Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 87181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 436(@200wpm)___ 349(@250wpm)___ 291(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 436(@200wpm)___ 349(@250wpm)___ 291(@300wpm)
“You look like you’ve been waiting for this day your whole life.”
“Accurate.” I smiled and walked over to him. He handed me a hot cocoa, and I took a sip. I raised an eyebrow. “Is that Kahlua liquor in my hot cocoa?”
“The one perk of adulthood.”
I smiled, and I kissed him.
I kissed him.
It wasn’t for a show. It wasn’t to push forward our fake relationship in front of people and make them believe that we were something real. I kissed him because that was something we did now. We kissed in private. And based on last night, he was pretty good at kissing all parts of me if I did say so myself.
It felt so right.
The best part about kissing Kai was that he kissed me back. There was something so rewarding about kissing a man you knew wanted to be there with you fully, completely, without question. After our night before, I knew Kai was into me the same way I’d been into him. Maybe that was why the kisses felt different now—because they were real.
He pulled me into him, holding my body with the extra one hundred pounds of clothing packed against me. “You know,” he whispered against my mouth. “Instead of building a snowman, we could do what we did last night. I liked what we did last night.”
I chuckled and nuzzled my nose against his. “Would you do that thing with your tongue again?”
“Oh, I’d do that thing with my tongue again.”
“With the flip, flip, slide?”
“I will flip, flip, slide you all day, all night.”
I rested my forehead against his, closed my eyes, and moaned gently. “Tempting, tempting. But think about the snowman family we are about to make.”
“A family?”
I pulled back slightly. “You thought we were going to build one solo snowman?”
Kai’s brow raised. “I thought that was the plan, yes.”
“So, he could be alone at night, standing there with no one to watch the sunset with?”
“Our snowman is watching sunsets now?”
“Based on the direction we build him, yes. Also, we have to get the carrots and the scarves for them. Oh! And black licorice for their smiles. And button eyes and—”
“And I’m not doing the flip, flip, slide thing, am I?” Kai asked with a scrunched-up nose.
I let him go and shook my head. “No, not now.” I started for the door and paused. I looked over my shoulder and found Kai smiling at me. It was a smile that I wasn’t supposed to witness. A smile that was supposed to be his and his alone, and that smile was made because of me.
I hoped he’d keep looking at me like that. As if I were his favorite, random surprise.
“We can do flip, flip, slide after the fireplace adventures, though,” I offered up.
He walked over to me, smacked my butt, and grinned ear to ear. “As long as you do stroke, stroke, choke, we have a deal.”
We built a snowman family with carrots and all. They’d faced the sunset, and I made Kai promise me we’d watch their first sunset with them that evening. At that moment, we put on all our winter gear for the second time that day, and I realized just how much Kai liked me.
You knew a grown man was into you when he was willing to bundle up twice a day to go in freezing temperatures to watch a sunset with a fake snow family. I could die happy thinking about it. That was the kind of stuff I wrote about in my novels. I never thought I’d be able to live out those moments, too.
Though, my favorite part of the day wasn’t the building of the snowman family. It was Kai slowly opening up to me more and more.
“I don’t think I loved her the way that love is supposed to be loved,” he confessed as we sat on the tire swings in the backyard, bundled up in our winter gear. We swayed back and forth, looking at the fallen snow. Our cheeks were blushing red from the chilly air kissing our faces. Our noses were a vibrant apple tone, too.
Kai didn’t mention his past relationship often, so I was all ears.
My hands wrapped around the tire chain, and I leaned in his direction, resting my head against the metal. “What do you mean?”
“She was my first and only partner. When I moved out to Chicago at eighteen, I worked at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant where Penelope was the owner’s daughter. We instantly clicked, and I fell for her. I fell for how she made me feel and how she seemed so engulfed with my entire being. I’d never had that before. I never had people…care about me.”
I intently listened as he continued. His head tilted down as he stared at the snow-covered grass. “My parents are better now. They figured things out over the years. Mano gets the best parts of them, which is great. I’m glad my little brother grew up in a better situation than I did, but also…there’s this odd sense of jealousy I have.”