I climb onto the bed beside her, and it’s hilarious how unsteady this little thing is. It sags heavily under my weight, and Evie notices with a grin. I lean my back against the headboard and pull her to my chest. “I’m not going anywhere,” I say into her hair, and then I kiss her forehead.
We stay like that for a minute, and I can feel her quickened breathing against my chest. It makes me smile to know that I have the same effect on her that she has on me. “How are you feeling?” I ask.
She tilts her chin up to me and wrinkles her nose. “I’ve been better.” She then looks down to her hand resting on my chest, and she moves her index finger in a small circle. “I’ve also been worse.” Oh, man. Can she feel my heart trying to pound out of my chest and leap into her hand? It’s embarrassing.
Her smile grows, and her eyes peek back up at me, and yep, she can feel it and it’s going right to her pretty little head. She then lays her head right on my chest where her ear is perfectly centered with my hammering heart. It’s a pointed move. One where she’s saying, Yeah, I know how you feel about me, and I like it.
We spend the entire rest of the day like this until I force myself to go pick us up some dinner. When her stomach settles and her migraine subsides a little, we eat on the couch and watch reruns of Friends with her legs draped over my lap and my arm around her shoulders. It feels so right. So natural. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this content in my entire life. And I’ll say one thing: it doesn’t feel casual.
I think what we’ve shared together today has probably tied us together more than anything physical would have. Although, the night wasn’t completely physical-less. We definitely spent an entire episode of Friends making out on her tiny couch. It was sweet and appropriate (at least that’s going to be my answer when June asks me about it later), and we both cut it off before anything more serious happened. The self-control between us is outrageous. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got asked to be the newest spokespeople for an abstinence program. But unless they pay me a billion dollars, there’s no way I’m going to wear an “Abstinence is Cool!” T-shirt.
Sometime about midnight, Evie falls asleep on the couch beside me. I pick her up and carry her to bed and climb in behind her. Charlie is once again on one side of Evie, and I’m on the other. It’s not the most comfortable thing to sleep in jeans and a shirt, and the bed is so small that my butt hangs off the edge. But honestly, I couldn’t care less. Evie is here with me. I can smell the coconut scent lingering in her hair and hear her taking deep breaths as she sleeps. This feels right, and I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to keep convincing myself that we’re just two casual friends dating.
This feels a lot like falling in love.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
EVIE
I can’t stop smiling, and Jo notices. “Is it my imagination or are you glowing today?”
“I’m afraid I’m going to be glowing red if you aren’t more careful with that curling wand,” I tell her and try to inch myself away from the burning hot hair tool hovering beside my face.
Jake went home this morning but will be here soon to pick me up to go to my parents’ house for dinner. I told Jo about the dinner, and she suggested she come over and help me get ready. But what I really think happened was she called me while I was still wrapped up in Jake’s arms in my bed this morning.
My phone was going to buzz off my bedside table if I didn’t answer it, so I did. That was mistake number one. Mistake number two was trying to whisper to Joanna so I didn’t wake up the sleeping man beside me. But you guessed it, he woke up and leaned toward my ear (aka CLOSER to the phone) to huskily ask who I was talking to.
Want to take a wild guess what Joanna did before peppering me with 101 questions? She squealed. Squealed like a little teeny bopper at a Justin Bieber concert. “He’s there with you, isn’t he?! Oh my heavens, he’s in your bed! It’s only 7:00 in the morning, so I KNOW you aren’t out of bed yet. Don’t lie to me, missy!” She always calls me missy when she thinks her age will suddenly work as a rank card. Like she has the power to ground me or take away my phone.
“Oh, would you pipe down over there. I’ll call you later,” I said in a useless whisper because Jake was RIGHT there in my bed.
“You better!” she sing-songed back to me before I abruptly ended the call—pleased to finally get to end a call before she had the chance.
It was so strange waking up with Jake beside me. I thought I was waking up from the most wonderful dream where a strong, attractive man spent the entire day taking care of me and then snuggled me while we slept. And then when I opened my eyes, I realized a tan, muscular forearm was draped over my shoulder, and I nearly screamed.
I would say nothing happened, but that wouldn’t be true. Oh, it would be true in the physical sense. We didn’t do anything that Pastor Mike wouldn’t have approved of…well, I mean a Southern Baptist mama might not have cared for the interlude during that one Friends re-run, but I’m getting away from myself. What I meant was, something happened in the form of my heart.
When I woke up with Jake’s arms around me and felt his breath tickling my neck, I realized I wanted to wake up like that every morning for the rest of my life. Now, don’t get me wrong. I realize that we are still so new that it would be insane to say something like that out loud. Those are the kinds of thoughts that you are allowed to have but must keep locked away in a secret compartment until somewhere around the six-month-relationship mark when you let them out in the form of a three-word phrase.
But I feel them. And I think Jake does too. He’s just still too scared to admit it to himself.
He and Sam have been through hell and back this past year, which is why I’m perfectly fine waiting on him to adjust to the idea of another serious relationship. If he wants to go on pretending that this is something “casual”, fine by me. But I know it’s not…and I think that, deep down, he does too.
I don’t know of a single man in the entire world that would drop everything, tend to an epileptic woman for a whole day, AND spend the night with her without having sex, and still have casual feelings. Not even a best guy-friend would do that. Well, he might share her bed if his best girl-friend’s couch was as small as mine, but he wouldn’t press soft kisses to her temple when she was sleeping. No. Jake is all romance, and it honestly takes my breath away.
Suddenly, the curling wand appears an inch from my face again, jolting me back into reality. “Tell me everything that happened.” Wow. Jo has a real interrogation-officer thing going on right now, and I’m a little terrified of her.
“Nothing!” I say, craning my neck as far back as I can without falling off the stool.
Joanna lifts a brow. “You’re not holding out on me, are you? I know he was in your bed this morning when I called. And no sense lying to me about it, because I already smelled your pillow, and it smells like Old Spice!”
“You smelled my pillow?!”
If someone was just tuning in, they might think that Joanna was about to scold me for having a man spend the night. Ha! I wish.
“Come on, Evie, didn’t anyone ever teach you how to kiss and tell?”