He grinned and went back to his plate.
I did the same and kept doing it until I heard him say, “This is delicious, baby.”
I looked at him. “It’s Roxie’s recipe for the French toast.”
“Your hand that made it.”
Again I felt melty.
God, I was totally becoming a Rock Chick.
Nevertheless, I decided breakfast in bed every Sunday until that day long in the future when Ren and I were both in a nursing home where we didn’t have kitchen privileges.
“You done with your questions?” he asked, and I nodded. When I did, he stated, “Right. Then we got something else we gotta talk about.”
I hoped whatever it was stuck with the easy vibe of our together togetherness because I was still riding the high of Ava and Luke’s wedding, the fact that I introduced Ren to Mom and Dad (eventually, between Ava and Luke’s dance and cake cutting) and they’d both acted genuinely nice instead of stiffly polite, and breakfast in bed with Ren was the bomb. I was digging easy. We hadn’t had a lot of that. And, with our personalities, this was as easy as I suspected it would get.
“What do we have to talk about?” I asked.
“What I’ve been needin’ to get down to talkin’ to you about since we got back from the mountains, just haven’t had the time.” He sucked back some coffee and finished, “Now we have the time.”
Okay.
Good.
I was happy we were getting to this. So much had been going on I hadn’t thought about it that much. That didn’t mean I wasn’t curious. Then again, I was always curious.
“Shoot,” I invited, grabbing my mug and leaning over him to deposit my plate on the bedside table.
Ren followed suit, lifted one knee and twisted partially to me.
“Shit’s goin’ down at work,” he announced.
Oh man.
This was sure to take us out of easy.
Denying what Ren and I were, having my apartment explode and the rest of all that went down, it didn’t hit me in our together togetherness that an official Ren and Ally would not only include us sharing mundane things like why he parked out front, but also non-mundane things, like how his day was at the office where he was in charge of the legitimate side of a crime empire.
Fuck.
“Okay,” I said slowly.
“And you gotta know what it is,” he went on.
“Okay,” I repeated.
“You also gotta know why it is what it is,” he continued.
I didn’t repeat an “okay.” I just nodded.
He looked away and took a sip of coffee, but something changed in his face that I did not like.
Then he looked back at me and I saw whatever it was I really didn’t like.
But it was familiar. I’d seen it before whenever he mentioned his dad.
“My mother wasn’t in the life,” he shared. “She came here from Chicago after college for a job and met my pop.”