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Annette was only five minutes late for the party. Hardly late at all. Honestly, a remarkable feat of agility and the efficacy of the high-powered blowdryer she’d splurged on a year ago.
It wasn’t exactly her fault. Anyone would have had a minor breakdown if they were blindsided that the comfy cottagecore future they’d imagined for themselves came to a screeching impending homelessness halt.
Annette had assumed, after nine years of living together, that when Mercie told her that she wouldn’t be renewing their lease that it meant Mercie wanted to live somewhere new. Annette was the organizer of the two of them so she went on a weeks-long hunt of all of the listings in Fhirdiad until she found something perfect.
And Mercedes smiled at her, said it sounded great and showed her the lovely little one-bedroom she’d just signed for in the city center.
Annette might have missed the not-so-subtle hints that Mercedes would be living with Sylvain now.
It was totally fine. She was truly very happy for her friend and her happy relationship.
Any errant negative feelings she did have were more about scrambling for somewhere to live after she’d gotten her heart set on a new place. But she’d handled it fine. There was a quick sob in the bathtub when she realized that the adorable little cottage would be out of reach.
But she’d pulled herself together because it was Dedue’s birthday and they were all going to the Biergarten on the other side of town that was more of a greenhouse than a bar. Annette was too good of a friend to let that effort go to waste over something like losing her adorable dream cottage.
Annette refused to be sullen on a happy occasion. So she bottled it up like the rosé she’d mainlined in the tub. It was going just fine. Okay, she’d destroyed a stranger’s game of giant Jenga while lamenting that she wouldn’t get to live somewhere with flower boxes.
But she’d apologized profusely, and no one yelled at her, so that would be the last mistake of the night.
She was just starting to give herself a little pep talk in the drink line when there was a not so gentle tap on her shoulder. She jumped, swiveling around to see Felix staring at her with his perennially grumpy expression.
They’d fought about him sneaking up in the past and come to an impasse, he was quiet, she got in her head. She didn’t need to yell at him every time he approached her. At least he’d tried to say hi.
It wasn't unusual to hang out with Felix at these sorts of things. They’d floated around each other’s periphery for years, friends of friends in the same circles, crowded to the front row of group pictures together.
She was, however, an absolute donut, and just assumed he was being friendly when he pulled her aside in the drink line.
Felix was never friendly.
“So um… Your roommate is out of the picture.” Felix scratched at the label on his beer rather than look her in the eyes, something she was trying to get used to five years into their friendship. “Are you going to stay in your apartment?”
Annette glanced over to where Sylvain had his arm thrown around Mercedes and sighed. “I wasn’t going to stay there next year. I found somewhere new.”
“That’s… Good?” he said, eyebrows furrowing as he tried to decode her tone.
“It was, but I can’t afford it on my own.”
Felix nodded. “Oh. Good.”
She sputtered. Was he enjoying her pain? Did she not sound properly depressed about the whole thing?
“Not good! I don’t have a roommate anymore so I really have no idea what I’m supposed to do and I’m going to have to move in with my mom or something and my students won’t ever respect me.”
Felix had not caught on to the problem quite yet, staring at her with the sort of quiet amusement he always seemed to meet her with when he wasn’t outright confused.
She didn’t like it. She preferred the confusion to the amusement, but only slightly. Not that she spent much time thinking about that. She had no preferences when it came to Felix because he was always one second away from being evil. And men who were evil were not worth her time even when they were sometimes kind of cute and had good taste in music.
The villain raised an evil eyebrow. “Do your students usually know who you live with?”
“Felix, that's not the point!”
She was winding up into a full-blown tizzy in the middle of Dedue’s birthday party, but Felix grabbed her shoulder and the shock of the contact rendered her quiet enough that he could get a word in edgewise.
“Annette, I need a roommate.”
“Oh, that’s…” Right, he and Sylvain lived together. It clicked at last. She was a donut. “Oh! Why didn’t you say anything?”
He looked unimpressed. “I tried.” Felix let out a long, exasperated sigh as Annette scanned the room for a hole to crawl into. “Would you be interested in living together?”
She, much to her surprise, was.
Whoever lived in this house before Annette was clearly insane.
Home, according to her freshly signed lease, was now a crumbling old cottage on the edge of Fhirdiad, held up by history and a prayer. A real find, right around the corner from the School of Sorcery so she could walk to work. And, even better, absolutely dirt cheap when split with a roommate.
And it was completely and totally fine that it was Felix. She had no feelings about that whatsoever. Nope. Not a one.
Not about him. And definitely not about living with a new roommate for the first time in almost ten years.
It was going to be fine.
She could live with Felix. They were friends. He was mostly quiet and kept to himself and had a preternatural sense for when she was about to hurt herself which would inevitably come in handy when she tried to use her new kitchen unsupervised.
The new kitchen in her beautiful new home that was definitely completely normal.
Annette had maybe been so distracted by the overwhelming charm of the place that she missed some errant details.
Like the blinding lime green paint on the walls. Or the crooked shelving in the kitchen that couldn’t hold plates.
Or the ginormous train set that wove through the rooms, attached by cutouts in the ceiling that were probably not up to code.
Each new space was to be met with a new mystery of who on earth would ever make such a choice. And, as far as Annette was concerned, that was very exciting. Fun, even.
She could just conveniently forget that Felix was allergic to fun. He’d manage.
“I’ll take the upstairs room,” Felix grumbled from his seat on the boxes stacked high in the front hall. “The stairs are stupidly narrow and I won’t have you breaking your neck in the middle of the night.”
“I wouldn’t…” She sighed as he eyed her warily. “I like the downstairs room better anyway.”
The second bedroom looked out onto the tiny backyard and got excellent sunrise views. She’d be able to place her bed right up against the window so the first morning light would wake her and she could start every day all snuggled up and bathed in the warm pink glow of a new dawn.
Felix scoffed, nudging his chin towards the rickety little train tracks that weaved through the house, popping through the living room wall into her new bedroom. “Lucky you, you get to be a station on the madman express.”
“I kind of like the train, too,” Annette said with a genuine smile to an exasperated Felix.
He looked at her like she was insane but shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
And like that, they were roommates.
Felix took days to unpack. He was in and out of the house at odd hours, and most nights when Annette stayed up reading too late she could hear the ear-shattering creak of the one wobbly stair up to his second-floor bedroom.
But it was going well, besides the ever-present boxes that littered random rooms of the house. Over the first week the numbers whittled down bit by bit, and on their sixth day in their new home Annette didn’t trip over even one box.
Felix did.
He landed at the bottom of the narrow staircase, cursing under his breath as Annette scrambled across the house for the source of the noise.
“You okay?” she yelled, ready to call Mercedes to patch him up since apparently, he’d been the one to break his neck.
Felix pushed himself up to standing, his cheek bright red from impact and he gripped his shoulder with a white-knuckled intensity.
“Fine.”
“The death stairs of doom get you?” she asked, deciding he wasn’t lying out of some strange machismo.
Felix snorted, looking at her rather than the source of his injury. “Death stairs of doom?”
“Yeah, you’re all wary of them and…” Felix was starting to do the thing where he flared his nose to keep himself from smiling. “It’s not funny! ”
“Death stairs… of doom.” He was smiling now, full out the way he did when there was good music or he won at all the stupid arcade games he was annoyingly talented and competitive about.
She scoffed, flustered by the way his smile made her stomach do somersaults. “You’re the one who tripped over them!”
His eyebrows knit together. “I didn’t. I tripped over your box.”
“My box?” She was horrified. “Oh no, Felix. I am a civilized person who unpacked all of her belongings on the first day. That, right there, is your box.”
The box in question sat in the front hall, knee-high, dangerous, and not hers.
Felix stared at her for one second longer, eyes dropping to the cardboard trip hazard. “Not my box.”
She approached it like it was a booby trap, circling around the last remaining box in their weird little house.
It had no package label. No sharpied message of books or kitchen. Really it lacked anything at all to indicate anything other than its mere existence as a box.
“Do you know what it is?” Annette asked.
Felix shrugged. “I thought it was yours. The old tenant probably left it behind.”
Which made it a mystery and therefore a thousand times more interesting.
She got down on her knees to investigate, looking for any clues that maybe she’d missed. No awkward bulges or ticking clocks alerted her to the contents. “What do you think is in it?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters.” It was a mystery. “Aren’t you just a little bit curious?”
She looked up from the floor in time to watch Felix cross his arms, feigning disinterest.
“It’s probably train parts,” Felix said.
Annette giggled, trying to push it, but it was surprisingly heavy. “Or atrocious paint.”
Felix kicked it with his toe. “Or bath bombs.”
“Bath bombs?” Annette asked.
“The upstairs bathroom is packed full of them,” Felix explained. “A tiny army of soap robots stand sentinel over the tub.”
That sounded adorable. Almost as fun as the train. She’d have to go ask permission to see it one day, especially since it sounded like Felix might be moments away from destroying the tableau before she ever got a chance.
Little soap guys, all lined up along the primary bathroom… She tried to envision it when an image popped into her head.
“Wait, the upstairs bathroom has a tub?” Annette asked, instantly jealous.
Felix raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t you tour the place?”
“Um… I forgot?”
She hadn’t toured, exactly. She’d researched the place and assumed it would work out and if anything was broken she’d be able to fix. She’d been in a bit of a rush to get her application in, after all!
Felix made a little tch noise with his mouth, clearly not believing a word she said. “I’m just using it as a hamper.”
“You’re what?” she was aghast. “Felix I’d kill for a proper bathtub, that’s such a waste.”
He looked down, face going a little pink. “Didn’t know you were a bath person.”
“I mean it’s nice, you know? Sometimes?”
She would not explain the intricacies of crying in the bathtub with a glass of wine and one of Ashe’s trashy novels to him.
He shifted awkwardly, shoving his hands into the pockets of his black jeans. “You can… borrow it. If you want.”
Was it her or was he being weird about something?
“Oh, but I don’t want to intrude.”
“It’s fine.” He refused to look at her. “Just, um, knock first before going into my room.”
Annette scoffed, smiling at how ridiculous the request from him was. “I would obviously knock, Felix.”
Because she had manners after all. More than him.
“Might as well let it get some use. I don’t like baths.”
She longed to call him stinky but he was being generous so she held in her joke.
She beamed at her very generous new roommate. “Baths are very helpful for relaxing, you know.”
He shrugged. “I had a coach who was obsessed with ice baths… Kind of ruined it for me, I guess.”
Annette gasped. “Ice? Agh. That sounds terrible Felix.”
“It was.” There it was, the whisper of a smile he tried so hard to keep in. “So um, bathtub. All yours.”
She tried to find a reply but the overwhelming sensation that he was keeping something from her began tingling at the back of her spine. It was just taking a bath. An extremely normal thing for a person to want to do, and he was being nice.
They were roommates now. Felix certainly would need to get used to the idea that she bathed. It was a good thing they had their own bathrooms, but it would have been fine if they’d shared. Annette was great at sharing. She was a good roommate and Felix wasn’t bad in any way yet, especially since, as it turned out, he wasn’t the kind of guy who left a random cardboard box in the middle of the floor for days on end.
Right. The box.
Annette was done stalling, and she tried and failed to open the box. “Now, come on, we’re opening it right?”
Felix looked at her skeptically. “Isn’t it stealing?”
“It was in our house. If it were mail it would be stealing. Regular shmegular box? I think it’s ours now.”
“Regular shmegular…” He shut his eyes, pressing at his temples before making a decision. “Fine. I’m telling you it’s going to be train crap.”
That sounded perfect, actually and she couldn’t help her ripening excitement for their surprise. “Ohhh maybe it’s a little seasonal decor! So we can winter wonderland the train stations.”
Felix pulled out a pocket knife, efficiently cutting through the tape with one smooth motion. He knelt over the box, opening up the top. “I am banning any winter wonderland from the upstairs- AGH.”
A spray of neon orange ink spurt up like a fountain, hitting Felix square in the chest. He recoiled as the last rivets of color bounced up, leaving an impressionist painting on his pale skin.
Annette panicked, trying to scan him for any signs of injury from the clearly booby-trapped gift. “Ah! Are you okay?”
Felix grunted, pulling the hem of his shirt up to wipe the remains off his face.
“What the hell was that?”
At least, that’s probably what he said. Annette was just the tiniest bit distracted by what was under his henley.
Annette was fond of hard facts, given that she was just a bit prone to wild speculation. But when it came to Felix Fraldarius and anything that might maybe be under his clothes she was quite content to say that she was better off not knowing. She’d filed that away along with things that were under the bed and looming in dark corners.
Dangerous, and better to leave up to chance.
Because knowledge like that could lead her to have feelings. And she distinctly didn’t want to have any sort of feelings for Felix. It was hard enough to deal with the sort of flip-floppy thing her stomach insisted on doing when he was around. Or occasionally noticing that he was probably the sort of guy that most would consider handsome, you know, objectively. Theoretically.
So it was best to imagine that under Felix’s shirt was a sort of black hole.
Not muscle.
Not a line of enticing dark hair leading down to the tops of his jeans.
Nope. None of that.
Her stomach was preparing for the Olympics, in clear defiance of all of her most logical orders.
Because the problems with liking Felix, of course, was that they were six days into a legal contract that meant they had to be in each other’s space all the time for the next year. Stupid things like seeing Felix as something other than her grouchiest friend were firmly off the table. If just a glimpse of him had set her off like this…
“Do you, um, need to go wash that off?” Annette asked, desperate for an escape route.
Felix pulled his shirt clean off, revealing a well muscled chest that was still very handsome despite the neon ink he was dabbing off of himself.
The squeak Annette let out was not very dignified, but she turned away, trying to kick the box one last time for good measure.
The trap went off again, and now Annette was the one being tagged with cold neon ink.
Strong hands pulled her back, cradling her against Felix’s bare chest with little room for her to move because his damn biceps were locked around her, holding her in.
He probably thought he was pulling her to safety, that bastard. Completely unaware of the very danger he held. Too strong. Too warm. Too much of everything.
“You okay?” he asked, voice rumbling through her.
“I’m a little trapped,” she said for lack of anything smarter or more clever to say. All the oxygen in her body was going towards not sighing or screaming or doing anything untoward.
“Oh. Um.” Felix stepped back, holding out the shirt awkwardly. “Here.”
Felix’s henley was still warm from his body heat and it smelled like him, all cinnamon and something masculine that she could never quite identify.
Would she be a creep if she took a whiff? Just so she could try to discern what it was? No, not weird, she wouldn’t do anything like that if she weren’t using his shirt to wipe off her face. She could sneak it in when she breathed.
She needed to breathe, after all.
Pine. Fresh pine. Like evergreens. Like the kind of candle Mercie made in their kitchen, joking smells like a lumberjack.
Why was that so good and why was she so weird?
“I think… I think he tried to prank us?” Annette said.
“He?”
“Mr. Conductor,” Annette explained. “He of the trains and the bath bombs.”
“How do you know it’s a guy?” Felix asked, crossing his arms over his still painfully bare chest.
Annette was going to faint if this went on much longer.
“Well, Conductor Prankpants is now our sworn enemy, I think.”
Annette regretted the words almost as soon as she said them. Why was she always such a dork around him? Conductor Prankpants was more of a Mercedes joke. And Felix was…
“I think we fight him on sight.” he agreed. “For revenge.”
Annette’s jaw dropped and Felix sunk into himself at her reaction.
“I’m kidding,” he said quickly, and the blush that started in his cheeks began to sink down his neck. Bright red splotches that went out towards his ears and all over… Felix couldn’t hide himself and Annette couldn’t hide the way her eyes lingered.
New piece of information about her roommate number one: Felix blushes everywhere.
New piece of information about her roommate number eight: Felix had his boxing meetup on Thursdays.
Annette usually loved the noise of a well-occupied house, but there was something to having a perfectly private evening at home that was a singular joy.
Especially because her students had not done well on their first quiz. They’d blamed her rather than their own lack of initiative. Apparently, none of them noticed that the practice problems she’d assigned as homework that were the exact same as the ones on her quiz. Or, she guessed, none of them had done their homework. and she now had an inbox of angry emails from young mages who were absolutely sure this would kill their chances of going to graduate school.
Annette needed a bath.
She crept up the death stairs of doom, using both hands on the too loose railings to keep her balance.
One of the first things she’d discovered about Felix was that he was passably neat in common spaces, but his own room was another matter entirely.
She dodged over a pile of laundry by the door because, apparently, her using his bathtub left him completely without a hamper.
And still, his room didn’t even have the grace to smell bad.
Another thing she’d realized about her now not-so-new roommate Felix. He lingered wherever he went.
She could see echoes of him tumbling through the room, rushing to get everything done more efficiently and forgoing steps she’d consider necessary.
Felix did weird things like leaving his socks in a basket by the door or storing his cereal with his bowls. He ate out of containers more often than plates.
It was weird.
It was him and she couldn’t help but find most of it a little endearing.
She crossed the room, dodging piles of library books that were piled high but not yet out of date to push on the door of the upstairs bathroom.
Felix had relegated the bath bombs off to their own corner after she’d fought, valiantly, for their survival. They were there first, after all. Felix was merely an intruder.
The bathroom was truly the most unhinged room in the entire insane house. The ceiling was painted with constellations, the tile floors chipped and crooked with vinyl stickers placed over the cracks. And off in the corner, surrounded by heavy red curtains, was the enormous clawfoot tub.
Annette hit the taps, humming to herself as she tested the temperature of the water. Felix had understated how amazing his tub was. It was glorious, and surely even he understood that it did not deserve a life of holding laundry.
It could hold her instead. Provide the warm, bubbly comfort she needed.
She gave one of the little robots in the basket a mock salute, dropping him into the tub so that the water became frothy and tinged ever so slightly blue. It was the color of the idea of water, what a child would draw.
It was perfect.
She poured herself a glass of the sweetest rose the corner store sold, and sank in, wiggling her toes as she was fully submerged.
This was nice. She could just splash around and not think at all about her students. Or her roommate.
Nope. She would not think about Felix at all.
Not that he didn’t mind her playing pop music as long as it was after eight AM.
Not that he didn’t sleep with a shirt on which meant sometimes he didn’t eat breakfast with a shirt on and she was almost used to the sight of him half naked. Any day now, it would cease to have an effect on her.
And she definitely didn’t think about how she was technically naked in his room. Nope. Not weird. Not at all weird. Nothing about her and Felix was weird. He just had a body. She had a body that happened to be naked. They all had bodies. It meant nothing.
Her stomach gymnast gave her a perfect back handspring, just to prove its point.
She just needed to stop thinking about him.
They’d spent two months together, there was plenty that annoyed her. Like that he did a bad job vacuuming. Or that he’d tripped down the stairs again, and he’d called it having an Annette day.
Or that he insisted on sitting on the floor rather than sit next to her on the couch when they watched TV together.
She wanted him to sit next to her. She wanted so much more than she could possibly have with him.
She wanted more wine.
Annette sighed, reaching over the edge of the tub, groping around on the floor for the bottle.
“Oh, shit”
A painfully familiar voice echoed across the tiled room and Annette screamed and ducked back into the tub.
Felix stood in the doorway, covering his eyes and his bright red face with his hands. “I didn’t know you were here. Shit. Sorry.”
“Get out!” Annette screamed, trying to grab for something to cover her better than the not at all sudsy enough water.
“I didn’t see anything,” he said with a stubborn insistence, retreating through the door.
Rage coupled with the full-body embarrassment and Annette yelled at him, “That very much sounds like someone who did see something, you villain!”
She scrambled out of the tub as soon as the door closed, and grabbed her fluffy yellow robe off of its little hook by the tub.
Oh no. Oh no no no.
There were lines that could not be crossed with her roommate, especially if that roommate was Felix, and this was absolutely one of them. She'd need to move. Pause their friendship forever, which was a darn shame considering they'd organized a group outing to see the Mittlefrank reunion tour.
If she couldn't face Felix, she'd need to give up the house. And darn it she would not do that for all the embarrassment in the world. She'd just started fixing up the train so she could deliver notes through the house.
Shaking, she caught a glimpse of her cherry-red face in the mirror. She’d have to see him, if only to retreat back to her room. Damn ensuites. Damn crazy weird house that trapped them together.
She’d seen Mercie naked a half dozen over the years. It was a hazard of living together.
But this was so much worse than a weird bathroom door mishap or an outfit consult that went on too long for either of them to have shame.
This was Felix. Felix seeing her topless. Maybe more. Why didn’t he knock? She tried to stem her anger. Accidents happened.
She might as well be called Annette Accident Dominic. She just had to act like this was normal and let Felix stew in his mistake. She needed to hold her head high, tie her robe closed, go down the death stairs, and throw herself back into bed to try to focus on anything besides what he did or did not see.
Annette counted to three and threw the door open. Better brave than trapped there forever. Probably.
They’d both act normal and it would be fine.
“I thought you said baths were relaxing,” Felix said as Annette stepped into the bedroom. “You don’t look very relaxed.”
She gawked at him, skidding to a halt on the hardwood floor. “Well, someone came in without knocking!”
“It’s my room.”
It was a terrible defense and they both knew it.
“You said I could use the bathtub.” Annette put her hands on her hips, anger newly spiked before the weird mystery of Felix's peeping-tom incident came into focus. Something here didn’t line up. “Why are you even home? It’s Thursday.”
He shrugged, sitting heavily on the edge of his bed. “Had a shit night.”
“Did seeing my boobs make it any better?” she grumbled.
Felix choked on air and Annette felt a little bit better to have him blushing. “I didn’t see anything, Annette,” he repeated.
“A likely story.”
“I…” His brown eyes trailed up to hers, boring in full of something unreadable, strange. It felt for a brief second of time as if he were going to say something, a spark of honesty in his guarded expression. But it fell as quickly as it appeared and he frowned. “Ugh. Sorry.”
Annette huffed out a laugh, crossing her arms over her chest. “An admission of guilt.”
“It’s not…” his excuse was lame, and he took in her angry face, deflating. “I can’t ever win with you, can I?”
Annette shook her head. “Nope. Not really.”
“Fine.”
It was low, mumbled under his breath in the way he always did when he thought she was about to yell at him. But something set her skin on edge, something she was painfully familiar with. The trickle of amusement in his face. All danger.
“Fine?” Annette asked.
“I didn’t see anything.” He glanced over at her from his perch on the bed. “I kind of consider that a waste.”
Annette’s mouth went dry and she straightened as her stomach tightened with new nerves.
She couldn’t find any response. “I… You… That’s so…” She was stammering and blushing and Felix wouldn’t take his eyes off her.
“If you’re going to be mad at me I wish it were about something I actually did.”
He looked so casual about it, as if they were discussing groceries. If groceries could send white hot want through her.
She grasped for something to say, anything at all. “So you want to see my boobs?”
Saints not that!
He was truly bright red now, eyes scanning up to the painted ceiling. “That’s not it.”
Because Annette was insane, and she was, that was somehow disappointing.
“Oh.” It was hard to feign anger when he looked like that. Weirder still that the anger, so bright before, was now well and truly past.
He wished he’d seen something… He wanted her to have reasons for anger… But that didn’t have anything to do with her, right?
Maybe it did. Annette was so wrapped up in maybes when it came to him, frozen in indecision because she so often fell. Mistakes were more common than success in her life, and she couldn’t possibly make a bigger one with him than letting him into her head.
He couldn’t know how she felt. It would ruin everything.
And yet, the quiet disappointment in his face made her have the strangest kernel of useless hope.
They stood at an impasse, her standing across from him in his cluttered bedroom in nothing but a bathrobe, feeling more awkward and exposed than she had when she was far less covered.
Felix broke it first, cocking his head to the side. “Do you want me to have wanted to see you naked?”
She swallowed down exactly what she wanted. “W-why would I want something like that?”
“You tell me.”
The balance shifted and Annette, not for the first time in his presence, searched her immaculate vocabulary and came up completely empty.
“I… You… You’re a villain.”
He nodded, reaching a hand out to beckon her closer. “So you’ve said.”
The distance that had once seemed cavernous was really only a few short steps. If she reached her arm out she could grab his hand. His long-fingered, calloused hand that she couldn’t get out of her mind.
Annette took a step. “You’re driving me crazy,” she admitted.
“Yeah?” his eyes lit up with something so heady it blew her away. The nervous energy gone, replaced by a significant stillness that let her see his pulse pumping in his throat.
“Yeah,” she half-whispered.
And there she was, her knees touching his, standing over him at the edge of the bed.
Wanting.
“Annette, I want to kiss you.”
It was so brazenly direct it took her breath away, and her heart soared.
“You can.”
She grabbed his hand in hers, the contact indecently innocent.
“Even though I’m a villain?” Gentle amusement had never been so seductive.
“Especially because you are.”
A fond smile broke out across her face as he pulled her closer, the contact far more relaxing than any warm water could be.
Lips pressed together, soft and tentative as if he was worried she’d run. As if he didn’t know she’d been fantasizing about this for weeks. Years even.
She tangled her hands in his hair, doubling her intensity as she left him gasping against her mouth.
“I have a giant crush on you, you know,” Annette admitted into his cheek. Unwilling to part from him and the way his hands found her back, her hips, sending sparks of pure affection through her.
The corner of his mouth curled up into a smile. “Good.”
She swatted at his chest. She was being vulnerable!
“I haven’t been able to keep the idea of you in the fucking bathtub out of my head for weeks.” It was half growled and it made Annette’s toes curl.
The stupid, ridiculous bathtub.
“You know…” she said, pulling back and loving that he groaned at the loss of contact. “The water is probably still warm.”
“Oh?” Felix looked amazing when he was dumbfounded. Truly, her favorite look on him.
“We could go together,” she flirted, taking a step backward towards the bathroom. “Might be relaxing you know. Better than an ice bath.”
He gave her an appreciating look, from her blue painted toes up over her skinny knees, to the thick fluffy robe, over her collarbones and up her neck, before finally meeting her eyes.
“Way better.”