Maybe while I was gone, he’d do some more bonding with Cat and the others.
Maybe we’d just see what happened from there.
Or maybe I’d go home for a few days, get my head straight without all the sex and attention from him and decide to pack a bag and move here. Or not.
Or maybe something more realistic, like date him for a bit before I moved here. Or not.
I really hadn’t thought it all out, but I had been thinking about it.
Or trying.
Every time I tried to get in my head too much, he was there, doting on me. Being affectionate. Being sexual. Making me coffee or tea. Bringing me a snack. Wanting to talk to me. Purring in that sexy/sweet way that managed to just melt me into warm Ivy goo.
The guy was really getting to me and I needed a bit of space to sort my head out.
He wouldn’t let me go to the store alone. And he wouldn’t give me my keys, so right now I was kind of pissed.
***
“You’ll look good in anything,” he says randomly as we’re coming into the town.
“You mean dress shopping? Flattery is nice, Tyson, but I need to feel good, too. And that might not happen with the first store we go into.”
I managed to fend him off sex earlier, bribing with the offer of a quickie when we got back if we got back in time for me to shower and do my hair without too much stress.
“In other words, the sooner we go, the sooner we’re back and the more chances of a quickie,” I had said.
“A quickie? What’s a quickie?” He had no idea what that meant.
“Quick sex.”
He blinked then barked out a laugh.
I loved it when he did that, especially after he’d admitted to me in bed the night his family left that he loved to smile and laugh. He had never been around it; his uncle never laughed, and it felt foreign to him, but he liked how it felt. So, I started telling him stupid jokes. And he didn’t get some of them, but when he got a joke, the way he laughed felt like an accomplishment to me.
“What do you call a werewolf with no back legs and metal balls?” I’d asked.
“Huh?”
“No hind legs and metal testicles…you know… balls?”
“No. I don’t know about metal testicles. There’s metal balls? What on Earth for?”
“It’s a joke! I’m telling you a joke.”
He looked so confused.
“Just follow my lead. Okay?”
“Okay.” He didn’t look so sure.
“What do you call a werewolf with no hind legs and metal balls?”
“I don’t–”
“Sparky!” I bumped his shoulder with mine.
He stared blankly.
“Sparky,” I repeated with a big smile.
He didn’t get it.
I tried to look up videos to show him how sparks would fly off the pavement if you dragged metal off it and it took some time and so the joke was ruined.
He didn’t get it.
I then took that opportunity to show him a compilation of people slipping on banana peels. At first, he stared with unconcealed concern, and then a few slips in, he was laughing uproariously, finally understanding why I laughed at him that first day here.
This took us to Reddit, where I read him a bunch of Dad jokes and typical knock knock jokes.
There were jokes he didn’t get, but he laughed at quite a few of them. And then later, while I was cooking dinner, I found him laughing in the chair with my phone in his hand, reading more jokes from the same page.
This was so adorable I just crawled up into his lap and snuggled him.
He read me three dumb jokes. I laughed at all of them. More than because they were funny, because he found them funny and his whole face was lit up with excitement while he told them to me.
But then my phone made a sound and his face changed.
“What?” I asked.
He read the screen, “Ben. Are you all right? I heard about what happened at the tux fitting today. Call me. I’d love to talk. Miss you, Ivy.”
Oh shit.
I took the phone from him and tossed it aside.
“I don’t miss him.”
Tyson’s face was red, his nostrils were flaring, and he looked like he was about to go find Ben and rip his face off.
“Ty, don’t worry about a text message from Ben. Trust me.” I put my lips to his. He let out a stuttered breath, like he was trying to calm himself down.
“Did you love him, Ivy?”
“Nope. Really, baby. It wasn’t even serious.”
“But he fucked you.”
“Pff. Trust me. Not remotely serious. Ben is old news, Ty.”
I tugged on his earlobe with my teeth and he shivered. I liked that so I did it again and made a little growl sound.
He whispered, “Your growl is cute.”
“Is it?” I looked into his eyes.
And his mind was no longer on Ben.