“Yeah. I’m starved. You hungry?”
His eyes are on me and they’re hungry, all right. They’re hungrily raking up my body from my bare feet, up my naked legs. Then they go lazy for the upper-body part of their peruse, landing on my face, which I know is beet red.
“I am. But, Aiden, those are my groceries.”
He gives me a confused look. He puts the wooden spoon down and folds his arms over his chest. And then he flexes his biceps. And my eyes don’t know whether to look at his biceps, his pecs, his dick print, or to burn lasers through him for what he’s done.
“My eyes are up here,” he teases. But, he’s right. My eyes are darting to and fro, from his chest to his crotch, and now I’m just lost for words.
He turns, lifts the spoon, and continues stirring.
Oh shit, his ass is eating his sweatpants. They’re bunched in the back. God, why is his ass so perfect?
“You keep eating my food. This is my food.” I gesture to myself, though he can’t see as he’s facing the stove, and my eyes are still on his absolutely picture-perfect bubble butt.
“Not yours. You buy your food, I’ll buy mine, Aiden.”
He laughs and keeps stirring the colorful vegetable concoction in the pan. It smells great. My stomach rumbles, painfully with hunger.
“I wasn’t joking,” I tell him.
He turns, tilts his head and furrows his brows. “You’re serious?”
“Yeah, I’m serious! I’ve separated my food from… from where you’d put your food if you had any.” I open the fridge door and gesture to the empty shelves. “If you buy something, you put it on another shelf. That’s my shelf, my stuff. You buy stuff, I won’t touch it. I buy stuff, you don’t touch it.”
He twists his lips in confusion.
Has he never had roommates? Has he gotten away with this behavior in the past?
“Roommate rules. You don’t eat your roommate’s food, you don’t leave a mess for your roommate. You clean up after your own mess.”
“Hmpf,” he grunts and appears to consider what I’ve said. This is a brief pondering as he then goes back to stirring the stuff on the stove. “You like it hot, Carly?” he eyes me.
“Huh?” I ask.
“You bought the hot cock sauce. Guessin’ you like it hot.”
He gestures to the bottle of sauce and my eyes move to the Huy Fong Sriracha sauce on the counter. There’s a rooster on the front of the jar. Oh. Hot. Cock. Duh.
My face flushes red at the way he’s said, “Hot cock”. Not like a thirteen-year-old boy trying to be crude. Nope. With sexuality.
“Yeah,” I try to deadpan, try to pretend my face isn’t the color of the sauce. “I like it hot.”
I allow my eyes to rove over every inch of muscle on his upper body and then my eyes take in his lower body. In those grey sweatpants, for fuck sakes. That’s one seriously prominent dick print. I want to take a picture of it and make a meme with it. No, I don’t. Focus, Carly. I shake my head.
“How hot?” He lifts the sauce and squirts it into the pan. Instantly, I feel it in the air, the hot sauce attacking my sinuses.
I stare him down.
He glugs more into the pan. I fight the wince and reach into the fridge for the bottle of white wine I’d left in there and pull it out.
“Pour me one, too, peaches,” he says and turns back to the pan, stirring vegetables some more. He drops the noodles into the boiling water and starts separating them with tongs. I glare at his back, but move to the kitchen cabinet and fetch two wineglasses.
He reaches into the drawer and pulls out a corkscrew, but I uncap the bottle of wine with a swift twist of the cap. He makes a face. A snob face. Yeah, buddy. I drink my wine out of a twist-off bottle. I drink my wine out of a box, too. Elitist food-stealing jerk.
And he should not be calling me peaches. Or baby. He’s my boss. Correction: my boss’s boss.
I’m pretty sure he can read what I’m thinking even though I’m saying nothing as I pour the wine. He snickers and works at separating the noodles some more.