Thursday, January 15, 2015

Best Kind Of Broken

The door to the dining room swings open again and this time Levi walks through, a box of tools in his hand.
Cougar Mable immediately lights up. “Morning, Levi!”
“Morning, Mable.” He smiles at her. He scowls at me.
I notice his face is now clean-shaven and a part of me misses his scruff—what? No. NO. I do not miss his scruff. Missing scruff is for weirdos.
I scowl back at him and start grating Swiss cheese.
“Where’s the fire alarm in here?” he asks in his work voice. It’s a very different voice than his get-out-of-my-way voice or his if-you-want-hot-water-wake-up-earlier voice.
Mable points to the wall, looking far too happy to be of service, and I keep my eyes down as he moves past me. As I sprinkle cheese over the quiche, I can’t help but notice how grated Swiss kind of looks like white scruff.
I’m not a weirdo.
Quiche finished, I turn to start sautéing vegetables and my gaze automatically darts to Levi. He’s so distracting. His arms are all raised, and his shoulders are all broad, and he’s fixing crap, and it’s just… it’s just… annoying.
You know what else is annoying? The fact that the freaking fire alarm is right by the stove.
With a huff and a puff and some choice words in my head, I grab my sliced bell peppers and force my feet to the stove. I throw the vegetables into a frying pan, grab a wooden spoon, and ignore Levi’s close proximity.
My body hums.
I ignore that too.
I steal a glance in his direction and watch as the corded muscles in his forearm flex as he unscrews something on the alarm box. Why does he have so many muscles in his forearm? That can’t be healthy.
I drop my eyes to the frying pan and focus on bell peppers, because bell peppers are interesting and they don’t have backs the size of Alaska or copious amounts of forearm muscles.
The forearm muscles that I’m not thinking about lightly brush my shoulder, and the humming inside my body knots together and zips around like a bumblebee on crack.
I casually turn down the heat on the stove, like that’s the reason I’m suddenly a human vibrator, and go back to stirring. Levi goes back to screwing.
Bell peppers.
I’m thinking about bell peppers.
Levi brushes against me again, except this time his forearm grazes my breast and my body immediately goes wild, like I’m some love-starved teenager, and the humming dives low in my belly and the stove gets hotter and my breaths get shallow and suddenly bell peppers are the sexiest vegetable on earth.
Welcome to Hotel Horny Women, home of scruffy cheese and sensual produce.
From the corner of my eye, I catch his Adam’s apple bobbing with a nervous swallow, which can mean only one thing. The boob brush was an accident.
Well, crap.
If he had been trying to cop a feel with his Hulk-ish forearm, I could have responded with some kind of snarky “you’re a pervert” comment. But it wasn’t on purpose and somehow that makes it sexier, and now the cracked-out bumblebee is buzzing in my nether regions and my hands are starting to tingle and why the HELL is this stove so hot?
I turn the burner down another notch and take a slow, deep breath. I have a boyfriend. A great boyfriend. So this sexual frustration I feel around Levi is nothing to get my bee-loving panties in a bunch about. I just need to calm down.
Levi lowers his arm for a moment, his eyes still on the alarm, and stretches his neck.
Ah, the neck stretch. The universal sign of stress. Well, at least I’m not alone in my frustration. My hot, distracting, pants-are-so-inconvenient frustration.
Wait, what?
Who said anything about pants? I am NOT thinking about pants—or lack thereof. Damn you, bell peppers!
I toss the wooden spoon to the side and move back to the counter, where the threat of being turned on by a handyman or, you know, a sautéed vegetable is much less severe.
I stare at the scruffy quiche and bite back a groan. What was I thinking, living under the same roof as Levi? There’s no way I’ll survive the summer.

Hell, I can barely survive breakfast.

Excerpt 2
My black and white paint tubes are still out from the last time I painted. I’m not sure where my colored paints are. Maybe in one of the unopened boxes I brought from my dorm? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m not really in a red or green or yellow mood, and haven’t been for quite some time.
A few blonde curls fall into my eyes as I stretch my arms out, and I hastily blow them away. Once again, I didn’t bother to straighten my hair after my warm shower last night—I needed to rinse Matt’s buttery saliva trails from my skin—so of course my locks are a poofy mess, which is why I hate showering at night!
Holding the paintbrush between my teeth, I quickly pull my hair into a haphazard bun and imprison my curls.
Sunlight pours in through my bedroom window, warming the floorboards beneath my feet as I wiggle my toes and stare at the blank canvas.
Still staring.   
A good twenty minutes goes by before I finally set my brush to it, and when I do, it’s a giant black stroke. Then another. I brush at the canvas until it’s nearly covered in darkness. I add white. I smudge it into gray. I change my mind and jab more black on there.
I don’t know what I’m painting yet, but that’s not unusual. I typically don’t know where I’m going when I start a painting. The image just… happens, and sometimes it’s not even a real image. Sometimes—most times, lately—it’s just an array of colors and brushstrokes that feel like something more than look like something.
A few quick knocks pull my attention to my door.
“Come in,” I call out.
It creaks open and Ellen steps inside with two canvases. “Here you go.”
“Thanks,” I say. “And thanks for lending me your spare keys yesterday too. My set is lost somewhere in this mess.” I gesture at the mounds of laundry, books, and boxes about my room.
“No problem.” She sets the canvases by the wall and watches me paint for a moment. “Why is everything you paint only black-and-white? What happened to those beautiful color paintings you used to do?”
Why does everyone care?
“Don’t overthink it,” I say. “I’m just in a phase.”
“Right,” she says with knowing eyes. “Well. Enjoy your day off.” She turns and disappears into the hallway.
I go back to painting, thinking about all the times Ellen encouraged me to pursue my passion for art.
She bought me my first set of paints. My first real paintbrushes. She paid for my first art lessons and hung my first real painting—a bright orange sun shining over a purple lake surrounded by yellow flowers—in the center of her living room like it was a priceless piece of art. Like it was special.
I stand back and look at the muddled gray colors in front of me. I frown. It’s not quite what I want to see. It looks… wrong, somehow.
My eyes skip to my bedroom window, drawn by a flash of movement outside. I see Levi running up and down the stone steps behind the lavender field. He does this almost every day.
Today it’s cloudy outside and the sky is darker than usual, which means a storm is coming. My heart starts to race.
I watch Levi scale the steps again. His hair is all mussed up like he’s been shoving his hands in it, and he’s wearing a pair of gym shorts and his worn-out ASU T-shirt. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen him in that shirt, running laps or bleachers. His dad, Mark, gave it to him for his sixteenth birthday, and I swear Levi wore it every day for two weeks after that. He was so determined to play football for ASU. He was always so dedicated and driven, so focused. He was a teenage boy with big dreams and few problems.
I wonder who he is now. Who’s that guy running up and down those old stone steps?
I used to know him. I don’t anymore.
Sharp sadness sinks into me, cold and dark, and I suddenly want to run outside and throw my arms around him. I want to bury my face in his chest and cry into his college T-shirt like a lost little girl.
I pull my eyes away from the window and look back at my gray painting.
I put my paintbrush away. It no longer looks wrong.

Excerpt 3
It’s late, and most of the inn guests are already asleep.
I wait until I hear the TV click on in Levi’s room before I start plugging everything I own into the wall.
We argued today. We avoided each other. And aside from the weird look we exchanged in the hallway this morning and our little spat in front of Zack, everything is back to normal.
Which means I owe Levi for the cold shower I had to take.
I turn everything on and the lights go out. I hear the TV die in the next room and crawl onto my bed with a smile.
“Pixie!” Levi’s irritated voice rings through the walls and I’m feeling happier than a mature person should.
I hear stomping, and then he opens my bedroom door. Just opens it. Like he has the right to just waltz into my room. I could be naked in here; he doesn’t know.
“You’re going out to the fuse box this time.” He steps inside, and now he’s standing just a few feet away, pointing his finger at me.
I’m on the bed, trying to look casual, like lying in the dark playing games on my phone is perfectly normal. The only light in the room is coming from the glow of my phone and the half-moon outside, so we both look blue and soft. And in the blue softness, I see he’s shirtless.
I see Levi without a shirt on almost every morning, but I’ve never seen him half-naked in the dark, and something about it makes my body feel electric.
“Not going to happen,” I say.
He steps closer. “Well, I sure as hell am not marching outside to turn the power back on.”
I shrug. “Fine with me. I don’t need electricity tonight. I can watch TV on my fully charged phone.” I wiggle said phone at him.
He sighs. “You don’t understand. I was looking up the contact information for an alarm company I found so I can call and schedule the installation tomorrow. I need the Internet, Pix.”
“Then use your phone.”
“My phone is dead.”
The boy never charges anything. He almost makes the whole fuse-blowing thing too easy.
“Well, that’s too bad. I guess you’re going to have to turn the electricity back on after all.” I pretend to be very interested in my game.
“Let me use your phone. Just for a minute.”
“No.”
“Come on. It’s for Ellen.” He implores me with a pouty face I’ve seen him use on his mom a dozen times.
I scoff. “Please.”
“Dammit, Pixie.” The pout is gone.
“Maybe tomorrow you’ll remember to charge your own phone. Or hey, better yet, maybe you’ll let me have a hot shower.” I make a big production of pressing random buttons on my phone.
He slumps his shoulders like he’s accepting defeat, then whips out his arm and tries to swipe the phone from my hands. Sneaky bastard.
I pull my phone back and kick at him with my foot, but he grabs my ankle—because I’m not exactly a ninja with my kicking skills—and then we both freeze.
Because now I’m leaning back on the bed with my legs spread apart, and he’s got one hand on my ankle and the other on the bed next to my hip where he was reaching for my phone, and his body is in between my legs, which are completely bare except for the tiny gym shorts I have on, and my right arm is raised over my head with my cell phone still out of his reach, but my back is arched and my shirt has come up so my stomach is completely exposed and I’m hot all over.
Hot. Heat. Everywhere.
I mean, really. We look like we’re in the middle of having sex, but with clothes on. My body knows this. His body knows this. And our bodies are really, really happy about this.
He’s looking at me with nothing in his eyes except want. And I like it. No, I love it.
This must show on my face because his hand—still wrapped around my ankle—moves up my leg an inch, and he watches my reaction.
I try not to react because, hell, he can’t win. He can’t just be asshole Levi all day long and then climb into my bed at night and touch me wherever he pleases.
Ugh. Yes he can.
I part my lips and he slowly, slowly slides his warm hand up my calf and, holy hell, I could orgasm right here. I might, actually.
My calf.
My calf.
He’s touching my calf and I’m more turned on than I’ve ever been in my life.
His hand shifts again, and the only thought in my head is, Go higher, go higher.
Please, dear God, go higher.
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