Nine’s fingers brushed through my hair. “Why not?”
I tugged at his beard again. “Because you’re my favorite.”
For a split second, he looked confused, and then it changed to suspicious. “Me?”
I leaned in and kissed his gorgeous mouth. For some reason, I couldn’t exactly bring myself to say the words just yet, but I came as close as I could. “You’re my closet chicken.”
And then, before he felt obligated to say anything back, I pecked annoying kisses all over his face. “Better than Sir Pecks-A-Lot, right?”
We almost tumbled off the steps laughing and kissing until Nacho made it clear it was dinnertime. Nine pulled me up and led me into the cabin instead of toward the RV.
“Wanna show you something,” he said.
When I entered the front door, I was amazed at what a difference the hardwood floors made. “Holy shit. Look at these floors.” And then I saw it. Over to the right, surrounding the original stone fireplace, was the most gorgeous custom mantel I’d ever seen. It was made out of big, smooth logs and anchored the room perfectly. I turned to Nine, who was already blushing and twitchy. “You did all this.”
He looked away and couldn’t seem to figure out what to do with his arms. Finally he shrugged. “Yeah. Well, there wasn’t anything else to do, and I remembered you pinned those pictures of the mantels you liked.”
I walked right up to him and got down on my knees, yanking his pants open as fast as I could and sucking on his cock before either one of us could even think about it.
“Fuck!” He shouted into the empty space. His deep voice echoed around the room. “Oh god, that’s not… you didn’t have to… don’t stop. Fuck.”
I laughed around the dick in my mouth. If I hadn’t been busy with other things, I would have made a joke about mixed messages. Instead, I focused on getting him to come as hard and fast as I could.
Nine’s hand landed in my hair and held the back of my head tenderly even though the rest of his body was tightly coiled like he was holding back.
He kept grunting out curses as I caressed his sac and peered up at him through my lashes. I could tell when he was close, and I pulled off him and jacked him until he came on my face. It was hot as hell and something we definitely hadn’t done before.
“Oh god, fuck, fuck,” he grunted. “Babe. Shit.” Nine pulled off his shirt and tried to wipe my face off. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
I yanked the shirt out of his hand and fell down to the floor laughing. He was so goddamned naive in some ways. “It’s called a facial. It’s a thing. I thought it would be hot. Never mind.”
He stared at me for a second before he started laughing. “I’m so stupid. It was hot. Like, really fucking hot. I was just worried I was going to blind you.”
Nine pulled me up and into a kiss before reaching down to palm my dick through my jeans. I pulled his hand away. “Not yet. Let’s feed Nacho, and then we can start over again in bed.”
So that’s what we did, and after a crazy, gymnastics-level sixty-nine in the RV bed, we finally slowed down long enough to fix dinner.
“Get out of there and sit down,” I told Nine after coming out of the shower and seeing him attempt to cook. “I’m making pasta. Remove your big self from my kitchen.”
Before I finished filling up the pot with water though, my mom called. Nine quickly hopped up and took over so I could answer the call.
“Hey, everything okay?”
I could tell right away she was crying, and I reached out to claw at poor Nine’s arm. “What? Mom, what is it?”
She sucked in a shaky breath. “Cooper, someone paid for the procedure.”
“What? What do you mean?” I peeled my fingernails out of Nine’s skin and absently rubbed the little crescent marks to try and get them to go away.
“He okay?” Nine murmured.
“Wait, Mom. Is Jacks okay?”
“What? Oh yeah. He’s fine. Back home and watching some kind of drag race, but it’s not the car kind.”
I nodded at Nine, and he kissed my forehead before going back to the pasta prep. “Mom, tell me what you mean about someone paying for the procedure.”
“The doctor’s office called and said that they’d found us a grant or something. I’m not really sure. It was all very confusing. But I guess there are people in the community who donate into medical funds for people who need help and they picked us. Can you believe it? It’s not even a loan or anything. It’s a grant. They said that means it doesn’t need to be paid back.”
It was too good to be true. “Mom, are you sure?”