Without a word, he plops down into the chair beside me, grabbing the pack of Marlboros, and pulling one out for himself. He lights it, inhaling before blowing the white cloudy smoke into the air. All without saying anything. In my peripheral, I can make out that he’s wearing only his black briefs. His right ankle sits on his left thigh as he takes drag after drag.

The air around us is thick. Heady. The chill in the air has nothing on the bite of tension sizzling between us. Suddenly, my blood is on fire, my skin blazing. The goosebumps adorning my skin are now there for an entirely different reason. Absentmindedly, I rub the corner of my mouth with my thumb before taking another drag off my dying cigarette.

I don’t want to look over at him. But I do want to. Everything about me turns into a contradiction around him. I hate him. But I don’t. I need him. But I can’t. He tests every boundary I have. Forces me to cross every line I swore I’d never cross. And I don’t think he even realizes it.

After several incredibly awkward moments, he breaks the silence, but doesn’t look at me. “I don’t want you to regret it, Cash.”

The vulnerability and the sadness in his tone is a knife to the chest. Words die in my throat, and I have to swallow hard around the knot in order to respond.

“I told you I would never regret anything with you.” Smashing the nearly gone cigarette into the ashtray between us, I push out of the chair and walk inside. No backward glance. Once inside, I saunter into the kitchen, grabbing a water from the fridge and downing half of it in one go.

Before I know it, he’s behind me. The hairs on the back of my neck stand and another chill runs through me. I set the water bottle on the counter before slowly turning to face him. His ebony hair is disheveled from sleep and the pillow left creases on the left side of his face. My gaze falls to his chest—wide, chiseled, dusted lightly with hair that just last night I was running my hands over. When I look up again, his skilled pink tongue slips out, gliding over his bottom lip before disappearing back into his mouth.

Closing the distance between us, he backs me up until I hit the refrigerator, boxing me in with his arms. My body responds immediately to being in such close proximity to him. An electric current flows from me to him, and it only intensifies when his face comes to my neck. His breath ghosting across my skin.