I didn’t see how he was going to navigate through the number of drunken bodies clogging up the path to the exit. But I needn’t have worried. The crowd seemed to fricking melt for him. We were outside before I knew what had happened. The air was shockingly fresh and jolting, goose bumps immediately rose on my arms.
Heath was yanking his leather jacket off and it was situated on my shoulders in a moment.
“Now you’re going to be cold,” I murmured, inhaling his purely male scent, hoping it imprinted onto my skin. That it would somehow sink into my bones.
“But you’ll be warm,” he said, his lips coming down on mine for a quick and brutal kiss.
And then he was walking us along the sidewalk.
To get lost.
And I found myself hoping I’d never be found again.
I was nervous.
I hadn’t given myself time to properly and truly get nervous. To think about what I was doing. Mostly because Heath demanded every ounce of my attention, there was no room for nerves when he was kissing me, when his hands were on me. There was only enough room to remember to breathe.
But now I was nervous.
Because it was real.
I was going to give him my virginity.
There was no hesitation in that. I knew instinctively that he was the perfect person for me to give it to. He was the person I didn’t know I was waiting for.
I went on intuition.
I might’ve still been a girl, but he awakened the woman in me, including my woman’s intuition.
I knew he’d take care of me. That he wanted to. It was evident in everything he did. From putting his jacket on me to opening my car door, to not moving the car until my seatbelt was buckled, to his hand settling on my thigh the entire ride.
And then to him directing me to the bedroom and then leaving to get me a glass of freakin’ water.
Because that was the kind of guy he was.
“You hungry?” he called from the kitchen.
Not that he even really needed to raise his voice since the kitchen was approximately two doors away from the bedroom.
“No thanks,” I called back.
My stomach was far too unstable for such things like food.
I was sitting awkwardly on the end of the bed, not quite sure if I should undress, lay seductively splayed across the dark gray comforter, or get right under the covers.
All of these options seemed awkward, not that sitting ramrod straight at the end of the bed was exactly any better.
To distract myself, I looked around. Not that there was much to look at. He’d told me that this was his ‘crash pad’ in L.A.
And considering he was away for years at a time, it was a surprise he even had a pad, crash or otherwise.
I’d asked him about this on the drive.
“Why don’t you just get a hotel when you come back?”
He glanced at me across the cab. “’Cause after a year livin’ hard and rough and not knowin’ if I’d be alive to have a shitty sleep in a shitty cot, I like knowin’ that I’ll be coming back to a bed that’s mine, even if it’s in a crappy apartment. It’s somethin’.”
All of this was spoken with a harsh nonchalance that I was getting to understand was Heath’s default when talking about things that were heavy or emotional.
It got to me.
A lot.
He didn’t have a home.
I was a huge believer in a home being people more than a place. A family, adopted or otherwise—I was lucky to have both, plus a physical home of my own with memories that sank into the very foundation—to be a constant, people you could always go to, always count on.
And Heath hadn’t mentioned family. Friends.
Granted we barely knew each other, but he already knew I had two sisters, one adopted, one blood related, a mother that texted me to make sure I was still in the country—and being serious—a father that brewed his own beer, and that my friend Allie wanted to star in her own movie but instead was playing a serial killer’s latest victim on some crime show.
He’d listened. Asked questions. Seemed utterly engaged in my long-winded, enthusiastic and totally crazy stories that should’ve made a guy I met at a bar run a mile.
He didn’t run a mile.
He kissed me until I was crazy and then took me home.
To his ‘crash pad’ that served as the one constant he could come back to after months, years of war.
It wasn’t in a terrible area of L.A., not that I was one to care about ‘areas.’ But the cars parked on the street were nice, the apartment buildings all well-kept, and the streets were well lit.
He lived in one of the highest buildings on the block, top floor but where that didn’t mean a penthouse, it just meant the exact same, shoebox apartment without hearing the neighbors practicing tap dancing on the floor above.
You walked in with a small and modern kitchen on the left, an equally small and sparsely furnished living room directly ahead, with doors opening off to a small balcony.
His hall consisted of one door to the bathroom, one to his bedroom.
From what I saw of the place, it was lacking any kind of personality but was meticulously clean.
The bed I was sitting on had army corners and everything. I had yanked at the comforter just to create some disorder because the pure crispness of it all made me uncomfortable.
The room had a large dresser, not a single thing sitting on top of it. Not a photo, not a jumbled array of aftershave and deodorant.
Not one thing.
Ditto with his bedside tables.
There was a lamp on either side and a digital alarm clock.
He said he didn’t want a hotel room because he wanted a home. Hotel rooms had more personality than this.
My heart burned with the knowledge that this was his version of a home.
It was only as I was blinking away tears at that thought did I realize that the man I’d been crying for was standing in the door, with one glass of water in his hand and his eyes on me.
I wondered how long he’d been there, staring at me while I had grieved over his version of a home. Or lack thereof.
“Your bed is far too neat,” I said.
He blinked.
“Like, I know it’s good to make beds when we’re not sleeping in them,” I continued. “Believe me, I know, since my entire family are bed makers.”
Heath’s jaw ticked. “You say that like they’re serial killers.”
“They might be,” I deadpanned. “Serial killers like order after all.” I paused. “Now would be a terrible time to find out you’re a serial killer. Now I’m alone and at your mercy.”
The jaw tick disappeared. And pure male hunger replaced it.
My inner thighs clenched together as I responded to the look physically.
He moved then, rounding the bed to place the water on the bedside table and then yanking me up off the bed and into his arms.
He toyed with a strand of my hair, his hand biting into my hip. “No, Sunshine,” he murmured, not taking his eyes from me. “I’m the one at your fuckin’ mercy.”
Cue another thigh clench.
A fricking huge one.
And a stutter in my heartbeat.
A fricking huge one.
He didn’t move to kiss me, didn’t brutally throw me down on the bed like the darkness in his eyes communicated.
“I haven’t done this before,” I said, trying to sound proud of my virginity instead of slightly ashamed, as I did right now.