“Are you sniffing me?”
Smiling and rubbing my cheek on his shoulder, I mumbled, “Mebbe?”
“I probably stink. Let me get you set up with what you need first, and I’ll go and take a shower in Toby’s bathroom.”
He’d worked a physically demanding job all day, and I probably should have been the one offering to do something for him. But try as I might, I couldn’t bring myself to offer up anything that’d mean detaching my body from his.
The shoulder jerking under my head made me frown, and I lifted my head to glare at him for interrupting my moment.
“You need to let go of me, Tana, if I’m going to get you shit for your back.”
Blushing, I unwound my arms from around his neck—totally unsure when they’d moved there—and braced as he gently lowered me on his bed. Since I’d moved in, I’d walked past the open door of his room and peeked in, obviously, but I’d never crossed a boundary and fully snooped inside. Oh, what a fool I’d been.
His bed felt like a cloud. The comforter was cool against my hot back and felt so soft and squishy, I sighed.
“What the hell is this bedding sorcery you’ve got going on? Why does it feel so good?”
Remy had already gone into the bathroom and was going through the seemingly vast contents of his medicine cabinet. “Mom bought it for me when I moved here. I thought it’d be too much, but seeing how I like to keep my room freezing cold, it’s a Godsend.”
That I knew already. He used to keep the whole house the same temperature for some reason, but when he’d brought Bub home with him, he’d stopped doing that and now kept it at a more comfortable one.
Rolling onto my side, I smiled happily. “It’s like it creates the perfect cushion for your body when you move. Is it a NASA invention?”
A deep chuckle sounded from behind me as he pushed me farther over onto my stomach.
“That’s likely the mattress. I got a Tempur-Cloud and put two four-inch mattress toppers on it. I need something soft because I feel like a ninety-year-old man at the end of the day.”
Doing my best to see him over my shoulder, I pointed out, “You’re only just turning twenty-five in just over a month!”
“I know, but I’ve got the skeleton of a pensioner, I swear. I bent down to pick Toby up yesterday morning, and all I could hear were my joints popping. It felt like they were screaming when I stood back up again.”
“Imagine what you’ll be like at eighty, then. You’ll have to get those shoes with the wheels built into the heels and use your walker to scoot along the path.”
The pinch to my sore ass cheek was unwarranted, but he did it anyway. I actually thought it was a good idea.
“Why don’t more people of a ‘mature’ age use those shoes, do you think?” I mused. “Now that I’ve thought about it, I’d totally do that if it meant getting to places more quickly or avoiding moving my hips.”
“Maybe because if they fall, they’ll hurt themselves? Remember Coach Maggie, our neighbor in Kissimmee? She fell, running to pick her paper up off the grass before her dog could get it, and she broke her hip. That was landing on the front lawn, too.”
“Uh, yeah, I remember that. I was the one who found her and had to call 911.”
That had been mildly traumatic for me at the age of eight as I’d walked to visit my friend. Coach Maggie—named because she’d been the girls' softball coach at one of the high schools in the areas for around sixty years—had been lying on the ground, her paper in her hand and her little Jack Russell, Mango, lying on her head. I’d thought she was dead until she’d lifted her head and told me to stop being a girl and call a damn ambulance.
He lifted my t-shirt until it was halfway up my back, then began massaging something into the skin gently. “Did she really say what everyone says Coach Maggie said to you when you found her?”
I closed my eyes and almost drooled at how nice it felt. There was no icy afterburn and no strong scent, so it couldn't be Bengay. It felt damn good, though.
“Her exact words were, ‘Quit screaming and crying like a girl and call damn 911. While you’re at it, fetch me my gun so I can shoot the little asshole who pissed on my back and then lay on my head.’”
The bark of laughter that burst out of Remy made my lips twitch. “I was traumatized for months after that and refused to walk anywhere on my own. Croix used to pretend he was deaf because Mom and Merrick made him go with me when I went out.”