Unable to contain the excitement, I had barged in holding two mugs full of coffee. I couldn’t wait until later as I had planned. Frank sat on the couch, going over the case files on the drug doctor, and Kace sat at his desk, watching surveillance footage on his tablet. For three days, I had been holding in the news because I was waiting on the rush delivery of our funny matching mugs.
Mine had cuffs and said: I lock people up.
His had a gun with a sonogram banner hanging from the barrel that said: I knock cops up.
He read mine first and laughed. When he read his, he cried.
It had been the happiest day of our lives.
I want to crush the ceramic between my fingers and bleed memories out of me, but I don’t dare to take this from him too. So, I stick a note on the inside, and add the paper clips back in, one by one.
The next morning, I wake up to Kace standing over me with two cups of coffee in his hand and wholly dressed, showered, and smelling too clean for someone who spent the whole night awake, going over the case with me.
“What time is it?” I grumble and wipe the sleep from my eyes.
“Eight.” He shoves the steaming mug in my face. “Necromancer mojo.” That’s precisely what it said on the cup
The waft of freshly brewed coffee infiltrates my nostrils, luring me up from the depths of sleep. The covers are tossed aside, so I can stretch my muscles. Lately, sleeping on the couch tenses me up.
“Tired?” Kace casts his eyes downward, looking into the dark pool of liquid.
Before reaching for my favorite drink in the world, I ask, “Did a fly fall in there?” I check myself before taking a sip.
Usually, Kace made dark, super-strong coffee, but today he made it toxic.
“Whoa,” I say, smacking my lips together at the bitterness. “You can really wake the dead up with this stuff. What did you do? Poor the whole container of grains into the filter?”
“Something like that. You’re going to need it. We’re in for a full day.”
“What do you mean?” Files litter our living room floor, so I tiptoe over them on my way to the kitchen for some extra sugar and food.
He follows me through the open floor plan to the kitchen island and plops himself down on one of the stools. “We’ve got a body. Aaron Borshin. We have to go in like five minutes.”
“He’s dead. He can wait until I put some pants on.” After adding a heaping spoonful of sugar, I realize what Kace just said. “Cap said I wasn’t allowed on active crime scenes, only interviews.”
“He said nothing about you waiting in the car while I check it out.”
“Okay.” I grab some frozen waffles from the freezer and pop one into the broken toaster that always overheats.
He mutters something incoherent.
I’m not used to peopling in the morning. Most days post-Tyler, I slept through Kace leaving and arriving. Making sure he ate wasn’t high on my priority list—hell, most days I forgot to eat.
“Want some?” I hold the box out, catching his eyes on my bare legs.
He grunts and hangs his hand on his neck, the material around his shirt straining against his muscles. He’s about to say something dirty, I can tell. He’s licking his lips and hungrily eyeing me.
“Waffles!” I clarify with a shout. “For breakfast.” My voice cracks as he stares up at me with a heated gaze. I clear the fire from my throat and open the freezer, letting the frigid air cool my blazing cheeks, preferring the absence of him and solitude of me. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?” he asks from right behind me.
Too close! My brain screams.
His body presses against mine, trapping me between the cold breeze and the radiating heat of his perfectly sculpted torso. Before I think, his breath falls on the skin between my neck and shoulder, where the stretched-out T-shirt doesn’t reach, and trickles down my spine.
I hang my head, clutching the cold cardboard box to my chest, and use the fridge to hold me up with my other hand. Despite the heat pooling in my center, I’m frozen in place. I’m not ready to feel his arms around me or to remember what it’s like to be his, but my body is.
It’s crying—pleading for human contact—to break the bubble of isolation my sadness has thrust upon me. During the day, his absence arms me with the ability to reduce the impact of his touch. Time apart helps us stay apart.
But he’s right behind me, and time is against me.
Without words, there’s no way to force him back with my mind. My tongue lacks its sharpness; my thoughts are silenced by the pounding drum of my heart, and my body trembles, shaking with intensity.
He flips me around gently, commandeering gravity and tilting the earth to bring us closer without actually moving. His hand cups my burning cheek while the fingers of his other hand massage the nape of my neck, before threading themselves through my tangled hair. I shiver as his wordless moans hum over my lips, and I shut my eyes, recognizing the familiar tune of love.
Reduction—inches to micrometers. So close to colliding after eliminating months of distance in less than a minute. All I have to do is tremble, and we’d touch like we hadn’t touched since Tyler.
I moan shamelessly, willing my brain to override my heart, constantly telling the erratically pulsing muscle that Kace can’t fill the emptiness. His kisses won’t heal me; they’ll bruise me so deeply, I’ll feel it in my bones.
Then why can’t I pull away? Why can’t I open my eyes or push him back?
And how does he suck the air out of my lungs, the room—the atmosphere—and make it so his mouth is an oxygen mask? Like I’m suffocating, and he’s the only source of air left for me to breathe. The only way to get it is to latch on to those perfect lips.
The draw to live is much too strong for someone who just yesterday didn’t care for a future.
When our lips touch, they aren’t wild or attempting to recover lost time. The kiss is sweet and gentle, only slightly urgent. Restraint is his ally, and my foe.
The more our lips glide over one another, the more life he breathes back into me, returning my stolen breaths a little at a time.
His hands lower over my hips, gliding over the thin straps of my panties to stop right below my butt cheeks.
I sigh into him, melding our rapidly beating hearts together as if clothes do not exist.
Or skin. Or flesh. Or bone.
The burning smell of… “Waffles,” I mumble against his lips, but it’s lost somewhere between his grunts and the increasingly fervent kisses.
His tongue slips through my lips, summoning mine. They briefly meet for too short a time, barely say hello before the smoke detector goes off, interrupting us.
We hang in the moment, memorizing it until the noise gets too loud to ignore.
He tears himself away first. “It’s not the first time our kissing set the smoke detector off,” he says, as he grabs an old magazine from the island and waves it around while I glance at the gray vapors exiting the heated slots of the appliance. “I think you need new waffles.”
“We need a new toaster.” I chuckle as I unplug it and slice through the smoke clouds with the wave of my hand.
He smiles wide. “What number is that?”
One too many smiles. I pluck the charcoal waffles out of the toaster and place them on a plate, just outside the back door, feeling guilty as all fuck and desperate to repeat the kiss again.