As she walked closer, I couldn’t help my stare from dipping again, taking in her olive skin that was teased by the long, dark hair that hung over it, the narrowness of her waist, the gap between her legs. “Perfect.”

“I thought we could eat at your table.” The wheelchair wasn’t far from the bed, and she rolled it over. “Sound good?”

With Whitney coming over on her day off, I certainly didn’t want to spend our time together with only one of us in bed.

In the last week, even with the pain so present, I’d had more practice at getting up. I pulled back the comforter, sliding my legs over the edge of the mattress, feeling for the ground beneath my toes.

“Wow,” she exclaimed, “look at your improvement.”

Her arm slipped around me, guiding me as I got on my feet, and she put the chair behind me once I turned. I reached for the armrests, taking several seconds to breathe through the throbbing in my legs before I carefully sat down.

“Give me a second,” I told her, the burning traveling down my back and into my ass and to my knees.

She shook her head as she stared at me. “You did amazingly well.”

I waited to speak until the agony died down enough. “Amazing will be when I can do it without wanting to rip my legs off.”

She smiled and moved behind me, whispering into my ear, “We’ll have to agree to disagree.”

She brought me into the kitchen, where I saw several paper bags on the island and a large bakery box.

“What’s all this?”

Her laugh was a sound I wanted to pipe through the speakers of my condo, playing it on repeat. “I brought the ingredients for dinner.”

“And you want me to cook?”

She parked me between the stove and island and moved across from me to the other side of the counter. “I was hoping you could tell me what to do, and I could cook for you.”

Air huffed from between my lips. “Whitney, that sounds like a date.”

“You can call it whatever you want,” she joked, using my own words.

She reached into the bags, removing several different types of cheeses, a box of lasagna noodles, sauce, onions, peppers, and mushrooms along with sausage and ground beef. There was also a loaf of French bread and a bottle of wine.

“Google gave me the ingredients. I’m hoping you know what to do with it all, or we’re going to be eating some absurdly thick noodles with an obscene amount of cheese.”

Her adorable side. I’d seen hints of it but never as evident as it was now.

I couldn’t get enough.

I held out my hand. “Come here.”

With the bags empty, she put them in the recycling basket and came around to my side.