Making up my mind spur of the moment, I leap onto the bed. I have a half a second to panic that it won’t hold the strength of my weight landing on it, and then I’m straddling her, swallowing her surprised whompft sound with the squeaks of the bouncing mattress. She really needs a new bed. This one is probably as old as the house.
“Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey! It’s time to get up sleepy head. We have a busy day ahead of us.”
Shelby doesn’t say anything intelligible, outside of ugh and what I think is getoffofmeasshole. Instead, she grabs the edge of the blanket, attempting to pull it over her head while burrowing down inside of it. I roll off the bed, landing on my hands and knees, and yank of the blanket, pulling it clean away from the mattress and onto the floor.
“Hey!” she yells, disgruntlement tinged with laughter. “Give it back,” she whines, curling into a ball.
“Nope! I’ve got breakfast. Then, it’s time to work.”
“Noooo, you asshole. I don’t work on the weekends. Give me back my blanket.”
She sounds petulant, so unlike herself, and it’s freaking adorable. I climb back up on the bed, grabbing a wrist in each hand and holding her to the mattress.
“Can’t you leave yet?” she asks, pushing against her bindings. “Surely with a mask, and maybe some aerosol hand sanitizer, it would be safe for you to fly far, far away from here?
“Do you know,” I ask conversationally, as if I’m not actively assaulting her, “that you have a brand-new bathtub wasting away in your storage shed?”
She pushes against me, to no avail, her face scrunched up with the effort. When that fails, she tries to knee me, but all it takes is me dropping my ass onto her hips and she’s affectively pinned underneath between me and the bed.
“Of course, I know, asshole. I’m the one that bought it.” She strains against me again, and I smirk at her frustration, all remnants of sleep forgotten. “Why did you feel the need to pounce on me to tell me that?”
“Because today, we install it.”
She immediately stills, excitement and surprise making her face light up.
“Really? You can do that?”
I scoff at the insult implied at her insinuation.
“Ye of little faith. I’m hurt you even have to ask. We’ll be lounging in that tub before dinner time.”
“Yeah, okay. Absolutely,” she chirps, smiling ear to ear. Then she gives me a bemused look, pushing back against my hold again.
“Ummm, Derrick. It’s hard for me to get up when you’re still sitting on me.”
All her squirming underneath me left an impression, and I waggle my eyebrows at her and give my hips a little thrust.
“Oh, it’s up, and hard. Don’t you worry about that Cobra. But, if I start in on you now, I’ll get never around to installing that tub.”
I lean in to kiss her anyway, debauching her mouth until she’s writhing underneath me for a whole new reason, before I release her wrists and swing my leg up and off of her.
I sit at her kitchen table and watch as she makes a trip to the bathroom in nothing but her shirt and panties. Going in, her hair is a mess, her mouth is caught wide in a yawn. I can hear the toilet flush, the sink run, and finally, the low buzz of her electric clippers.
She leaves the bathroom five minutes later with her hair tucked back into a knot on her head and her undercut smooth and even. Her shirt is draped over her shoulder, her nipples hardened in the air, and I tighten my grip on the Styrofoam coffee cup until I feel it bend under my fingertips. I have to remind myself that I have a goal for today, and a marathon sex session will only derail that. She smiles at me, not bothering to shut her door when she goes back into her room.
How I got so comfortable living with this woman so quickly I’ll never know. It’s scary, honestly, and not something I want to think about. I need to get back in the air, back in the cockpit, before something happens, and I no longer want to.
This is the longest I’ve been without being in the sky since I learned to fly. Even when I was between the Air Force and working for an airline, I still made it into the clouds once a week, renting single passenger planes by the hour.
Thinking on it, this is the longest I’ve been in one place since I left the Air Force. I’ve been on the go, in some form or another, since the military cut me free. It’s strange to think that, as desperate as I am to get into the air again, this is probably the most relaxed I’ve been since I became an adult. It’s easy being here with Cobra, in a way I haven’t experienced before.
It’s something to think on, that’s for sure.
But not today.
She emerges from her bedroom in a paint-splattered, worn t-shirt and another pair of leggings. This pair sports a hole and are obviously used to manual labor.
“You mentioned food?” she asks, and I merely point to the bag of McDonalds on the table, still filled with pancakes and three different types of breakfast sandwiches.
“I didn’t know what you wanted, so I got a little bit of everything.”
“Aww,” she coos in a sarcastic voice. “It’s like in Pretty Woman, when Edward orders breakfast that first day.”
“Would that make me the prostitute, or you?” I ask her, and duck when a hunk of unbuttered pancake gets thrown in my direction.
“I think between the two of us, we know who the whore is,” she smirks, and I have to bow down to her epic burn. And the truth in her words.
“Touché,” I say, giving her a round of applause.
“Thank you, I thought of it all on my own. For some reason, I’m only quick witted around you.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You should,” she grins, before folding up a pancake and shoving it into her mouth.
That. That is what I like so much about being here with her. Jessica eats like a rabbit. Danielle lives off of champagne and air alone. Shelby just shoved an entire McDonalds pancake into her mouth, chipmunk style, and didn’t even think twice about it.
“What?” she asks, giving me a weird look. “Why are you smiling at me like that?”
“Nothing Cobra,” I say, bringing my cooled coffee to my mouth to cover up my grin. “Nothing at all.”
*****
“You didn’t tell me that switching out my bathtub meant knocking down half the walls in my bathroom,” she wails, looking at the bare corner where her shower-bath combo used to sit.
The distress clear on her face makes me laugh, even though I shouldn’t.
“We didn’t remove the walls, moron. Did you see us take down any drywall? The tub was against the studs. There weren’t any walls there to begin with.”
Immediately her face blanks, to be replaced with dawning comprehension.
“Oh. I knew that.”
I chuckle again but refrain from making a point that she knew no such thing.
“What’s next?”
We have removed all the hardware, the drain, and the shower head. Used the electric hand saw to remove the stud holding the bathtub in place, then, together, hauled it out to the street where the trash guys would pick it up. I triple checked that it was okay that we leave it there, but she assured me it would be. According to Cobra, it probably wouldn’t even make it to trash day. There’s a truck that goes around and picks up anything remotely useful from people’s garbage piles.