“About me not getting better if I didn’t get out of bed. Well, I’m not sure what better is for me yet. But lying around in bed isn’t me. That’s not who I am, and I needed some tough love to show me that.”
“Love?” I said with a raised eyebrow as I held back a laugh.
“Oh, you know what I mean.” He laughed and gave me a tap on my hand as he pulled his hand back toward his side of the table. “I needed someone to be straight with me and that was exactly what you did. I appreciate it, and I wanted you to know.”
I missed the warmth of his touch instantly and longed to feel his skin on mine again. There was one thing for sure: Erik’s touch had instantly made me feel comfortable with him. There was no longer awkwardness between us, and instead I felt like I was sitting across the table from a very close friend.
Weirdly enough, I didn’t know much about Erik at all. All I knew so far was that he didn’t have family that he thought cared about him and his mother appeared to have died. My initial impression of him was that he was some sort of rich brat who had been given the family money, but I was starting to rethink that version of who he was.
“Did your mom pass away?” I asked in an effort to get to know him a little more.
“Yeah, it was a long time ago, when I was a teenager, but I still miss her like it happened yesterday.”
“It must be hard not to have family there for you. I live with my mom and dad, and they are my rocks. I couldn’t imagine life without them.”
“Let’s change the subject,” Erik said without continuing down the path I was trying to take him.
“I don’t want to sound like a jerk, really I don’t. But why come to treatment if you don’t want to get better?”
“I don’t really have a drug or drinking problem. I’m just here so my business partner can get a deal closed for a new project we are working on.”
“It sounds like you must have had a problem if they wanted you to come here, though, right?”
“Nah; you know those California types.”
I had to laugh. No, I didn’t know those California types at all. I didn’t know them except for the addicts and alcoholics that had come through our doors. So, if I compared Erik to those California types, he sounded exactly like all the others who had been through the treatment center. I probably shouldn’t have compared him to others, but the way he was talking was very familiar to patients who just weren’t ready for treatment.
“I’ll hold my opinion on this whole conversation for right now. Are you done with your project?”
He placed his scissors back in the bin and I gathered everything up and opened the locked cabinet to put them away. We had just made up from my previous yelling at the poor guy; I wasn’t about to tell him that everyone seemed to think they didn’t have a problem with drugs or alcohol when they showed up.
“You are one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen,” Erik said as he stood behind me near the cabinet.
My breath caught in my chest as I realized his body was closer than I had expected. Normally, I would have pushed him away. Normally, I wouldn’t have let a patient get as close as he was. But there was something different about Erik. There was something different about how I was around him. I didn’t feel like I had control at all when he was around.
Chapter Eight
Erik
The words had come out of my mouth before I could sensor them. I had been thinking she was the most beautiful woman I had seen in a very long time, but as she stood there, my mouth spoke befo
re I could stop myself. I really wasn’t the type of guy who gave out compliments to women. It even caught me off guard.
At first, I wasn’t sure if I had actually said the words out loud or not. She turned to look at me and then back toward the cabinet. I expected her to say something; I wasn’t sure what I thought she would say, but surely she would have some sort of response to the compliment I had just given her.
I had an overwhelming urge to kiss her. To be honest, I had felt that way since I had first laid eyes on her, but now I felt like I couldn’t hold back. I shouldn’t have gotten so close to her because the second I walked over to the cabinet to hand her the stack of papers that were left on the table, I was close enough to smell her. Close enough that my senses had taken over and the words had escaped me before I could hold my control over them.
A light, flowery scent combined with what I thought was cinnamon made Cassidy smell good enough to eat. Oh, how I would have loved to nibble on every inch of her body. Seriously, I didn’t know what had come over me. I didn’t nibble on random girls. I screwed them. I wasn’t a flowery kind of guy. I wasn’t a crafting kind of guy, yet there I was, crafting and thinking about the flowery scent of this girl.
“Here are the papers,” I said as I handed the stack of collage paper to her and tried to totally ignore that fact that she hadn’t responded to me telling her she was beautiful.
“Thanks.”
She turned around to face me and then quickly back to the inside of the cabinet and stayed there for much longer than she needed to. My hand reached out to touch her shoulder, but then I decided not to. I wasn’t thinking straight. She was only being nice to me because she worked there, nothing more and nothing less. I had to be imagining the chemistry going on between us because I had been away from women for so long.
Cassidy was still close to me. She didn’t push me away. She didn’t seem to mind my close proximity to her. There was a primal urge that had me wanting to press her up against that storage closet and bang her. My body was hard with even the slightest possibility of feeling her wetness around me. My brain could only think about sex in that moment. All reason was long gone, and somehow, I felt like the possibility of having this girl was real.
“We should get you back to your unit,” she said as she expertly closed the cabinet and stepped away from me at the same time.