I pressed my body further into him and whispered,
“We’re good.”
Then I noticed his chest moving, shaking in a strange way. It took a few moments to realize he was silently laughing.
I came up to an elbow and looked down at him again.
“Are you laughing?” I asked, thinking maybe he’d gone temporarily insane with lack of sleep or something.
“Yeah,” he answered.
“Why?”
He did a mini-ab-crunch and twisted so he was on his elbow too, his face in my face, so close, it was the only thing I could see.
“I win,” he murmured and his words were ful of triumph and arrogance.
For a mil isecond, I considered giving his shin a good kick.
Instead, I rol ed my eyes and muttered, “Whatever.” At that, his arms shot around me, he dropped to his back, taking me with him, me mostly on top and he burst out laughing.
* * * * *
It was a long time later when I knew definitely without a doubt that Mace was asleep that I thought he was wrong. It was me who won.
* * * **
It was after ungodly hour in the morning sex. After Mace took Juno out. After a slightly later but stil ungodly hour in the morning couple’s shower that I was making eggs benedict from scratch. Mace was hindering these efforts because he was in the tiny kitchen with me, sipping a mug of coffee, his big body leaning against the counter and getting in my way.
He was wearing faded jeans, no belt, no shoes, hair stil slightly damp. He was also wearing a bit greener than olive green short-sleeved henley. It was a sweet henley mainly because it had been made for a normal man, a man without large, defined, muscular biceps. Therefore, the sleeves fit tight, drawing your attention to Mace’s large, defined, muscular biceps.
My attention on Mace’s biceps was also hindering my cooking efforts. Hol andaise sauce required concentration or it would split and when it split you had to throw it out and start al over which sucked (I knew this because it happened to me a lot).
I was wearing a pair of cutoff jeans shorts and a black, racer back tank with a skul entwined with vines emblazoned on the back in charcoal gray. Like Mace, my hair was wet and my feet were bare.
“The boys’l know I’m comin’ to you at night,” Mace told me.
“How?”
“Babe, the cameras,” he reminded me.
Effing hel . How was I always forgetting about the cameras?
Mace went on, “The Rock Chicks need to be kept in the dark.”
I was whisking the sauce like my life depended on it (which was the way with hol andaise sauce) and I looked over my shoulder at Mace in confusion.
“Why?” I asked.
“They got big mouths, that’s why.”
He was not wrong about that. The Rock Chicks definitely had big mouths.
“Okay,” I repeated. Then something about the cameras hit me, I saw the sauce had thickened and I pul ed it from the burner, trying to keep my cool as I began to feel uncomfortable. “Mace, those cameras –”
“Yeah?”
I set the sauce aside and fished the poached eggs out of the water and put them on the waiting toasted English muffins and gril ed Canadian bacon while I said, “They don’t watch when we, um… you know. Like this morning?”