side was a counter with five chairs. There was even a wrought-iron rack suspended from the ceiling, with gleaming pots and pans hanging from it. Someone would be very happy in this house, she thought; it was a family home. She felt a sudden pain in her chest. She wasn’t looking for that with Enzo. In fact, she didn’t think that was in the cards for her at all. But specifically not with Enzo. She understood that they lived in different worlds. In her world, pots and pans did not hang from beautifully ornate wrought-iron racks. She lived in a world where you had one frying pan and one pot and the yellow enamel was chipping from overuse.
She never really thought of the future. For so long she’d been living from day to day. First she’d had to survive life with her abusive mother. Then, when she moved out on her eighteenth birthday, she’d focused on just trying to make ends meet. Suddenly she found herself thirty years old, without any real dreams of her own, and that scared her more than anything.
But she wasn’t going to dwell on that. She lived in the present. Hell, the second tattoo she’d ever gotten, barely noticeable at her hairline on the back of her neck, said CARPE DIEM. She always seized the day. She was the eternal optimist and she wasn’t going to let the kick-ass kitchen with the kick-ass pot rack change that. Today was about fun. She needed to focus on now, and now was about Enzo and sex. The best sex of her life, actually. And now she was fucking famished.
Opening the freezer, she was ecstatic to find a pint of chocolate ice cream. She took it out and rummaged through the drawers until she found a spoon.
Taking the ice cream back to the living room, she ate a few delicious spoonfuls. Though it was the middle of the night, she was wide awake, and there was no way she would be able to go back to sleep. JL set the ice cream on the expansive wooden coffee table and went back to the kitchen to look through his kitchen drawers, confirming what she already knew: Enzo was a neat freak. Everything was perfectly in place and where it was supposed to be. “But everyone has a junk drawer,” she whispered to herself as she opened and closed drawer after drawer. “Unbelievable,” she muttered at last. The man did not have a junk drawer!
He did, however, have a drawer that held just a small notebook, a pencil, and a few pens, likely for taking notes or for grocery lists. She took out the notebook and the pencil and went back to the living room. She sat on the floor on the plush area rug and began to draw. When she was uneasy, she liked to draw. It was her way of coping with the nervous energy. It got her concentrating on something specific rather than on her twitchy leg that bobbed up and down or the silence that cloaked the massive house. Plus, there was nothing as gratifying as seeing a finished product. It gave her peace. So she sat cross-legged and sketched, ate ice cream, and tuned out the world.
JL wasn’t sure how long she’d been at it when she heard Enzo’s footsteps. “Jamie Lynn?” he asked with a yawn. His boxer shorts rode low on his stomach, making it impossible not to stare at his amazing body. She’d never been with someone who had chest hair. He didn’t have an overabundance, but there was definitely a fair amount. She’d never thought she’d like it, but now that she’d run her hands down his body, she found herself wanting to feel it again.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said with a mouthful of ice cream.
He began to turn off the various lights she’d turned on before lying down on his couch behind her.
“Did you want to be alone?” he asked.
“Not particularly.”
“What are you drawing?”
“Not sure yet.”
He kissed her shoulder. “Are you eating ice cream?” He squinted. “Straight from the container?”
She nodded and held a spoonful to his lips. He shrugged before opening his mouth to eat some. She went back to sketching as he continued to lazily kiss her shoulders and caress her back. She stiffened when his hands roamed down her spine and along her hip to her thigh, where she’d gotten her first tattoo.
“What happened here?” She could tell he’d felt the raised scar that had been hidden by