Page 2 of Bitter Desire
I dropped my bag behind the counter and grinned at her. “Yeah, okay. I can tolerate that.”
“Awesome!” She hugged me tight and then gave me a gentle push towards the door. “It’s all taken care of. Just let them know it’s for Gus and they will hook you up.”
I saluted her on my way to the door. “On it!”
I rolled my shoulders and stepped out onto the sidewalk. The morning air was crisp and fresh. My earlier good mood slowly came back to me with each step I took towards the bakery. It didn’t have to be Christian that sent the first one. Maybe that one wasn’t even for me. That happened all the time in a city as big as New York. Someone had hit the wrong number before they hit send and bam! I had a message not meant for me.
“That has to be it,” I told myself. And because I couldn’t take any other truth, I accepted that, lifted my head, and enjoyed my walk to get breakfast.
Today would be utterly normal. A good fucking, perfectly normal, day.
* * *
“How the fuck…”Law’s annoyed grumbling pulled my attention away from the movie that I was watching. I was in his apartment; I mean if you could call this place an apartment. It was a penthouse really; the entire floor was his with the elevator taking you right up to his front door from the ground floor.
“This is super fancy,” I’d told him when I’d stepped out of the elevator for the first time last week.
“It is,” he’d agreed.
“I get why you replaced the lights in my building,” I said, looking around the spacious apartment we were entering.
He chuckled, a hand going to the small of my back. “Wanted you to be able to see, is all.”
“Sure, sure,” I replied, coming to a stop when I caught sight of the glimmering New York skyline visible through his floor-to-ceiling windows. Law’s home was more comfortable than mine by a mile, everything in it was luxe and top of the line, while I had a drafty walk up with a heater that banged when it kicked on. But if Law ever thought anything less than about where I lived, he never let on. We’d been dating for three weeks, and I’d only started coming to his place a week ago with an equal number of nights spent in each of our homes.
I liked that he made the effort to spend time where I lived, even if I was still struggling with doing my best to figure out how to make it feel like home. I’d bought a handful of houseplants and even hung art on the walls, a piece we’d found wandering around in the Village. It was slowly becoming a place I wanted to be in, a place that felt good to take up space in, and I knew that had a lot to do with the person I was becoming with Law. I turned to look over the couch I was sitting on and hit pause on the movie, a fairy tale retelling that was just chef’s kiss perfection, and laughed when I saw Law, hands on his hips, glaring at the pot in front of him.
He was making me mac and cheese. When I’d told him I had a craving for the comfort dish he’d assured me it was “not a big deal, it comes in a box, how hard can it be?”, but from the way he was standing, I could tell it was plenty hard.
I turned completely, rising to my knees and leaning forward, bracing my elbows on the back of the couch. “You okay in there?” I called out to him, leaning my chin in my hands.
“I’m fine, princess.”
“You don’t look fine.”
Law snatched up the box and shook it over his head. “I swear to god, they didn’t say,” he lowered it to read the instructions again and then sighed heavily, “fuck, they did say.”
“What’d they say?”
He tossed the box to the side and picked up the pot he’d been making the macaroni in. “Some cooking shit. I got this. Go back to your movie.”
“But do you need help?” I asked, knowing from the determined set I saw in Law’s shoulders he wasn’t going to be asking me for help, even if he needed it.
He turned looking at me over his shoulder and winked. “Daddy’s got it, princess. Go back to your movie.”
The warmth that always bloomed when Law talked to me like that hit me square in the chest. “Okay, Daddy.” I ducked my head and turned, knowing my cheeks had a faint glow. It was hard not to blush when Law talked to me like that. That one word was capable of making me warm skinned and fidgety. In the few weeks we’d dated he had talked to me like that often. A soft voice, a tender word, the affection blatant. I succumbed to it each and every time.
“That’s fuckin’ soup. Not goddamn mac. I’ll show you mac, ya damn box,” he muttered, sounding pissed from behind me. I giggled.
Law hummed and I heard him pause what he was doing in the kitchen. “Laughing at Daddy, little girl?” He asked, and I sank lower on the couch, pulling the blanket up to my chin.
“No! It was the movie,” I shouted, hitting the play button and muffling another laugh behind my hand. I waited, wondering if Law would come see if I was telling the truth. A minute later I saw he had come to investigate.
“You’re lying, sweet girl.” He moved, putting a hand on the couch beside me. His other went to my neck, fingers gentle on my skin. “Aren’t you?”
“No,” I insisted, but I was smiling. I looked up at him and felt the warmth his words had brought to life spread over my body. He was open faced, his eyes having lost the sharp edge they often had in them when we were in the city, “out in the open,” as he called it. There was a past to my man, one that was dark—if the signs I’d picked up on were telling the truth. I knew they were. His tattoos and scars were more than enough proof of it, but he hadn’t brought it up, and so neither did I. Whatever it was that had Law slipping into high alert when were in too crowded a space, the way he moved when I insisted on a late night walk in Queens, the outright scary aura the man put off that had more than one wannabe goon on the street backing up and giving us space, was not lost on me. I saw it but didn’t ask where the sharp edges and steel in my man had come from.
He hadn’t given that to me yet. I knew that meant something. There was a reason he hadn’t, and I was smart enough to know better than to let my curiosity get the best of me. Law was good to me. He treated me right, and there was no cruelty in him when it came to others.
