I still didn’t know why the hell I was here. Maybe it was how she’d leaned against me when she’d looped her arm through mine and asked me to go grocery shopping with her. Or maybe it was her smell. Since I’d gotten home last night and gotten into the shower, I’d been smelling it. The lingering herby, floral scent. When she held on to my arm, it invaded my nostrils, bringing back thoughts of how I’d jerked off in the shower trying to figure out why the smell hung in the air after I’d taken my clothes off.
It hadn’t been from the club. It was something else, and when I smelled it, everything else faded away.
Which was how I found myself strolling the aisles of the grocery store seven blocks from the apartment, trying to keep myself awake under the fluorescent lights hanging over our heads.
Last night I’d come home and sat up in a chair beside my window, afraid to go to sleep and wake up screaming again. I’d turned on the music, put on my noise-cancelling headphones, and read until I’d nodded off. I’d jolted awake with a yell. My book hit the floor with a muted thud, but I’d been afraid to close my eyes again. I was coasting on less than two hours of sleep.
The alluring scent of coffee had dragged me from my room and into the kitchen. Little had I known my new roommate was trying to poison me with sludge.
“Is that all you’re getting?” Sabrina pointed to the couple of oranges and carrots in my half of the cart. Why the hell were we sharing a cart anyway?
“You should be happy I’m not trying to drain your bank account.”
She picked up a carrot and mimed biting into it. “You don’t look like a rabbit to me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I squeezed the bridge of my nose.
She could push me back to the apartment in the cart when I fell asleep in the aisle.
My lids were weighted down like five-pound bags of flour.
“Nothing. I guess you’re more of a sweets guy, not a pasta guy. The Nutella is a few rows over.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I’d resorted to a sugar rush after one too many espressos had made me jittery.
She dropped a few cans of crushed tomatoes and tomato puree into the cart and tilted her head, looking up at me. “Nutella. Like the kind you were eating yesterday. I figured you must be out since there wasn’t any in the cabinets.”
My fingers gripped the cart tighter. “It was an old jar someone left behind.”
“People just rock up to your apartment with jars of chocolate spread? Do you leave a donation bin out in the hallway?”
Hate was a strong word, but I was getting there with my new, soon-to-be-gone roommate. “Would you drop it? Can we finish this up? I’ve got shit to do today.”
“Touchy this early in the morning. I figured you’d be less hangry after inhaling those French toast dippers.” She swirled her finger at my chest.
At the spot where a couple of dried droplets of syrup stained the front of my shirt, even after I’d dabbed them with water.
“I didn’t inhale them.” I’d devoured them. The sugar hadn’t helped and now my stomach wasn’t happy with me. Add that to a foggy brain and I was screwed.
Her nod and umhmm told me she believed it as much as I did.
After skipping out on dinner last night, I’d been left with few options at the club other than cocktail garnishes. Drinking and an empty stomach didn’t mix, so I hadn’t even had a chance to get blitzed to stave off my hunger. Instead I’d broken down and grabbed a cheeseburger on the way home. I needed actual fresh food since I wasn’t giving my body the sleep it needed.
She disappeared around the corner to the next aisle. The baking aisle.
“Do you have a favorite?” She pointed to the boxed cake and brownie mixes.
“No.” My mom and I would bake a dessert every weekend. Cookies, cakes, brownies, whichever we were craving at the time. The flavor always reminded me of her. That was why I stuck to overcomplicated desserts with more syllables than ingredients—they never stirred those childhood memories, which were much closer to the surface than they’d been in a long time.
“Well, I do.” She threw on a fake Southern accent and picked up a couple boxes of dark chocolate brownies and yellow cake mix.
I was so fucked.
“Not that you couldn’t tell already.” Her shoulders curled in a little.
“What’s that mean?”
“Oh come on, Hunter.” Her voice swayed, drawing out all the syllables. “Look at me.” She gestured to herself with the boxes of cake mix.
My sleep addled brain was roaming to dangerous territory. “What am I looking at?” Other than her holding sweet treats and highlighting her glorious rack and hips that filled out her jeans in a way I didn’t need to be noticing at nine in the morning in a grocery store where other people were present.
Her lips pursed and she tilted her head, narrowing her gaze, and for the first time I didn’t feel it was in a playful way. She was trying to peel back a layer of me with her eyes.
“Fine, whatever.” She chucked the boxes into the cart.
In the meat section, she grabbed a few packages of fresh fish, beef, and chicken. “Are you buying for a small army?”
More staples went into the cart, my few things swamped by her selections.
“Since you’ve so graciously”—an eye roll punctuated how much she believed that remark—“welcomed me into your apartment, I figured the least I could do was cook. Cooking for one always throws off recipes. I also hate needing to do this more than once every couple of weeks, so it’s good you keep your fridge, freezer, and cabinets barren except for all that coffee so there’ll be plenty of space for all this.” She swept her arms over the contents of the cart I was still pushing.
In the freezer section, she picked up a few bags of frozen vegetables and fruit.
“There, I think that’s everything, unless you had anything else you needed.”
“No, let’s get out of here. It’s already late, and I need to get to the gym.”
Her eyebrow punched up. “Of course you do. Gotta work off those French toast sticks to keep your svelte figure.”
I gritted my teeth, willing my eyes open. “I work out. What’s the big deal?”
“No big deal. Just an observation.”
She guided the cart into a checkout aisle and started unloading.
“Is there a law against exercising now?”
Her head jerked, and she locked on to me with her assessing gaze once again. “No. Why are you making such a big deal about it? I made a joke. You’re the one getting defensive.”
“I’m not defensive.” I stuck more things onto the conveyor belt.
“Said the most defensive guy ever,” she grumbled at a volume telling me and the checkout cashier it was definitely meant to be overheard. “Is the gym in our building, or do you go somewhere else?”
“Why?”
“Because I want to burn it to the ground? Why do you think? I want to work out. What? I can’t work out?” Her defensiveness caught me off guard.
“Who the hell said you can’t work out?” I gritted my teeth. “Can we just get the groceries and go? We’ll talk about this when we get back to the apartment.”