Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 96600 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 483(@200wpm)___ 386(@250wpm)___ 322(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96600 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 483(@200wpm)___ 386(@250wpm)___ 322(@300wpm)
I couldn’t imagine anyone thinking I would be a good enough mother to have their kids. Not once they saw the state of my bathroom, anyway.
“I was. I would still like to have kids. If it happens.” He shrugged and sounded way too casual.
“It’s okay to say you want to have kids. You’re not going to send me screaming out of here,” I said with a snort of laughter. “Let me guess, you thought that because I’m a sexual deviant, I would never want to be tied down?”
“I think you’d love to be tied down.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “But not in that sense.”
“I wouldn’t mind having a family one day. Not when I’m twenty-five, but one day.” I did not want that last part to be misunderstood. If he planned to have some kind of midlife biological clock crisis, I would have to scram.
No, you wouldn’t, my sense of reality scolded me. And it was right. I loved him way too stupid hard. Maybe that’s why I was suddenly in search of a deal breaker.
To avoid my urge to bring up religion in an attempt to nuke our probably fleeting happiness from orbit, I asked him, “Do you have anything you want to know about me?”
His brow crumpled as he thought. “I know you haven’t been in a serious relationship before. I won’t ask you how many sexual partners you’ve had—”
“Good, because after the other night I don’t know,” I joked.
I hadn’t known before the other night, anyway.
He smiled but turned serious again. “And I know about your family, through Scott. I suppose my biggest question is about living arrangements in the future.”
“Like…” Did he mean we were going to move right in together? He’d done it before, if I’d heard him correctly.
“Like what happens when we decide to cohabitate.”
When. Not if.
“You live in California. Your friends are in California. My life is spread all over the East Coast. Which one of us compromises?” He wasn’t asking for an answer, I could tell. Just musing aloud about a problem that, with another person, a settled person who knew exactly what they planned to do with their life, could have swiftly made being in love pointless.
“Hmm, do you uproot your business headquarters and your apartment and that famous restaurant you own a huge stake in?” I ticked them off on my fingers. “Or do I leave behind my lucrative dispensary job and the luxurious accommodations afforded by my parents’ pool house?”
He gave me a bashful laugh. “Fair enough. I didn’t want to assume.”
“That’s in the future, though,” I stressed.
“Absolutely. I don’t expect you to move in with me right this second.” He patted his chest in an invitation I couldn’t turn down. I snuggled up to him and sighed with a contentment that felt dangerous to the part of my brain convinced that he couldn’t really love me.
Would it be so bad to believe he was in love with me? That he wouldn’t change his mind suddenly and throw me on a plane back home? Scott had been so concerned that Matt would fall for me, and I would break his heart. I wondered if my brother realized I had a heart that could break, too.
The thought of Scott made me groan in dismay. “Dude. We have to tell my brother.”
Matt hissed an inhale between his teeth. “I was trying not to think about that.”
“It’s going to suck so hard when he finds out he was right about us.” I toyed with one of the buttons on Matt’s shirt. “Do you tell him? Or do I?”
“I think I should,” Matt says resignedly. “Rip it off like a bandage.”
“How are you going to tell him?” I was more concerned with what Matt would tell Scott. The two of them knew each other in a completely different context than I knew my brother. “I might be able to pick up some pointers for how to communicate with him as an equal and not as a little sister.”
“You overestimate his respect for me,” Matt quipped. “I’m going to tell him the truth. I’m in love with you, and I’m hoping that we’re going to be together forever, and, if he doesn’t like it, I’ll give him one free punch.”
I laughed. “That’s so immature.”
“I hope you’ll still love me when my jaw is wired shut. Your brother is a beast.” Matt kissed the top of my head. “Can we wait until after our New York week, though? I don’t want to get hit in the face unless you’re absolutely sure I love you.”
“Getting hit in the face for me might prove your love,” I teased.
“There has to be a better way,” he said. “I’m too pretty to get hit in the face.”
I leaned up and blinked slowly, taking a long, dreamy look at him. “You know, now that we’re not pretending not to be into each other that way, I can tell you that you are so fucking handsome.”