Page 57 of Gunner

I grin at her until her feistiness softens. Fuck, I love seeing her both ways. She’s hot as hell when she’s mad and no less so when she’s sweet.

My cellphone is on the nightstand beside the bed. I palm it one handed and check the weather app like an old man. This place didn’t have any reception before, but Wizard took care of that, installing a piece up on the roof that gets insanely high-speed internet.

“It’s supposed to be clear tomorrow. Nice weather for riding. I never thought about what I’d do if it was raining, and I couldn’t get you back in time for Monday morning. It’s difficult to ride a motorcycle through these roads in the rain. I would never do that with you on the back, but this is Washington. It can rain for days or even weeks. I should have checked before we left.”

She shoves up on her elbow and silences me with two fingers.

“We’d get it figured out.”

It sounds very much like she’s talking about all the shit that’s been wrenching me in half. It’s true. I was in pain. I was lying here, trying to fight it. Normally, I can just turn it off, butI can’t do that now. I want Diletta to be happy, but how can you have happily when there can’t be an ever after?

I make a strangled sound beneath her fingers.

“Okay,” she says decisively. “If you can’t shut it down, let’s go to the kitchen. I obviously didn’t feed you enough for dinner. There’s no way between the eating and all that sex that even you should be able to hold out on sleep.”

“I’m not hungry. You don’t have to do that.”

“Cooking is my love language.”

We both freeze at that word. She punches me lightly in the shoulder. “It’s just an expression.” Her eyes aren’t light and teasing like her tone. They’re soft and warm and serious.

Diletta reaches for my t-shirt, slipping into it. It’s so hot seeing her in my clothes that I barely get my boxers on before my cock is doing its best tent pole impression. I have to adjust myself before I follow her. She’s intent on cooking, not getting her brains screwed out again, though if she wants that after, I’d be happy to oblige.

I find her in the square kitchen, rummaging through the cupboards.

“I think that your club’s version of fully stocked might be different than mine.” She didn’t say anything at dinner, but she jokes about it now.

She finds a plastic container of popcorn kernels, and a few minutes later, produces a strange old popcorn maker that has to be operated by turning a crank with heat from the stove and tossing the pot back and forth over the heat so that the kernels don’t burn. She cuts a few pieces of butter into thecontraption while I lean back against the wall, watching her the way I used to, except in this scenario, I’m warm and dry, on the inside.

I didn’t think that Diletta could be sexier or more beautiful, but she proves me wrong. As in, there’s probably something wrong with me that my dick is leaking all over the inside of my boxers at the sight of her swallowed by my t-shirt, smelling like me, shimmying her lithe form at the gas stove, working wonders with a pot that belongs to some other century.

I make a mental note to find her popcorn maker back at her house and throw in the garbage and do the same to anything she might try and buy as a replacement. The only way to make popcorn is like this. In the eighteen hundreds maker.

I know it’s not really that old. Whatever.

“Will you let me take care of you, Ronan?”

The question comes out of nowhere, barreling into me rudely.

I cross my arms and do my best tough guy routine. “Christ no. I should be the one taking care of you.”

She flips the pot, shimmies her hips and arms, gives a flick of her wrists, and turns the dial thing on the top to move the kernels around. A distinctive first pop echoes through the quiet kitchen. The silence is suddenly so charged that I can hear the hiss of the propane flames on the stove.

“Because you’re the man? In a relationship, you take care of each other. You help each other and treasure each other. You’d do anything for the other person. I’d let you look after me, if you wanted to. I meant… will you let me feed you? Hold you? Help keep you safe? One day, will you let me love you?”

I’m so glad the wall is at my back. There’s that word again. Love. I have no idea what that means. At best, I could only ever hope to give Diletta the most brutal form of that emotion, and even then, it would be dark and twisted, not pure and unselfish. It would be so fucking selfish. It would be the burn down the world protective shit that makes a man crazy.

As if it’s not already, dumbass.

“It doesn’t matter if I want that. It only matters what’s real.”

The first pop is finally followed by at least six more and after that, it’s like the whole pot is going to explode. Diletta works it hard, paying an intense amount of attention to it to make sure nothing burns.

“You miss your family. You belong with them. You know that I can never go back there. Chances are slim for you, but they’re none for me. Can you give up Italy forever?”

“I’m alive and free because of you. That’s what I care about. I miss my family, but I don’t think that they’re mutually exclusive. I don’t have to go back. My father and anyone from my extended family who wants to come here, could. We’d always protect your identity.”

“You father saw my face.”

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