Page 50 of It's Only Love

In short, he was the whole package, goddamn perfect from head to toe and didn’t that just piss her off. She was secretly relieved when they had a day apart because it meant her body could have a day off from being a throbbing, sweaty, aroused mess. It was nice. She went for a walk in the forest nearby and then she went to the bar to see Taylor and try to do some writing, needing to destroy her writer’s block, but no ideas came to her. When she did finally break it, she would want to be shut away in a room to write, but by then she would have likely left town, the thought leaving a hollow feeling in her chest.

Today Dean was back, and he turned up looking sexier than ever. So obviously she had been pretty snappy with him all morning. She chalked it down to sexual frustration, but if he noticed he hadn’t said a word about her mood. She went out to meet Justine for lunch, she felt bad leaving him in the house working while she socialized. He insisted it was fine, but her guilt at leaving him forced her to stop by the diner on the way home and bring him back a burger and fries.

As she walked up the path to the house, she steeled herself against the wave of arousal that would surely plague her all afternoon. Life wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t she have her cake and eat himit too? She just hoped he wasn’t shirtless again. She came up the porch steps, admiring the work done on it as she went. He really was great with his hands, no pun intended. She felt a sense of pride, seeing the house change and knowing that Dean, Beau, and herself had all left their mark on it.

Christy dumped her purse and keys on the coffee table in the living room and looked around. She felt a prickle of unease as she realized, they had done so much and potentially finished fixing up the downstairs already.

“Dean?” she called out.

“In here!” His reply came from the kitchen, she headed to the door with his lunch, but she stopped dead in the doorway. He was shirtless, again, and hunched over the garbage disposal, his nemesis. The muscles of his back rippled with his movements, and his dipped jeans low enough that she could see the two dimples at the base of his spine. Her eyes were drawn to the valley between his shoulder blades, how she longed to wrap her arms around him from behind and rest her head against him. She shook her head, friends didn’t do that, but they also didn’t do a lot of things that she and Dean had done.

“I think I’ve done it!” he said triumphantly, jerking her out of her daydream. He reached over and flicked the switch with one hand. The garbage disposal roared to life, but the triumph was short lived. Dean bellowed out in pain and lurched forward as the garbage disposal made a horrible crunching sound, followed by a wet slurping noise.

“Oh my God!” she screamed, dropping his lunch and running over to him, trampling the bag as she went. She grabbed onto his shoulders and pulled him backwards as hard as she could, but he didn’t budge.

“Help me, my hand!” he wailed as she kept pulling on him. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, his hand! What if he loses his hand?It’ll be all my fault! Dean began shaking, no longer shouting, and she thought he was going weak from blood loss, but then the garbage disposal switched off and she could hear him laughing. She pulled away from him and looked over his shoulder but couldn’t see any blood, confusion consuming her. Her confusion quickly gave way to anger as she saw no blood, bone, or flesh and noticed Dean was smothering his laughter with two perfect hands.

“Was that supposed to be funny?” she asked, her tone deadly calm as her panic and fear ebbed away.

“Um, kinda?” he asked, injecting enough boyish charm into his voice before bursting out laughing all over again. She turned on her heel and walked away, eyeing the lunch she bought him, trampled into the floor. She picked it up and stormed back to him, thrusting the bag at him, smearing it into his perfect, bare chest. Before stomping out of the room and upstairs without another word.

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