Total pages in book: 157
Estimated words: 154525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 773(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 773(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
“Hey, I have a box spring and a mattress.”
“And a lamp without a shade,” he added, jerking his head toward the offending item in question sitting on a cardboard box. “I’m bringing you sheets the next time I show up.”
She swallowed hard. “When’s that gonna be?”
Lately, it’d been every night. Sometime after dinner. She’d venture into the city to go thrifting for things she didn’t buy and wasted her late afternoons in cafés just because, but come back to find him with cinnamon buns and iced coffee when he showed up in the mornings.
“I don’t know,” Nico eventually replied, fixing the hood around his head and then staring at her. “If I can, I’ll be around like usual.”
“What are you doing all day, anyway?”
He gave her a look she couldn’t decipher. “What do you mean?”
“You’re working, right?”
“In a sense.”
Frankie rolled over to her side, using her balled up fist as a perch for her chin so she could watch him shimmy up his jeans. “Do you not want to tell me?”
“There’s nothing to tell,” he said, shrugging. “I handle some shit for a guy out of New Jersey. It was supposed to be one thing, but it’s turned into another. I see him a couple of times a week. I can’t really talk more about it.”
“But you could...someday?”
At her question, Nico froze buttoning his jeans. “I mean, in theory.”
“Your word games are not appreciated at...” Her hand slid around beneath the one blanket on the mattress until she found the missing item currently keeping the time from her. One-thirty, it read. “It’s like an hour drive. You’re leaving super early.”
She didn’t mean to come off whiny, but...
Nico came close enough to put both fists into the mattress. She dropped her phone at the same time he came in for another burning kiss that made her lungs squeeze in the best way. She wished it were his hands doing the squeezing instead. How was it supposed to make her feel that she could lay practically naked in a bed with him for hours upon hours just so he could hold and kiss her?
She knew exactly how it made her feel.
Safe and strange. So needy.
“I figured out last night,” he told her as he pulled back just far enough to tip his head to the side while they watched one another, “that if I just got up a half hour early, I wouldn’t have to earn myself three photo radar tickets on the way back because I keep agreeing to give you five more minutes.”
Her smile grew knowing. “Does that mean...?”
He pushed her back into the bed, her fit of happy laughter being drowned in the wave of his tongue and lips finding her throat. She melted into the one pillow she brought from her bed back home, and he melded easily in between her thighs. The roughness of his jeans only added to the sensation of his weight pressing her down, and the heat of him took her someplace else.
Where things didn’t hurt and neither did people.
“So, you’re making me lose a half hour of sleep, then?” she joked.
Wordlessly, he shrugged, and then promptly disappeared up under her shirt. There, he said nothing as the side of his face found her chest. His hands traveled in the same direction, the way she’d come to like, to find their spot at the dip in her waist. She traced lines with her fingertips along his back under his hoodie.
“I don’t know how you breathe like that,” she said.
Nico’s breath tickled her right breast, bare under the baggy T-shirt of his that she’d worn to bed for the last two nights in the penthouse. He took back the first one he gave to wash it but didn’t mind replacing it. “I’m breathing in you, Frankie.”
“I’m not oxygen.”
“Something close to it, angel.”
She let the argument go. “Whatever you’re doing, workwise I mean, you’re still going to be there to see me walk for graduation, right?”
Nico smiled against her skin. “I won’t miss it.”
“But if something came up—”
He popped out of her shirt in an instant, hair messy and his gaze sharp, as he rested back on his knees. “Babe, I’m gonna be there.”
She toyed with the hem of the shirt. “Are you really going to bring me sheets?”
“And a bag of clothes from the estate,” he added, arching an eyebrow. “Anything Sissy wants to send. Shit, the first chance I get when I don’t have something else to do, I am taking you to the nearest IKEA because the state of this place is pathetic. You don’t even have chairs.”
“Maybe I’m not ready for chairs,” she argued.
“How did you ask for an empty penthouse, anyway?”
“I didn’t know what I wanted, okay!”
Nico chuckled, shaking his head. “Sad. That’s sad. You know, you could just go home for a couple of hours and grab some things as well. It would help.”