At first, she didn't want to get out of bed.
Then she realized she didn't have to, so she smiled to herself and enjoyed the warmth of Aaron's body heat, the scent of his skin—how he could still smell so good after drinking all night was beyond her—and the lovely feeling of his arms still wrapped around her. He had moved around throughout the night, but even when he moved his arms, he put them back around her before she had time to notice they were gone.
He still snored, but she could live with that as long as he let her sleep all wrapped up in his arms.
She didn't understand why it felt so good to her—they were just limbs, after all, and she had slept with Jack's arms around her many a night, that had never made her have any kind of warm feeling inside. She had also slept in Matt's arms a time or two, and while it had been a little better than sleeping in Jack's, it was absolutely nothing like sleeping in Aaron's; the next day all she could think about was her neck ache and how she was definitely going to spend a couple nights sleeping alone.
Why did she feel so at home in Aaron's arms?
However, as soon as questions like that would surface, she would open up the special little box in her mind marked "Do Not Open" and jam it in there. She was going to go with her instincts to just completely avoid getting into that—she was not exactly at a place in her life where she needed to contemplate why she felt so good in the arms of her baby's daddy's brother.
Nope.
Not at all.
So that question—along with the others—would stay in that box until such a time as the box busted open and they all came leaking out.
Then she would deal with it.
In the meantime, she would thoughtlessly enjoy sleeping in Aaron's bed and in his arms any night that he would permit her to do so.
Well, unless things got more complicated—sometimes guys has a tendency to complicate things when you wanted to sleep in their bed.
But even though Aaron had been very friendly the night before, she was sure she didn't have to wor
ry about anything like that.
She didn't even know if he would return to the normal grumpy-bear personality that he normally had around her once he woke up, because unfortunately he was sober, and when he was sober he didn't forget any of her sins like he seemed to when he was drinking.
Julie felt like a total sloth—she literally spent a good hour that morning lying awake in Aaron's embrace, not moving, just leaving her arms wrapped around him, his arms around her, her face pressed up against his chest.
It was a lovely morning, even if she got nothing accomplished.
She would have probably stayed there like that for another hour if her cell phone wouldn't have started ringing, and she attempted to grab it and silence it before it woke Aaron, then she ran in the hallway to answer it.
"Hello?" she said a bit quietly, not even looking at the caller ID to see who it was.
"Julie?" asked a calm and collected voice on the other end.
Her eyes widening, Julie jerked the phone away from her ear to see the name and number.
Sure enough, it read "Emma's Cell."
"Hello?" the voice asked with a touch of irritation.
"Hi," Julie said uncertainly, then immediately felt like a dumbass for such a lame greeting.
What was the proper etiquette for talking to one's former lover's current wife?
She would have to check out a book on that later.
"It's Emma," she said needlessly.
"Yes, I see that," Julie said, preparing for whatever curveball was about to be thrown at her.
"Listen, this is going to sound very strange," Emma warned.
"I'm listening," Julie said.