I plopped back down on the bed, hugely relieved. “Thank you. I don’t want to leave anyone in a lurch, but I’m wiped.”
“Wonder why?” He threw me a wicked grin as he pulled the sweatpants up and over his heavy dick.
“You know why,” I chided. “Are you headed out?”
“Yeah, I’m about to take a short jog….to the front door. Wayne just texted. He’s bringing up all your shit. Plus, food.”
I could have acted new. Put up some kind of protest about him having my things moved to his place without checking with me. Again.
But I was too darn happy to pretend like this announcement didn’t thrill me to the bone.
So I just sat back up in bed and offered to meet Wayne at the door since it was my stuff he was dropping off.
“Nah, you smell like I’ve been fucking you all night,” Hak-kan answered with a lopsided grin as he pulled a light crewneck sweater over his head. It hugged all his hard muscles like a second skin.
“Plus, I’m having a Neanderthal day.” His gaze settled on me, heavy and possessive. “I don’t want any other man looking at you for a while. But don’t worry, I’ll give you back your agency tomorrow morning.”
Somehow, I’d forgotten how adept he was at saying crude things that somehow gave me all the feels in my panty region.
But I had to act like his words had no effect on me for the purpose of informing him, “For future reference, just telling me I smell would have been enough to keep me from going out there.”
“For future reference, I know,” he answered, dropping a kiss on top of my now very messy weave. “I tell you all the other stuff because it makes me hard.”
He wasn’t kidding about that.
After Wayne left, Hak-kan came back, grabbed a condom from the nightstand, and fell on top of me without a word.
By the time we made it back out to the kitchen, we had to order a second breakfast because the cheese and grits Hak-kan had asked Wayne to bring over from an uptown soul food restaurant were too cold to eat and too dairy-filled for me to sanction heating back up.
After that, we learned to order food that could be eaten cold without the risk of severe stomach cramps, and I spent most of the Lunar New Year’s Day on my back without touching the luggage Wayne had left by the door. Hak-kan was insatiable and bent on claiming every day he missed fucking me when we were apart.
I knew that because he explained this to me in explicit detail before going down on me to soothe my sore pussy…making it better—a little too better, actually. By the time he was done, I was begging for him to abuse it all over again.
For those reasons, it might be easy to understand why it didn’t occur to me to ask one of the burning questions from my introduction to his family until we were eating heated up lo mein from Hak-kan’s favorite Chinese food restaurant for a much-delayed dinner that night.
“So you told your parents all about me, but you weren’t planning to let me meet them?” I asked.
He froze with his chopsticks filled with noodles halfway to his mouth. In a way that made me ask, “What?”
He released the noodles back into the cardboard box. “Okay, I’m trying this whole never lying to you again thing out. But that’s kind of a hard question to answer.”
“I’ll wait,” I offered, and I took a bite of my lo mein like I had all the time in the world.
He grimaced. “I guess this short version is that they weren’t in on the whole fake engagement thing, and it didn’t seem fair to them. They would have gotten too excited about you. I mean, you met them, right?”
I nodded, easily understanding, “Yes, I could see how introducing them to me, especially as your fiancée might set up an expectation you wouldn’t want. But then why mention me at all?”
He let out a weary sigh, then answered, “I didn’t say one word about you. Not a single word, not even when I left before Thanksgiving dinner to fly out to Kentucky.”
I shook my head, really not understanding. “Then how did they know everything about me? That I was a doctor? And that we’d broken up?”
Hak-kan looked to the side and muttered, “My grandma told them all of that.”
“So you told your grandma everything about me but not your family?” I asked, really not understanding his logic.
“Nah, I don’t tell that savage shit—especially about my personal life,” Hak-kan answered with a wry chuff. “She’s a 200-year-old with nothing to do but gossip. Can’t keep nothing secret. I wouldn’t trust her not to divulge my grocery store list.”
I might have laughed at his aggrieved tone and hyperbolic assessment of his grandmother’s character. But the question remained, “Then how did she know so much about me?”
