“Have you been up a long time?”
“An hour,” I replied, with a shrug. “I had some coffee.”
“Coffee is not breakfast,” Chance said. “I’ll make you something good.”
“You’re spoiling me.”
He laughed. “What would you like to eat?” he asked. “Waffles and eggs or pancakes and strawberries?”
“Mmm, they both sound so good.”
“Both then.”
I laughed. “No way,” I said. “I’ll go with pancakes today.”
“Good choice,” he nodded. “I was feeling like pancakes, too.”
I snuggled in closer to him and buried my face in his chest for a moment. I loved the weekends. Weekends meant two whole days of quality time with Chance. We cooked together, or rather he cooked, and I read him recipes and passed him things. We had long conversations on his sofa while we sipped wine. We watched educational TV specials and tried to pick out all the inaccuracies. Sometimes we went for walks around his neighborhood and made up stories about all the families, couples, and people we saw along the way.
We did mundane things together, things that best friends might do or new couples, but it was wonderful for us. Those were the little things that bonded us and kept our relationship fresh and interesting.
Nearly seven months later, Chance and I still had conversations that lasted for hours and hours. The sex was still amazing. It hadn’t fizzled out in any way. It was still hot and urgent and passionate, but it was also familiar now. I knew his body like the back of my hand. I had memorized all the ripples and muscles of his chest. I knew every one of his scars and birthmarks. The intimacy of that knowledge made the sex new and wonderful.
“How come you got up so early today?” he asked.
I hesitated for a moment, and I saw his expression turn alert. The flip side of spending so much time together meant that he knew me so well that there was nowhere to hide. I couldn’t hide my emotions because he caught on, even to the smallest change in tone and expression.
“Nothing.”
“Natalie,” Chance said.
I smiled. “I had a bad dream,” I said, trying to pass it off as nothing.
“About?”
“You really want to hear about my dream?”
“You know I do.”
I decided to use an old recurring dream from my childhood. “I was driving my car through the ocean, and the waves were about to swallow me whole. I was driving through a storm, too, so the lightning was nearly blinding me.”
“That’s the recurring dream you used to have when you were fourteen,” Chance said, looking at me with one raised eyebrow.
“Did I already tell you about that?”
“You did.”
“Oops.”
“Oops is right.” He nodded, sitting up in bed. “You were worrying again, weren’t you?”
“Um…”
“It’s Jason, isn’t it?”
We hadn’t really discussed our run-in with Jason in detail. We had brushed off the incident and tried to distract each other. And as the days went by and nothing happened, we had decided there was nothing to discuss. Maybe Jason had finally given up? Maybe he had set his sights on some other girl? Though a part of me was uncomfortable with that, too. I was worried about how he might react to another girl.
I wasn’t surprised that Chance knew what I was worried about, but I also didn’t want him to think I was too worried.