10. Tate

CHAPTER 10

TATE

Stretching out like a cat, I luxuriated in Brooks’ soft and sleep-warm sheets tangled around my legs. Beside me, he let out a low rumble of a groan, looping his arm around my waist and hauling our bodies flush. He kissed the back of my neck, upper lip dragging over the short hairs at the nape, and I shivered, burrowing closer to him.

“You’re still here,” he mused quietly, fingers tracking down my chest and my stomach, toying with the short and curly hairs below my navel.

“I asked you not to let me leave again,” I reminded him, slowly blinking my eyes open to take in the color of the morning as it washed over his room. “So you slept like an octopus.”

He chuckled, pinching my waist before rolling away from me. “I’m a man of my word. Do you want breakfast?”

I turned toward him, reaching out for the small of his back. Brooks was sitting on the edge of the bed, naked, and tanned, and soft.

“You don’t have to make me breakfast. ”

“I know.” He glanced at me over his shoulder. “I asked if you wanted breakfast.”

I want everything .

“Yes, please.”

His mouth quirked into a smile, and he pushed himself to his feet and disappeared into what I imagined had to be a walk-in closet…a door near the bathroom that blended in so well with the wall I hadn’t even noticed it the night before. When he reappeared, he had on a pair of gray sweatpants that looked as indecent on him as I would have hoped, and he dropped a pair of black sleep pants and a white t-shirt on the bed near his pillow.

“Take a shower,” he said, bending down to kiss my forehead in a surprising display of tenderness. “Then come find me.”

“I’m going to go through your medicine cabinet,” I warned.

Brooks’ smile grew. “Have at it, Tate.”

And then he was gone, leaving me alone in his bed to overthink the past twelve hours. The kiss on my forehead had been the most shocking part of the whole thing, and I pressed my fingers against the place his lips had just been. It wasn’t that the kindness had caught me off-guard—he’d shown me more than my fair share of tenderness the night before—it was the timing. Brooks had only shown that kind of softness after , though I supposed the morning after was still very much after.

“Do as you’re told,” I chided myself, kicking the sheets down, even though they were warm and smelled like sex and I wanted to bury myself in them. Grabbing the borrowed lounge clothes, I made my way into the bathroom and spent far too long trying to figure out how to get the water for Brooks’ shower turned on, but once I managed it…

It was the best shower of my life.

The water pressure was perfect, the temperature divine, and I used Brooks’ soap and shampoo until I was confident the scent of him had soaked its way into my bones. There was a single towel left in the warmer near the tub, so I made sure to use it, then dressed myself in Brooks’ clothes, which were barely too small and short, and stopped to look at myself in the mirror.

I had wondered if there would be proof visible of the night before on my skin, but save for some dark red ovals around my waist shaped like Brooks’ fingers, I was unscathed. The state of my skin had me frowning, because how could my body remain so unchanged when my mind and my heart were already irrevocably new? That should have been an outlandish and crazy thing to say, but it was true. I knew it down to the marrow of my bones that my life was about to change entirely.

Hopefully for the better.

Brooks was like a wildfire, fast and all-consuming, sucking up all the air around him and making it impossible to breathe, impossible to see anything besides the majestic power of his flames.

“Did you die in there?” he called, sounding closer than I imagined the kitchen to be.

“No.” My voice cracked and I cleared my throat, heading toward him. “I was just admiring your handiwork.”

Brooks was in the doorway to his bedroom, and I raised my shirt to show him the scant bruises he’d left around my hips. He immediately frowned, rushing toward me and dropping down to his knees. He pressed and pulled at the skin, manipulating it taut and laying his fingers against the bruises as if he was checking the shape to confirm he was the one who’d left them.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, looking up at me with hair still messy from the fucking and the sleeping, though he looked far from tired. “I didn’t mean to.”

I laughed, swatting his hands away.

“I was just upset there weren’t more,” I told him.

Straightening back to standing, he said, “I didn’t have permission.”

“Didn’t you?”

He shook his head. “Not specifically.”

“Implicitly,” I told him.

“That’s not how it works.”

I worried the frown was going to take up permanent residence on his face, so I grabbed his hand and brought it up to my mouth, kissing the tops of his knuckles with as much reverence as I could manage.

“It wasn’t a limit,” I reminded him.

“Just kissing and bleeding,” he recounted.

“Maybe just bleeding now,” I whispered, giving his hand a squeeze.

Brooks swallowed, eyes flashing with understanding, and then he was on me before I could breathe. He grabbed my face with both hands, slanting his head to the side and angling our mouths together like I was going to change my mind. I parted my lips for him readily, groaning and leaning my weight onto him as he licked his way into my mouth with a happy sigh.

He kissed the way he fucked, all consuming, all deserving , and it didn’t take more than ten seconds for my cock to jump, pressing against the expensive cotton of my borrowed pants. I slid my hands around Brooks’ waist, just to steady myself, and he responded by going onto his toes and spearing his tongue deeper into my mouth. Brooks kissed like the answers to every question he’d ever wanted the answer to were behind my teeth, and when he spun me so my back slammed into the wall, I was thankful for it because my knees weren’t going to hold me up for much longer.

From somewhere else in the apartment, a timer echoed, a loud and piercing beep that had Brooks breaking the kiss and groaning against my swollen lips.

“Breakfast is ready,” he said with a noticeable hint of regret.

I swallowed, thumping my head against the wall and sucking in a breath, realizing my comparison of the man in front of me to a wildfire was far more accurate than I originally thought.

“Okay,” I rasped.

We both looked down, our cocks hard and jutting out from our bodies, crying for attention even though I wasn’t sure my hole could take another round of rough fucking without a little more recovery time.

“Tuck it up,” he said, reaching down and adjusting himself behind the waistband of his sweats.

My shaft was burning hot against my palm, but I situated myself as best I could, then gave him a nod. He smiled and exhaled through his nose, taking my hand and leading me out of the doorway and back to the stairs.

Somehow, I’d forgotten that Brooks’ penthouse was as big as it was, and I didn’t even understand the scope until we descended to the first floor. He had to have near five thousand square feet, with sprawling open spaces that stretched what I imagined to be at least half the length of the building.

I cursed under my breath when he brought me to the kitchen, which was basically a long island made of the same marble in the bathroom and a counter that faced another wall of windows. I climbed onto one of the tan leather stools, ignoring the city behind me for the view of Brooks’ back muscles flexing as he reached up to turn off the timer on the oven and open the door. He pulled a glass casserole dish out and set it on a black trivet, then used the pot holder to fan some of the steam off the top.

“I hope you’re not vegan,” he said.

I laughed. “Far from it.”

“I made a frittata.”

“That sounds great,” I said softly.

And it did. It smelled even better, but the one thing I really wanted more than anything in the world at that moment was coffee.

“Cream and sugar?” he asked, like he was a goddamn mind reader.

“Black,” I answered.

Brooks poured two coffees from a pot beside the oven, adding two spoonfuls of sugar to his. I watched the careful and practiced way he moved around the kitchen, cutting and serving our breakfast onto plates that matched the countertops, then he came around the island to sit on my right side.

My stomach growled as soon as he slid the plate in front of me, and I cut into the frittata with an embarrassing speed, shoveling two quick bites into my mouth, even though the temperature was enough to burn the taste buds off my tongue. Brooks watched me with an amused expression, eyeing me over the rim of his coffee mug while he did the responsible thing and waited for his eggs to cool down. When I finally managed to chew and swallow, he smiled at me, and I melted just like the cheese.

“This is delicious,” I told him, finally taking a drink of my own coffee.

Brooks smiled at me, nose scrunching a bit in that unguarded expression I’d glimpsed the night before.

“Did you mean what you said last night?”

My brow furrowed. I’d said a lot of things the night before, and while in general I was sure I meant most of them at the time, I was a little sex-drunk and hoped he wasn’t going to hold me to something embarrassing.

“What did I say?”

“That you wanted more,” he said, spinning his mug handle from one hand to the other and back again. “With me.”

I exhaled, shoulders sagging. I remembered saying that, and I’d meant it with my whole chest. “Yes,” I said.

Brooks matched my relieved posture, a smile flickering across his mouth before he hid it by taking another drink of his coffee.

“You called me darling last night too,” I said after I’d replayed the rest of the conversation in question through my head.

“Did you hate it?”

I cocked my head to the side, wondering why he always jumped to the worst conclusions when we talked about his behavior.

“I really like when you call me by my name,” I admitted, “but darling was…nice. Unexpected.”

“It just slipped out. ”

I believed him. Both of us had been in such a raw and vulnerable state after the bath, after the second round of sex, it was like the sweat and the tears had washed away every defense that existed between us. And I was thankful for it, because even though I’d spent the last six months fantasizing about one part of the man in front of me, I was quickly beginning to realize the entire package was so much better.

“What does more look like for you?” I asked him, taking a bite of my breakfast, relatively confident it wasn’t going to sear the rest of my taste buds out of my mouth.

“More of last night,” he said quickly, using the edge of his fork to cut a piece of his frittata free. “But also more of this.”

“Sex and breakfast.”

“And dinners.” He studied my face, mouth pulled taut with seriousness. “Lunches. Dates.”

“Dates,” I repeated softly.

“I’m either on or off, Tate,” he said, almost apologetically. “I don’t know how to do things in half measures.”

I slid my hand down to the blooming bruises on my hip. “This was a half measure,” I murmured.

“That was an overstep.”

I shook my head.

“I want more of it,” I said. “I want to remember you when we aren’t together.”

“I’d rather just be with you all the time.”

“Not practical.” It was hard to speak for how much the conversation had me smiling. A foreign emotion burst in the center of my chest, feeling a lot like hope and a little bit like love.

“Fair enough,” he agreed, tugging the edge of the shirt up to inspect the bruising one more time. “We can definitely talk about that part of it, though I would prefer to have you here.”

“I have an apartment,” I told him. “I have a roommate.”

“I imagine you have a job too.”

I laughed, leaning away from him and gesturing at the massive penthouse we found ourselves in. “I imagine you have one also.”

“I have rich parents.” A smile pulled at his mouth, a relief from the worried tension that had been trying to sneak up around the edges. “But, yes, I have a job.”

“These will last a few days,” I assured him, “so we can start with dinner next weekend?”

Brooks licked his lips like he wanted to protest, like the following weekend was too far away, and holy fuck the way that made me feel stronger and more powerful than I ever had before. I was having breakfast with a man I imagined to be one of the richest in the entire city, and he was unhappy at needing to wait another seven days to take me out, to take me to bed.

“The timeline is up for discussion,” he finally said, chewing and swallowing the last bite of his frittata. “For now, just finish your breakfast.”