Getting up, I held my hand out to him. “Come on.”
Looking from my hand to me, he frowned. “Where are we going?”
“I’m going to look after you,” I explained, shaking my hand to get him to hurry up.
Slowly, he reached out and took it. “If this is a Townsend way of relieving stress, trust me—none of them work on me.”
I knew of quite a few ways my family dealt with things, and I could confidently say that none of them worked on me, either. The fact he’d experienced that insanity them made me chuckle as I led him up the stairs to my room.
“Uh, I can’t for sure say that this isn’t what some of my family do,” I snickered as I looked over my shoulder at him, laughing harder at his missed step. “But, I can say that this isn’t something weird, and none of them will be jumping out to surprise you.”
Thank fuck—which was what I said inside my head and not audibly. There was no need to give any of it away, yet.
As we reached the top and moved into my room, I pointed at the bed as I veered off to the bathroom. “Can you stay in here while I get stuff together? I’ll call you when it’s ready.”
The blind trust he had in me as he walked over to the bed meant a lot to me. After dealing with my family for most of his life, I wouldn’t have. We were prone to having weird and wonderful ideas, which usually backfired, and he’d probably witnessed more of them than I had.
Pulling out some clean towels from the cupboard, I turned the shower on and made sure I hadn’t left anything embarrassing on the counters and that my underwear from earlier hadn’t landed outside the hamper instead of inside it. Satisfied he wasn’t going to run screaming with disgust, I moved out to get him and grinned when I saw him looking confused.
“I don’t see your computer or gaming system, babe. Didn’t you have something like that?”
I had. Now I didn’t.
“I decided that I didn’t want to use them anymore, so I got rid of them.” There was no way in hell I was going to tell him why.
Sure enough, though, he was a nosy shit head when it suited him. “Why not?”
“The shower’s ready,” I said, changing the subject. “Now, I know men don’t normally—”
“I shower, Ari, every day, so I don’t have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is that you’ve gotten rid of the things that you loved only months ago. What the fuck?” he growled as he stood up with his hands on his hips.
I got that he had an issue about my missing things, but seeing him in his scrubs outside of the ER right now was messing with my brain. They weren’t the light green color I’d been expecting from watching television shows, but a really deep green instead. They also weren’t baggy and ugly. No, the ones he had were more form-fitting. It was the pants that were the genius item, though, with pockets like you find on cargo pants on the side of the leg, like smart cargo sweatpants.
“Well?”
Fiddling with the tie of my robe, I tried to quickly come up with a reason that wasn’t the real one. Not liking being under pressure, my brain didn’t fart, it freaking flatlined.
“Ariana,” Parker growled warningly. “Why don’t you have your games and computer?”
On a scale of one to ten, how pathetic would “because the girl posting photos of y’all together was the total opposite of me” sound? In truth, it wasn’t as clear cut as that, but it was pretty damn close.
“Well, you see, I figured I’d move from the nerdy-gamer-chic type to the non-nerdy-gamer-chic type. We all have to grow up at some point, right?”
His blue-green eyes looked from one of mine to the other, no doubt trying to scent the bullshit in the air. Not that he’d find any. Well, not much.
“Gaming doesn’t make you a nerd or mean that you need to grow up, Ari. It just means you have something that relaxes you.”
“Yeah, and it’s something that kids do with monotonous regularity nowadays,” I pointed out, emphasizing the word kids.
“So? Kids also start biking and horseback riding. It doesn’t make it wrong for adults to do it, too.”
Still.
“I don’t see what the big deal is? Not many people I know in real life do it, so it was about time I moved onto better things.”
I watched as he closed the distance between us, the buttons on his shirt getting closer until they were inches away from my face. He was so close, I could see the tiny individual threads holding them in place.
Tilting my chin up gently with his thumb, he continued frowning. Jesus, if he just did it a little bit more, the space between his eyebrows would look like a baby’s butt crack. Something I decided to share with him.