“There you go,” he said softly as he tossed the towel over the shower door. His eyes sparkled as he quickly reached down and wrapped one arm around my waist and the other behind my knees, lifting me into the air. He turned quickly and carried me back to the bedroom like a child, making me squeal. He smacked my ass and told me to hush.
“Ow!” I playfully bit at his neck.
“Oh, we’re on to biting, are we? You’ll regret that.”
“You started it!” I reminded him. “You can’t smack my ass without expecting retaliation.”
“It was a romantic slap on the ass.”
He tossed me in the middle of the unmade bed, and I grabbed at the sheets to keep from bouncing. Aiden crawled in beside me and pulled me up against his chest. He kissed me lightly on the lips and pushed wet hair from my forehead.
“My hair is going to be a disaster,” I commented.
“I like it,” he said. “It’s all over the place. Makes you look freshly fucked.”
I rolled my eyes.
“I am freshly fucked.” I giggled. I wasn’t much of a curser, but Aiden’s dirty mouth was contagious.
“Yeah,” he agreed, “I like that, too.”
I found myself tracing the edges of some of the tattoos on his chest. Well, at least where I could find an edge—they all blended together. My fingers ran over one of the more predominant ones over his right pec, where he had DAD inscribed in elaborate, scripted letters with birth and death dates below.
“Tell me more about you,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Maybe your family? You don’t talk about them much.”
Aiden looked away and shrugged.
“There isn’t a lot to say. I haven’t talked to my Mom in years, and she’s all there is.”
“Does she ever try to contact you?”
“Yeah,” he replied softly. “She calls on my birthday and Christmas like clockwork.”
“You don’t answer?”
“No.”
I had the feeling I was treading on thin ice, but I pushed forward anyway.
“Why not?”
Aiden sighed and rolled to his back, placing his hand behind his head.
“She dwells,” he finally said.
“Dwells on what?”
“Dad, having me too young, everything about her life she didn’t think was fair—all that shit. The last time I saw her or talked to her, she was sitting in the middle of the living room with all these pictures of my dad from when he played lacrosse. She had another picture of him on the table, and she was talking to it like he was there.”
“I talk to my Dad’s picture,” I admitted quietly.
Aiden narrowed his eyes at me.
“Why?”