The Road That Leads to Us (Us 1)

It took an incredible amount of strength not to tear off her shirt and throw her down on the bed.

I grabbed her wandering hands when she reached for the button of my jeans and gently pushed her away.

“Not yet,” I told her. “Not yet,” I repeated. I hoped she saw in my eyes how badly I wanted this. Wanted her. But I was doing this for the both of us. I wouldn’t let our relationship start out this way. I wanted her to know she was special and I wanted it to be perfect—as cheesy as that sounded. Here, in a dingy hotel that I wasn’t even sure had working air conditioning, was not the place I wanted to have sex with Willow the first time.

She nodded and I knew she understood.

I cupped her face in one of my hands and lowered slightly to her height and placed a small kiss on her lips. It was soft and sweet, nothing like the previous times we kissed, but it was still amazing.

Leaning my forehead against hers, I said, “And now I’m going to go take one hell of a cold shower.”

“It better be ice cold after what you’ve done to me, Hot Buns.”

I threw my head back and laughed the kind of laugh that shook your whole body.

I only ever laughed that hard with Willow, and now…and now that girl was mine.

Willow

After we showered we both fell asleep. The bed was small, so I basically sprawled across him like an octopus, but he didn’t seem to mind.

I kept feeling like it should be weird to be with Dean in a romantic way, but it wasn’t. In fact, it felt so incredibly right that it scared me. My feelings had gone from ‘just friends’ to ‘I want to jump your bones’ so fast I was surprised I didn’t have whiplash.

Dean rummaged through his bag, looking for a clean shirt, and I took a moment to appreciate the sight of him without one.

He was lean with enough muscle for it to be defined, but not bulky, because let’s be real, Dean didn’t work out. He was too busy fixing cars (which was where he got the muscle he had) and in his spare time he geeked out to his nerdoms as I liked to call them.

Dean picked up a blue shirt and sniffed it. “Smells clean,” he mumbled before shrugging it on.

He turned around and my eyes immediately honed in on the sliver of skin above his jeans that his shirt hadn’t covered yet. When it disappeared I nearly whimpered.

“I think we need to wash our clothes tonight.”

“Ugh.” I groaned and flopped back dramatically on the bed. “I don’t wanna.”

Dean chuckled and the bed squeaked when he sat down beside me. “It’s a necessary evil. We have to have clean clothes.”

I knew he was right, but the idea of sitting around for two hours or so while our clothes were washed was not appealing.

“Tell you, what,” Dean stood and grabbed his phone off the bedside table, “let’s go out for a bit and find this apparently magical festival, and then we’ll partake in the menial chore of washing our garments.”

I laughed, which I knew had been his intended effect. “Partake, menial, and garments. You sound like you’re eighty.”

He shrugged. “I think old people are cool so I’ll take that as a compliment.” He reached down and tapped his finger against my nose and then took my hand, hauling me up into a seated position.

I grabbed my backpack and we headed down to the lobby where Dean asked the receptionist for directions to the festival.

The receptionist was a young brunette who kept jutting out her chest and pouting her lips like somehow that would entice Dean.

Honestly, her behavior didn’t really bother me. I was so used to seeing women check him out that it didn’t faze me anymore.

Instead, I kept bumping his arm with my elbow and making a face like, “See? You see? She’s totally in love with you and naming your children!”

When we stepped outside into the afternoon sunshine Dean said, “What the hell was that for? Were you having a seizure or something?”

I groaned at his complete and utter obliviousness. “Noooo,” I drew out the word, “she was totally making googly-eyes at you and I wanted you to notice.”

He glanced back at the sliding glass doors. “Huh, I didn’t know.”