Watery gray dawn is making a half-hearted attempt to leak through the plaid curtains, but Taylor is gold and rosy, even the weak light picking up the subtle tones in her hair. Her head is on my chest, her hand tucked beneath her chin, her whole body pressed against mine. Her leg is thrown over my thighs, her heel almost notched behind my knee, like she’s trying to create a safety bar to keep me there.
I’m in no danger of moving.
Instead, I’m torn between competing desires: I want to wrap my arm around her back, tucking her in tighter, but I also don’t want to risk anything that will wake her up and put an end to this. Holding her feels more right than anything has in a very long time. It’s a feeling that’s been growing since I walked into her café last week. A feeling of a piece snapping into place.
Taylor is . . . everything. Somewhere along the way, I fell for her. Was it college? Was it even before that? I don’t know. But I know I’ve been fighting it hard for four years without even realizing it.
I care about her way too much to put our friendship at risk if I wasn’t sure that there’s something more. There is. Maybe there always was. But lying here with her in my arms is the sweetest torture I’ve ever experienced. I want to both devour her and protect her. Consume her and slay dragons for her.
Or at least fetch reindeer.
I decide not to risk moving. I don’t want to wake her up, but more than that, if she does wake up, it would take everything I have not to flip her on her back, swoop down, and drink from her lips until we’re more buzzed than any eggnog could get us.
We lie like this for several more minutes. My right pectoral falls asleep where her head rests, all the way through my shoulder, but I still don’t move. Only my T-shirt separates her skin from mine, and I wish I’d gone to sleep shirtless so I could feel the silk of her cheek against me.
Maybe this should feel like it’s coming from nowhere, but it doesn’t. I’m not freaked out or worried. I’m not even surprised. We’ve clicked into our rhythm as easily as if I never left.
That’s not to say I know what to do about it. I love my job, and it doesn’t lend itself to the kind of domestic bliss Taylor values. She loves family underfoot and nosing in her business even when she complains about it. She loves being in the middle of the town mix, nurturing the town’s most beloved traditions, all while handing out “smart cookies” and smelling of baked goods, as if that isn’t stronger than the most powerful pheromone for the average man. Her vanilla and warm oven smell is far more lethal to good intentions than a designer fragrance.
I study her, my angle letting me see the straight line of her nose, the dark lashes against her fire-pinkened cheek. She looks like a sleep-tousled angel. A fallen one, with her leg wrapped around me like that. An angel who will wake with a drowsy blink and not a single good intention.
I could be projecting.
She stirs, and her free hand flattens against my chest, pauses, then moves upward, a slow, smooth stroke, like she’s enjoying the way I feel against her palm. So, yeah. This is going to be trouble, and I don’t care.
She makes a soft sound, somewhere between a murmur and a sigh, shifting and resettling, somehow pressing into me more fully, leaving no gap between her curves and my planes and angles.
After several seconds, her body tenses, her hand clutching a fistful of my T-shirt. I don’t say anything, deciding to take my cue from her, but hoping with literally every molecule of my being that she’s going to lean into this. Into me.
I’m so attuned to her tiniest movement that in the blink of an eye when she coils to push herself up and away from me, I use the arm and leg she’s resting on me to leverage her over onto her back and keep her there, my forearms braced on either side of her head as I smile down at her.
“Don’t freak out,” I say, keeping my voice soft. “I’ll let you go in a minute, but I think if I let you up right now, you’ll streak out of here, and then I’ll find you in the kitchen in five minutes acting like you didn’t wrap around me like a tinsel garland.”
Her eyes slide away from mine.
I lower my head so it’s near her ear. “True or false, Taylor?”
She shivers, and I know it’s not the cold. She doesn’t answer.
I shift to murmur in her other ear. “So you’ll stay for a minute?”
Another shiver. Maybe more of a quiver. Still no words, but she reaches up to touch my shirt, following the outline in the faded A of “Hoyas,” which means she’s tracing right over my heart. Doesn’t take a writer to see the symbolism there.
I can’t help myself and I trail my nose down to the side of her neck, drawing in her sweet, now faintly smoky scent. It is perfect, like the heat of the fire has licked her and left behind the part of itself that conjures up long nights and warmth.
“Levi . . .” Her voice is soft and rough from sleep, and when I lift my head enough to brush the tip of my nose against the line of her jaw, she gives a gasp I can only hear because I’m as close to her as it’s possible to be.
I skim my lips from her jaw to the corner of her mouth and speak quietly, letting the puff of my breath send another shiver through her as I say, “This is not just me, Tay.”
She turns her head slightly, away from me, her eyes falling shut.
Even more quietly, I ask, “Am I wrong?”
For a handful of seconds, she says nothing. She doesn’t move except for her breathing, and it makes me even more aware of how we fit. At every point, curves into hollows, angles into curves.
Finally, she slides up her other hand and flattens it against my chest, her thumb pressing lightly as it follows the edge of my pec. I did not know that my pecs were so sensitive, but they have suddenly become one of the favorite parts of my body.
Then she shoves me as she says, “Off.”
