When the door closed behind him, I let myself fall back, legs still hanging off the end of the bed as I lay there.
I must have been more tired than I thought, because it felt like I blinked, and I heard the door opening again. I didn’t bother opening my eyes, wondering what it was that Elliot needed and had left in the room.
And then I heard the rustling of a plastic bag and opened one eye to find him carefully toeing off his shoes, two plastic grocery bags in each hand.
“Shit,” I grumbled.
“What?” he asked.
“I fell asleep,” I mumbled, the the words a little slurred.
He came over, setting the grocery bags on the desk, and pressed the back of his fingers against my forehead. I swatted at his hand. “I’m notsick,” I protested.
“You basically passed out,” he countered. “I want to make sure.”
I grunted.
“Come on, let’s get you somewhere less likely to fuck up your back.”
He wasn’t wrong. If I’d spent too much more time in that position, my back would probably have been screaming at me for at least a couple hours. So I let him help me sit up and move so that my back was propped against pillows he carefully arranged along the headboard. And then he grabbed the cushion off the little sitting chair and used it to elevate my leg.
And then he brought me a plastic spoon and a pint of cashew milk chocolate truffle ice cream before putting the rest of whatever he’d purchased in the mini-fridge.
“Thanks.” I tried to sound appropriately grateful.
Elliot kissed my forehead again, one hand cradling the back of my head. But then he didn’t move away, holding his lips against my skin so that I could feel his breath. I didn’t mind, so I waited, letting him breathe me in.
Another kiss, and he let me go, stepping back. “Eat your ice cream,” he told me playfully, but I could hear the roughness in his voice underneath the levity.
“El?” I asked.
He sighed. “I just—I worry,” he said softly.
“I’m not dying,” I told him.
“We’re all dying,” came the retort. “I just don’t know what I’d do if you died first.”
I blinked, then set down the spoon I’d barely had the chance to pick up. “I’m not planning on dying any time soon,” I informed him, although I was very aware of the fact that the line of work I’d chosen—firefighting and arson investigation, more than crime scene investigation, although anything in the criminal justice department had higher rates of mortality than most thingsnotin criminal justice—made it pretty likely that I would be the one to go first, even if the alpha-gal or Lyme didn’t get me before that. He might have a decade on me, but I was definitely the more sickly and breakable one.
“Good,” came the clipped response as he pulled off his socks. “I’m going to take a shower. Find something moderately interesting to watch?”
I knew he was avoiding me, but I let it go, picking up the remote and flicking through the odd collection of TV channels that characterized hotels everywhere. I settled on some sort of wilderness vet show and proceeded to do as I’d been told—eat my ice cream.
Elliot took longer in the shower than usual—although not by enough that I felt the need to worry about him—so I was most of the way through my ice cream by the time he came backout, towel wrapped around his hair and nothing but stray water drops on the rest of his body.
Sexy as Elliot’s body is, the towel-turban look isn’t terribly chic.
He grabbed an ice cream bar for himself out of the tiny hotel freezer and came over to sit beside me on the bed, opening the single-serve box and pulling out the wrapped treat, his gaze focused on the vet on the TV screen, who was attempting to wrestle an unconscious bear onto a stretcher while narrating for the camera how quickly they’d need to do this before said bear woke up. He crunched through the chocolate shell, peeling off a piece with his teeth. He liked to do this—eat away at the chocolate shell until it was gone before going after the ice cream underneath.
I took the last bite of mine, then set aside the container and spoon on the night stand. Elliot passed over the empty box of his, although he was still finishing the denuded ice cream.
I looked down at the box, then blinked in surprise. “Why’d you get dairy-free?” I asked him.
He turned his gaze from the TV to me. “Just in case I wanted to kiss you, so I don’t have to wait.”
I felt my neck flush. While the likelihood of me reacting to something Elliot had eaten was pretty low—given that one generally didn’t go from chewing to kissing without time in between for saliva to break down the proteins—going directly from ice cream to kissing would pose a risk.
If he’d gotten regular ice cream.
