When she’d finished her business and we climbed back into her bed, she turned away from me. Alright. So we were not going to discuss the most life-changing kiss of my existence. And we were very clearly not going for a reprise.

Disappointment flooded me as I gazed at the pink back of her head. But she was still sick.

My fault.

She’d likely come to her senses.

But then she squirmed her perfect buttocks backwards, until her back was against my front and grabbed my wrists, positioning my palms on her lower belly. “You’re better than any heat pack I’ve ever …” Her words broke off with a yawn.

“You need to sleep, Mouse.”

“You won’t leave?”

I inhaled the strawberry of her hair. “I won’t.”

“You promise you’re not going to sneak back to Hell as soon as I start snoring?”

I chuckled. “I don’t believe that you snore. But I told you, I’m here as long as you want me.”

“At least until morning.” She turned her head, grazing her cheek against my chest.

“And … if the electricity returns before then?” I asked, my stomach dropping at the thought.

“Stay until morning. Then we’ll talk.”

She fell silent after that. Sleeping.

But I couldn’t. She was so soft, and small, and delicate in my arms. And tonight was likely the only chance I’d ever get to hold her like this. In the morning, she would remember what I was to her, and what she was to me, and all of this would cease to matter.

“You know,” she slurred, rolling towards me, one hand pressing against my stomach, which dipped under her soft touch. “I haven’t believed in God for a very long time. I stopped when … after my parents … But if you’re real, doesn’t that mean that God … well, that He must be real, too?”

“She,” I corrected automatically. She gasped, and suddenly her eyes weren’t slitted with sleep.

“No! God’s a woman?”

I shrugged. “It’s true.”

She huffed, nibbling on her bottom lip. “Well, I hate her even more now!”

A shocked laugh burst out of me. “You hate Her? Until recently She didn’t exist to you!”

“Well, if she’s real, I have a few things to say to her! Like, what sort of God lets … what happened to my parents … happen? What kind of God lets lovely, innocent youngsters, like my art girls, suffer with cancer?”

I wrinkled my nose. “You’re preaching to the choir, Mouse. She’s universally hated down my way.”

“Well, you’re kind of enemies, aren’t you?” she mused, her fingers absently tracing circles on my stomach. I inhaled deeply for calm—she is not attempting seduction—but my wayward cock was not listening. It pressed against her soft hip, and her fingertips flexed, accidentally—on purpose? I couldn’t tell—grazing just under the waistband of my underwear.