Page 11 of Wrapped Up In You
He lifted my chin, forcing me to meet his gaze. There was a tenderness there I hadn’t been expecting.
“What am I going to do with you, Hayden?”
7
JONATHAN
“What do youwantto do with me?” Something was swirling in those dark eyes of his. Some unnamed emotion I couldn’t identify. I thought I should be sorry for what had happened. I should regret it, should be worried about the ramifications of what we had done. But I just couldn’t find it in myself to feel anything other than… Well, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was feeling, but I knew it wasn’t regret.
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. The hazy fog of alcohol had mostly lifted, yet my thoughts wouldn’t coalesce with any sort of clarity. Not with him standing so close to me. Not with both of our dicks still out. Perhaps we needed to take a moment to regroup. Yes, that was logical. Smart.
Regretfully, I took a step back, releasing him. It was harder to do than it had any right to be. “Why don’t we get cleaned up? You can go first, and I’ll scrounge up some lunch.”
“What about your hand?”
He really was so sweet. I couldn’t ever remember a time in my life when anyone had shown such concern for me. I gave him a small smile. “I think I can manage some sandwiches.”
“Yeah, okay.” He turned and walked toward the bathroom, grabbing his duffel on the way. The sight of him walking away from me in nothing but his crewneck, with his bare ass exposed, nearly had me calling him back for another round. But I forced myself to turn away, heading into the bedroom to change.
Hayden had taken the brunt of our mess, so cleanup was rather quick for me. I slipped on a pair of boxers and another pair of joggers and returned to the kitchen, where I opened the fridge and began pulling out the fixings for sandwiches. Unsure what he liked, I opted to leave everything out on the counter so he could assemble his own to his preference.
With the sound of the shower running as my soundtrack, I sorted through various toppings and condiments and allowed my mind to wander back over the events of the last twenty-ish hours.
Since he’d arrived last night, I’d gotten drunk twice—though, to be fair, I was already drunk when he arrived—jacked off twice—again, to be fair, it had been him jacking me the second time—listened to him sing, confessed my middle name, watched him perform a striptease, discussed my sexuality and his career aspirations, and stuck my foot in my mouth more than once while making an array of incorrect assumptions about him.
It was…a lot.
He was right though. I really was just like my father. Maybe not in the lusting-after-his-step-siblings department, but definitely in the passing-judgments-and-making-assumptions-while-maintaining-the-holiest-of-holier-than-thou-attitudes department.
Huh. Maybe Iwasstill a little tipsy. Or maybe Hayden had short-circuited the part of my brain that used to think in properly constructed sentences.
But was that really who I wanted to be? Rebecca had called me anal, boring, and predictable. She’d also been exactly the same type of judgmental person I was. It was why I’d thought we were such a good match. Not because she was judgmental but because she valued the same things I did. She was punctual. Organized. She ate healthy and worked out regularly. She was career-driven and understood the value of cultivating business relationships and presenting a polished, put-together appearance. All things that were important to me as well.
But where had that left us? We’d spent the last three years focused on those things, on what I thought were things we both wanted, when in actuality, she’d been banging Jeff from marketing. Nights spent working late and dinner engagements that’d been rescheduled hadn’t been related at all to a drive to further her career. As inconvenient as those things had been, I’d admired her sense of drive and ambition. I had those things too. Instead, nights working late had been spent at happy hour getting tipsy, and dinner engagements had been canceled so she could fuck Jeff at his condo across town.
Boring. Anal. Predictable.
Apparently, the fact I was boring sent her looking for fun with someone else. And the fact that I was predictable made it easy for her to know what time I’d be home so she could sneak around behind my back.
It was all bullshit, of course. Maybe I was boring and predictable, but that didn’t excuse her cheating on me. What it did do was cause me to reevaluate some things. The fact that Rebecca had upended my life, my carefully constructed routine, was more upsetting than her absence from it. It wasn’t so much that I hadn’t loved her as that I didn’t really know if I was capable of loving anyone. She’d been beautiful, of course, and we’d been compatible in the bedroom. But fuck…wascompatibleever a word you wanted to use to describe your relationship with someone you were sleeping with? That you weremarriedto?
I’d settled forcompatiblebecause it hadn’t really occurred to me that there could be more. Love, the kind with soulful looks and passionate embraces, was the stuff of movies and romance novels. Sure, I could recognize that my father loved Suzanne. And she was a lovely woman. But to my mind, they were the exception, not the norm.
Hayden emerged from the shower, interrupting my melancholy reflection. I looked up as he walked out, all thoughts of Rebecca vanishing as I took a moment to really look at him. His hair was damp and a little haphazard as if he hadn’t done more than run his fingers through it. He had changed into another pair of joggers, this time gray, and a faded black long-sleeved tee that clung to every muscle in his torso. He was fucking beautiful.
He caught my eye, caught me ogling him, and that playfulness was back. He shot me a wink before slowly making his way across the living room to the kitchen, where I was still standing at the counter. I felt my lips curve into a smile, almost as if my mouth had a mind of its own. He had this way about him that annoyed the shit out of me but still somehow had me smiling, whether I liked it or not.
I nudged a plate toward him. “I started to make you a sandwich, but I realized I didn’t know what you liked.”
“I see how it is,” he teased playfully, “I make you an actual meal, and you can’t even complete the task of making a simple sandwich.”
“Fuck off,” I said without any real heat. “I was trying to be considerate of your tastes.”
“Sure. Keep telling yourself that.” He bro-slapped my back, and I rolled my eyes.
We ate at the counter while standing, not bothering to make our way over to the table. I filled a couple of glasses with water and set one in front of him.
He raised his eyebrows at me as if to say,really?
