next time, but that doesn’t mean she might not regret what happened between us immediately after.
Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
After one last ruffling of her hair with both hands, she climbs off the bed and steps closer to me. Sliding her arms around my torso, she presses up and kisses my jaw. Surprised, but happy, I lower my face and kiss her on the lips, the easy intimacy another layer of reassurance that she has no regrets about us and what we just did.
“I’m starving,” she declares when she pulls away. “Let’s make pancakes.”
My eyebrows practically jump off my face they go so far up my forehead. “Pancakes?”
She casts a glance over her shoulder as she saunters to the kitchen, the sway of her pert little ass enticing me to follow her, her sly grin letting me know it’s one hundred percent on purpose. “You’re always trying to get me to eat more. You complaining?”
“No! No. Just surprised is all.”
With a shrug, she bends and pulls out a mixing bowl and a skillet, giving me a delightful show.
“So.” I prop myself in the entry to the kitchen, watching her pull out the high protein pancake mix I like and measuring cups.
“Hmm?” She doesn’t spare me more than the briefest glance.
“We’ve gone all the way to naked now?”
Laughing, more relaxed and joyful than I’ve ever seen her, she measures out the pancake mix and dumps it into the bowl. Then she sets it down and drags her eyes up and down my body. “I have no complaints about that.”
“And this … isn’t just a one-time thing?”
She bites her lip, meeting my eyes, her gaze solemn. “Um … I would be open to that. If you want to, I mean.”
“I would be open to that, too.” I’m careful to keep my voice neutral, since this feels like some kind of weird negotiation, but my heart leaps at the prospect of unlimited sex with Alexis, and my cock twitches. Which doesn’t escape her notice.
Smirking, she returns her attention to the pancakes, surprising me yet again by getting the milk out of the fridge and using that instead of water to make the pancakes. Again, I’m not complaining. But her willingly adding more calories isn’t something I’m used to.
She stifles a snort when she looks at my face again and sees my expression. “Mia, Kate, and I would always have pancakes after a show. It was our tradition. It started out with pancakes at a twenty-four hour diner that was down the street from our first gig. We went there after almost every show for a long time, but eventually it wasn’t practical for a variety of reasons. So we started making them ourselves when we had a kitchen or ordering them from room service when we didn’t.” She glances up at me, her breasts bobbing as she whisks everything together. “They taste better made with milk than water, even if it does add a few more calories. Everyone gets a cheat day, right?”
“Right,” I confirm, my voice raspy. I didn’t realize the significance of post-show pancakes, and the wistfulness in her voice as she described their tradition makes me sad for her. This isn’t what she wanted, making it as a soloist, trying to claw her way out of a bad reputation and back where she was. Her band’s rise was too recent for her to have enough power and influence to trade on, and in some ways being a no name would actually be easier for her. She has to starve herself and reinvent herself and grab at any and all handholds to help her climb out of the pit she found herself in.
“Do you miss them?”
She stops stirring and looks at me, blinking hard and fast, a small, sad smile on her face. “Yes.” The confirmation is barely a whisper. She busies herself with setting the skillet on the stove and turning on the burner, letting the batter thicken a little while she waits for it to heat up. “It was weird, y’know?” she says, her back to me, still facing the stove.
The easy way she carried herself a few minutes ago is gone, replaced by tension, the lines of her back rigid and stiff rather than fluid and supple like they were when I first walked out. Part of me wants to kick my own ass for ruining her post-sex glow, but it seems like she maybe needs to talk about this.