And he realized that he would always remember this day, this date.
It would be burned in his memory forever.
Because it was the day he met her.
EPILOGUE
Jules – 1 day
“What are you doing?” Kai’s voice asked, still slow and rough from sleep, a sound I never could have known would be so sexy, but now did. “Did you go to the store already?” he asked, taking in the plastic bags littering the counter.
He moved around to face me, shirt off, pants slung low, eyes only halfway functioning.
And my chest did it again.
Tightened.
And, what’s more, something else.
Something within me growled out Mine.
Mine.
He was mine.
Entirely.
I had never felt possessiveness before, never had a need to possess something – someone – so entirely.
“Are any stores even open this early?” he asked, glancing at the clock readout on the stove.
Six-fifteen.
“Walmart is twenty-four hours,” I reminded him. “I just needed a few things to tackle… this,” I declared, waving an arm at his junk drawer.
“Tackle it,” he repeated, brain clearly a little slow in the morning. How he got going without coffee was beyond me.
“Organize it,” I clarified.
“It’s a junk drawer.”
“Yeah?”
“Junk drawers aren’t supposed to be organized,” he informed me like this was somehow common knowledge. And if it was, then the human collective was crazy. If you needed to find birthday candles, wouldn’t it be better to have them right there in a designated spot instead of having to rifle through fifteen other things before you found them? Likely half-crushed?
“Well… be that as it may, yours is going to be. It woke me up in the middle of the night, Kai. It was calling to me, taunting me with its clutter.”
To that, he seemed to lose his sleep, face cracking into a grin as he let out a small chuckle.
“Then an organized junk drawer we shall have. But you get to explain it to everyone if they ask.”
“Ask. About a junk drawer? Your friends really struggle to find topics of conversation, huh? What… oh,” I let off on a small moan as he came to me, dragging my body to his, sealing his lips to mine.
I felt myself melting into him, my lips becoming demanding, needy, even though we had had each other three times the night before until our bodies just refused to do anything other than sleep.
Insatiable.
That was how to describe me now.
With Kai.
“Only you would lose sleep over a cluttered drawer,” he declared after breaking the kiss, pressing his forehead to mine.
“What if I needed a wrench in an emergency?” I asked, digging in the drawer to find the item in question.
“A wrench emergency, huh?” he asked, lips twitching, trying not to laugh at me. “Have you had coffee yet?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. I’d been in too big a rush to get to the store. I knew I wanted to get organizers, get the mess contained properly, then get to work at least a little early, knowing I had left things unfinished the night before.
“Don’t worry,” he said, brushing my hip as he moved past. He did that a lot. Even just in the eight-ish hours we had technically been together. He always touched me. Like he needed confirmation that I was there. He had no idea how stuck with me he was now. Now that I understood the feeling in my chest, could call it what it was, even just to myself for now. Something I had never experienced with anyone else, something that was his alone. “I will jump in the shower while you organize,” he added as I heard water running to fill the coffee maker. “Then we can both head in to finish what you didn’t get to last night.”
The man got me.
That was such a new sensation as well. Someone getting you, understanding your concerns without you having to spell them out all the time, someone who cared enough to get to know you to root level.
It was a little one-sided still.
I had a lot to learn about Kai.
Luckily, I decided as I pulled the stickers off the little plastic drawer organizers, I had nothing but time to figure out his story.
“You had sex,” Miller declared about five hours later.
My head jerked up, eyes going wide, frantically looking around to make sure we were alone.
“What?”
“Oh, don’t give me that innocent look. You finally got the balls to jump him, didn’t you?” She moved closer, smile wicked. “Was it amazing? All those years of pent-up frustration, it had to be amazing. I mean… unless he didn’t last. Which would be a huge bummer. But I get the feeling that Kai would be the sort who would compensate otherwise if he blew too fast and… no,” she said, nodding. “Homeboy wanted this too much. No way did he shoot it off early. It was amazing, right?”
“It’s my turn to talk now?” I asked, lips twitching. “You seemed to be carrying that conversation just fine all by yourself.”