there—here—when I need you.”
“I can’t protect you from murderers, though,” I told him honestly. “I mean, I’lltry, but I don’t know how to fight or do pretty much anything.”
Elliot brushed a lock of blond hair out off my forehead. “Just being here is enough,” he said softly.
“But—”
He leaned forward until his lips hovered over mine. “Seth?”
“Y-yeah?”
“Stop talking.”
Elliot had beensmart enough to buy frozen pizzas—including dairy-free pizzas for me. Six of them, because the diary-free ones are much smaller than normal pizzas. They actually weren’tnearly as bad as I’d expected them to be, either. Not something I wanted super often, but it kinda helped to scratch the pizza itch I hadn’t been able to touch since I’d contracted alpha-gal.
They were also pretty quick, which was good, because it was a good hour before we got around to actually cooking them, both of us wearing pairs of my sweatpants and lounging in a pile of blankets and pillows on the floor of my tiny living room because there was no way both of us fit in my papasan. Elliot’s chest was bare, his tattooed arm wrapped around my chest as I leaned against him, my head resting on his solar plexus. I had a long-sleeve t-shirt on, because my Southern self was not used to the cold, and I couldn’t afford to make my shitty apartment as warm as I wanted it.
I was fine at the moment, since Elliot was keeping me warm.
“How come you’restillwarmer than I am?” I asked him, absently tracing over the roses on his arm.
“Because you’re from the South, baby, and your blood isn’t nearly hot enough for Northern winters.”
“You’d melt in Virginia in the summer,” I told him, and he laughed.
“Probably,” he agreed. “Good thing you live here, now.”
“Good foryou,” I retorted.
“Exactly.” He nuzzled the back of my head.
The buzzer in the kitchen went off, but when I moved to get up, Elliot wriggled out from behind me. “Stay, baby. I’ll get it.”
I couldn’t see into the kitchen from where I reclined on the floor, but I could hear the sounds of cupboards, pans, the oven, and the pizza cutter—I sat up.
“Elliot?”
“I’m cutting yours first,” he called back.
I couldn’t help smiling. “Thanks.” It was nice, for once, to be the person somebody put first. To have someone automatically think about the fact that if they cut cheese first, they couldmake me sick or potentially kill me, assuming the Epipen failed or something catastrophic like that. To be important enough to another person that I wasn’t an afterthought, but afirst-thought.
He brought me a plate with an entire pizza on it—cut—which should tell you more about the size of the pizza than the enormity of my appetite. Although that was true, too, I supposed, now that I had a shifter’s metabolism.
Elliot went back to the kitchen, and this time I heard him using a knife. “What are you cutting?”
“My pizza,” came the answer. “There’s more than one of each, and I don’t trust myself to wash the cutter well enough in between.”
First-thought.
He came back with what looked like an entire pizza stacked precariously on his plate—his was normal-sized, so it took a bit more creativity than my sad tiny pizza.
It wasn’t terrible. My pizza, that is. Not what I remembered real pizza being like, but I supposed you couldn’t get too picky when you were working with vegan cheese.
Elliot set his plate to the side, then went about fiddling with his laptop so that we could watch a movie. He hadn’t told me which one.
