“Sure, but I need you to go kneecap somebody so I can remember who I’m dealing with,” she said with a soft smile.

“If that’s what you need,” I responded.

She shook her head, then took the plate that I offered her.

“And don’t worry. I’m not like this with anyone else, ever.”

“So, why me?” she asked.

I could sense something in that question, a weight that went beyond just the words that she had said.

Because I love you was one of the inescapable thoughts that filled my head.

Because I think you love me too was the other.

But that couldn’t be, and certainly not on her part.

So it was best to keep that to myself, see how this played out.

So I didn’t tell her the truth, but I did answer her question. “You know me better than most people. It’s the same reason I live in this building. You lose your edge if you are always one thing. Expanding out, being different, it just makes me sharper in the end,” I said.

“Um…I guess that was honest,” she said.

I took a bite of my food. “What? You don’t like my answer?”

“Well, let’s just say when you ask someone about you and they tell you that you help them become a better version of them, it’s a little…”

“Self-centered? Dickish?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“I’m those things too,” I responded.

She laughed and then continued to eat her dinner.

“You finished eating?” I asked a few minutes later.

Maybe it was her laugh, maybe it was the realization, or at least acknowledgment for feelings that had been there.

I wasn’t sure what, but the need for her, one that was always there, intensified.

“Yeah,” she said, “I am.”

She taken maybe five bites of her dinner, but from the look in her eye, one that I had come to recognize, she felt it too.

No surprise there.

Every time I was with her deepened the connection, made me want her that much more.

And I sensed it was the same for her.

She opened up to me in ways that I had never expected, and when I lay with her in my arms, I felt satisfaction, contentment at every level.

She was my drug, and I didn’t even try to keep myself from having it.

I walked around the island and met her where she stood.

Everything else faded.

All I cared about was being in the only place that felt right.

And that was inside her.

She lifted her hand and caressed my cheek, then stretched up to kiss my chin, smoothing her face against the rough stubble there.

Then she took her hands lower, caressing me, her touch sending thousands of sensations through my body.

She dropped to her knees and worked open my pants, then leaned forward, inhaled deep.