“I’d do it for you next Saturday. Oh, wait! You won’t be here.”
He laughs, then he frowns thoughtfully and keeps on driving. “I’ll stock up on whipped cream.”
“Okay.”
“I want it all over you.”
“Okay.”
We’re entering the outskirts of the city. I’m absolute lava in my seat, noticing Malcolm’s voice has gone raspy and thick. Noticing the green shade of his eyes has darkened considerably.
“They’re going to bring girls for sure.”
“There are girls everywhere. You’re my girl.”
I look at his hands on the gearshift and the steering wheel. He’s got great hands, perfect hands, and he knows how to use them like nobody’s business. I don’t want them on anyone else.
“And Rachel.” A dark warning enters his tone, as if he’s also thinking about me and the Chippendale. “My girl doesn’t get touched, or touch another man.”
The possessiveness in his voice brings out a tingle between my legs. “My guy doesn’t touch any other girl.”
“He doesn’t want to.”
When we reach my building, I’m hunting for the keys to my apartment inside my bag when he pulls the door open for me. I grip the keys in my palm as I step out, and Malcolm’s looking down at me with tender heat, like he wants his hands all over me too.
Like he wants to devour me, right here and right now, whipped cream or no.
“Mr. Saint, Miss Rachel,” Otis says to greet us as he walks over from the Rolls-Royce parked just ahead.
Saint leads me toward my apartment building and then pulls the door open for me. He holds the door open with one shoulder as he takes a pile of boxes from Otis and tells him, “I’ll see you upstairs.” We head into the elevator. Someone is buzzing his phone.
“Callan?” I ask.
“Probably.”
I laugh good-naturedly. “You guys are incorrigible.”
Incorrigible, and such boys at heart. But I love that they genuinely care for one another.
He follows me to my apartment door. Before opening my place, I whirl around and search his face. “Are you sure you’re ready to share all your space with me?”
He leans his dark head down without any hesitation and takes my mouth in an all-lips, heated kiss. “I’m sure. Let’s get you packed.”
MOVING IN
Our new apartment will be ready in six months, so I’m moving into his place in the meantime. My mother, Wynn, and Gina are helping with the last of my boxes.
I’ve already transferred several boxes this morning with Otis.
Already at Sin’s place are: A box with pajamas. A second box with important papers—birth certificate, passport. Some of my articles. My baby album, which he skimmed last night, start to finish—teasing me ruthlessly on my most embarrassing pictures and then kissing me to tell me how pretty I was. I’ve sent another box with my accessories. Photo albums, photo frames. My slowly emptied bedroom fills me with both dread and excitement of what’s to come.
Now the girls and Mom are helping me tackle the rest.
“Dude, I heard you two in the shower this morning. You giggling. His voice was all low but it’s still deep enough to be heard in my room. Plus the noise of all that water slapping muscles.”
I lift my head from where I am organizing my cosmetics, getting ready to pack them, and my eyes widen. I remember him soaping me up, and me soaping him up—hot hands and hungry mouths and teasing touches and lathering fingers and the way he lifted me and lowered me down on him—and a hot blush creeps up my neck as I remember the rest.
“Oh god. I’m sorry, Gina. I wasn’t thinking.” Then, frowning a little, I lift my index finger in the air, to be clear. “But I’m not sorry about the shower sex.”
Gina just smirks and continues to help shape the flat boxes into usable square ones.
“Can we make a suggestion?” Wynn asks as she finishes cutting bubble wrap into squares. “Cut the sex until the wedding.”
I scowl and start opening my dresser drawers to be sure they’re empty. My mother finishes taping a box closed, then heads to the next full one, peering up slightly at that. “I think that’s a great idea, Rachel.”
“No, Mom. Trust me. It’s not.”
Wynn starts to wrap all my photo frames in bubble wrap and tuck them into a box labeled FRAGILE. “Think about your wedding night. You’ll only have one of those. Don’t you want him to be wild for you?”
I look at them.
They don’t know that Malcolm enjoys me like saints enjoy holy water and sinners enjoy sin.
We’ve been having sex daily, several times a day. We need it like food and water.
“You guys don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Imagine how much more smoldering that first night as man and wife will be,” Wynn says, eyes bright with excitement.
“I definitely didn’t sleep with your father the whole month before. It drove him crazy but that’s why I got pregnant so fast with you.”
I shoot her a wide-eyed look, then her eyes widen as she realizes what she said.
“Mother! TMI!”
“He would wait until the wedding night if you asked him to,” Wynn advises. “Saint has been patient when it comes to you.”
I shake my head, refusing to speak more of it.
Finished filling up my makeup box, I glance around to see what I need to tackle next. The room is looking sparse now, save for the big things. Which are staying. All the furniture stays here with Gina and her new roomie. Wynn is supposedly considering canceling her lease and moving in. I plan to beg her to because I don’t want Gina to feel lonely, and I’m afraid that the month I’m on my honeymoon there will be loneliness here to spare. Even though Gina assures me that she’s “good.”
Wynn leaves the box of fragile items for my mom to tape and then walks toward my bed. “Are you taking your pillow?”
“No.”
“How can you not take your own pillow?”
“I don’t know. I like to lie on his chest.”
“What if one day you guys are mad and there’s no awesome chest?” Gina counters, opening a new flat box to make a box for the pillow.
“I hope even when we’re mad I get to lie on his awesome chest. Or his awesome shoulder. Or his awesome pillows. In his awesome bed. No, no pillow.”
“Oh, you! Well, this pillow’s mad.”
She hits me with it, and I grab it, squeeze it, and toss it back on the bed with a little pang of remorse.
It is my pillow. It is my room. My apartment. But if I clutter my future with too much of my past, there won’t be room for the new. And the new—even though a little scary—is something I’m looking forward to.
We take a lunch break, and my mom goes to her canasta game. Wynn and Gina stay until Otis helps us load the rest of the boxes. By the time we come back up, sweaty and exhausted, I’m done, my room looks bare, and pretty, and . . . I look at it harder.
I sit on my bed. My single-Rachel bed. I look at Wynn and Gina, who are looking at me with mixed emotions from the door. Emotions like “how exciting” and “we miss single-Rachel” and everything in between.
I love single-Rachel. But she was never as happy as I am now.
“Wynn, I hope you come live here. It’s such a good little room. I’ve got great memories here.”
That evening, I’m finally at his place. Malcolm’s on a phone call when I arrive, and he trails off when I walk in. I had showered and changed and I am wearing a tight tracksuit and a ponytail. He’s in tan slacks and a black button shirt, and both of these clothing articles fuck his body every which way possible.
I melt first. Then I wave at him hello, walk up to kiss his jaw, and feel him give my ass a little possessive squeeze, his eyes meeting mine—hot and approving and welcoming.