Page 25 of Tempted By the Safety

The door gives, and I nudge it open with my foot, and that’s when he tips his face up toward my ear, his breath landing warm against my jaw.

“Spencer.” His voice has gone soft and slurred and careful. “I need to tell you something.”

“Yeah?”

“Yesterday, after you left the dressing room, I… finished myself off. With your cum still on my hand.” He stops, and a shiver goes through him. “And I just… I really, really liked it.”

10

Milo

My head is doing an impression of a washing machine on spin cycle when I surface, and for a few seconds I just lie there, blinking at a ceiling that is not the ceiling of my studio, remembering, in pieces, that I don’t have a studio anymore.

Spencer’s guest room. Right.

My mouth tastes like a wine bar, which, I suppose, is accurate. I lie very still and let the last twelve hours drift back to me. Emily’s face across the table, delighted and horrified in equal measure. A guy at the bar I have no actual memory of talking to, only a sense that I mentioned him to somebody. Maybe in a text?

Spencer showing up. That part I’ve got, at least the shape of it: a big shadow crossing the bar, a cap pulled low that hid nothing. Because nothing on this earth is built to disguise him.

I remember his steady hand on my elbow, but after that, the memory goes even fuzzier. I remember the car, the buckle sliding against my hip, and Spencer leaning across me to click it into place himself when my hands wouldn’t cooperate. I remember thinking that he smelled unfairly good.

Then nothing. A gap, like someone cut the reel.

I don’t remember getting inside. I don’t remember getting up the stairs, or into this bed.

I look down at myself.

I’m in a plain gray t-shirt, soft, worn thin at the collar, and it is not mine. It’s enormous on me, swallowing my shoulders, the hem falling past my hips. Underneath it, just my boxer briefs.

Did Spencer undress me?

My brain produces several unhelpful images in response to that question, all of them involving his hands, and I have to press the heels of my palms into my eyes and breathe through it because my head is killing me.

I fumble for my phone on the nightstand, and the second the screen lights up I sit bolt upright so fast the room tips sideways.

10:14.

“Oh, no. No, no, no.” I’m out of bed before I’ve fully processed standing as a concept, feet hitting the floor, stomach rolling once before it settles. It’s Sunday, technically, but Sunday with a list: groceries, the good coffee beans he likes, the dry cleaning drop-off, and I’ve blown past the start time by two hours because I was busy being unconscious.

I brush my teeth so fast I nearly gag myself, shower in what has to be a new land-speed record, and stand dripping in front of the mirror for exactly four seconds, deciding what kind of person I’m going to be today. Given the current state of my dignity, I go with cute. Cropped top, soft yellow, and the tiny shorts, because if I’m going to face Spencer after last night, I’d like to at least look good doing it. Armor comes in a lot of shapes. Mine happens to show a lot of thigh.

I feel marginally more human by the time I hit the stairs, and then I round the corner to the kitchen and stop dead on the second-to-last step.

Spencer is at the stove, sleeves pushed up, flipping something in a pan, and the smell hits me before my brain catches up to what I’m looking at: butter, vanilla, sugar going brown.

He glances over at the noise of my feet on the stairs, and his eyes do one slow pass, chin to bare thighs and back up, the same unreadable once-over he gave me the first morning I made him breakfast. Except this time his mouth is looser when it lands back on mine.

“Sit,” he says. “Coffee’s fresh.”

I sit because my body still takes orders from that voice even when my brain has several unresolved questions about it.

He sets a mug in front of me without asking how I take it, which he learned somewhere in week one and never had to ask again, and I wrap both hands around it and drink like it’s medicine, because it basically is.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like somebody replaced my skull with a maraca,” I say. “But I’ll live.”

He puts two Advil and a glass of water next to my coffee. I take them and drink half the glass.