“Oh, fuck. I passed out.” He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “I’m sorry. I should have gone back to my room.”
With a crease from my pillowcase slashing across his left cheek, his hair sticking up in several different directions, and gunk in the corner of his eyes, Elijah shouldn’t have looked this good, but as my gaze roamed his face, I wasn’t sure he’d ever looked better. In that moment, I realized despite my fears about us getting caught together, I loved having him in bed next to me. This was the first time he’d spent all night with me, and while we hadn’t planned it that way, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to him sneaking across the hall before dawn.
“It’s okay,” I said, wrapping the back of his neck in my palm, my thumb brushing over the dark stubble on his jaw near his ear.
He nuzzled into my touch. “We could have been caught.”
I nodded. “I know.”
“We have to say something, Oliver. If we don’t, things could get incredibly ugly for both of us.”
He was right, of course. But first, I had to come clean with him about something else. “I know,” I said, blowing out a breath and rolling onto my back to stare up at the ceiling, my hands folded flat against my abdomen. “Last night, you asked me why I signed up to be on the show in the first place.” I rolled my head on my pillow to look at him. “You were right all those weeks ago to not have trusted my motives.”
“Shit,” he breathed, the earlier worry returning to his eyes. “I’m not going to like this, am I?” He scooted up onto his rear to press his back against my headboard.
I spun around to face him, sitting with my legs crossed. I reached for his hand, thankful when he let me take hold of it. “Don’t worry; it’s not completely terrible. At least, I don’t think it is. I do have some integrity, you know?”
He swallowed audibly, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “No, I know that. Although learning you didn’t would be totally on-brand for me. I have a habit of falling for liars and assholes.”
“You’ve fallen for me?” I asked quietly, my index finger absently stroking the underside of his palm.
Elijah leveled me with a disbelieving look. “What do you think?”
It was my turn to swallow audibly. “I think … for as much as you and I talk about so many different things, we’ve done an outstanding job of avoiding a whole lot of others.” It wasn’t lost on me that in saying this, I was derailing the conversation—again. He’d wanted to talk about my reason for coming on Happily Ever After, and I’d inadvertently just kicked off the relationship talk.
He canted his head to the side and studied me intently. “Out of curiosity, what did you think it meant when we discussed being together, openly, once we leave L.A.?”
“I don’t follow.” I wasn’t being willfully obtuse. Elijah and I certainly enjoyed each other’s company, and we were both really fucking fond of the orgasms we gave to one another. And while I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I’d fallen for him, the depth of Elijah’s feelings for me wasn’t a topic we’d broached yet. I might be totally new to relationships, but I was pretty sure you could be in one without actually having to fall in love with the other person. Wasn’t that what dating was all about, anyway—figuring that shit out? It just so happened that I already had, and well before we’d ever officially gone on a date. With each other, that was.
“Oliver.” He huffed and shook his head disbelievingly. “What have I told you since the very beginning of all this?”
Frankly, he’d told me a lot of things, but in the context of this conversation, I knew what he was getting at. “That you came here to find love.”
He pushed up onto his knees and moved across the mattress until he was directly in front of me. He tugged my chin upwards to look at him. “That’s right,” he said, his lips hitching to the side in the beginnings of a smile. “Maybe I should have been more clear, though, because it seems like you missed the part where I fell in love with you.” He pressed his mouth softly to mine. “I never took you for a dumb jock, you know.” He laughed against my mouth, and I joined him, launching forward to tackle him flat on his back.
Throwing my leg over his hips, I locked him in place and peppered his face with kisses. “You love me.”
He nodded. “I do.”
I laced our hands together, bracing them on either side of his head. He stared up at me, his eyes flicking between my own. “I love you too, you know.”
“You don’t have to say it back. I know this is—”
I squeezed his fingers between mine. “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it. In fact, this is the first time I’ve said it at all. I don’t go around—“
It was Elijah’s turn to cut me off. Canting his body quickly upward, his abs flexing into a ridged six pack that would make underwear models weep with envy, he cupped the back of my skull and pulled my face forward. When our lips met, he fell backward again, bringing me with him. “Say it again,” he whispered against my lips.
16
Elijah
“So,” I said some time later as Oliver and I lay in bed on our sides facing one another.
We probably needed to get our asses up and go join the four other guys still here, but with nothing on the schedule until later tonight, I wasn’t quite ready to leave the sanctuary of Oliver’s room.
“So.” A silly, happy smile split his face.
“You’re staring at me,” I told him, a stupid, smitten smile of my own lifting my cheeks.
“In case you haven’t noticed, I like staring at you. You’re fucking gorgeous, Elijah.”
I felt my grin grow even wider, and my cheeks heat with the weight of his admiration. I didn’t think I’d ever get over hearing him talk like this. Of course, I’d dated beautiful people before, but ever since I’d first stumbled across that magazine cover he’d posed for all those years ago, Oliver had been my idea of masculine perfection. Every little thing about him—from the awkward bend in his left pinkie from when he’d broken it wrestling with his younger brother when they were kids or the white, jagged scar that bisected his right eyebrow that was the result of a skiing accident after college—was attractive to me. Knowing that he was equally enamored of my appearance was a heady rush.
“Not that I don’t love hearing you extoll my virtues, but we should probably join the guys. They might come looking for one of us again.” It had been at least an hour since Brett had led Matty back to the kitchen, promising to give him the cooking lesson I’d initially offered up.
“We will,” he said, “in a minute, though. I wanted to finish talking to you. You distracted me earlier.” He grinned cheekily as we’d distracted each other equally. Me with his dick in my mouth and him with his talented hands wrapped tightly around mine.
“It doesn’t matter.” And I meant it. At this point, I had the only words that mattered.
“I wasn’t lying before when I said it wasn’t a big deal. I honestly don’t know why I’ve kept it from you this long.”