Under One Roof (The STEMinist Novellas, #1)(33)

I feel my pulse spike, and I smile at him as I lean forward. I love you, I think. And I suspect that you love me, too. And I cannot wait for us to admit it to each other. I cannot wait to see what happens next.

“I think,” he grunts against my throat. “Mara, I think I’m going to come now.”

I nod, too close to speak, and let him roll us over.



* * *




*

“Well. That was certainly fast.” Liam hasn’t caught his breath yet. His tone is mildly self-deprecating.

“Yup.” Delicious. It was delicious.

“I can do better,” he says. I’m pretty sure he has no clue that this was better. Best. Ever. “I think. Maybe with practice.”

I’m not even sure it’s over yet. My nerve endings are still twitching. My entire body is flooded with an electric sort of pleasure, wrenched out of me and then poured back in again. “It wasn’t that fast,” I say.

Liam buries his face in my neck and curls around me, dwarfing me. Yeah. It was fast.

“I mean,” I mumble against his chest, “that it wasn’t too fast. It was . . .” Extraordinary. Spectacular. Transcendent. “Good. Very good.” He presses a kiss to my throat, and I add, “But it wasn’t that hard, either.”

He tenses. “I’m sorry. Do you—”

“That is to say, we should do it again.” He pulls back to meet my eyes. He looks very, very serious. I’m feeling considerably less so. “And again. And again. Until we get it right. Perfectly hard, and perfectly fast. You know?”

His smile unfurls slowly. “Yeah?” Hopeful and happy, he looks younger than ever. I grin and pull him in for a kiss.

“Yeah, Liam.”





Epilogue


Six months later “Who puts coffee creamer in their smoothies, anyway?”

“People.”

“No way.”

“Plenty of people.”

“Name one.”

“Me.”

I roll my eyes. “Name two.”

Silence.

“See?”

Liam sighs. “It doesn’t mean anything, Mara. Normal people don’t have conversations about coffee creamer.”

“You and I certainly do. Hazelnut or vanilla?”

“Vanilla.”

I put two bottles in the cart. Then I push up on my toes and plant a kiss on Liam’s mouth, short and hard. Liam follows me for a bit when I step back, as if reluctant to let me go.

“Okay.” I smile. Lately, I’m always smiling. “What else?”

Liam browses the list I wrote earlier today, sitting between his thighs while he was busy killing bad guys on the PlayStation. He squints a little at my terrible handwriting, and I try not to laugh. “I think we’re done. Unless you need a few more family-size Cheez-It boxes?”

I stick my tongue out at him. My hand falls to my side, until it’s brushing against his. He starts pushing the shopping cart and twines our fingers together. “Ready to go?” he asks.

“Yeah.” I beam. “Let’s go home.”





Don’t miss

Love on the Brain

coming soon from Berkley Jove!

“By the way, you can get leprosy from armadillos.”

I peel my nose away from the airplane window and glance at Rocío, my research assistant. “Really?”

“Yep. They got it from humans millennia ago, and now they’re giving it back to us.” She shrugs. “Revenge and cold dishes and all that.”

I scrutinize her beautiful face for hints that she’s lying. Her large dark eyes, heavily rimmed with eyeliner, are inscrutable. Her hair is so Vantablack, it absorbs 99 percent of visible light. Her mouth is full, curved downward in its typical pout.

Nope. I got nothing. “Is this for real?”

“Would I ever lie to you?”

“Last week you swore to me that Stephen King was writing a Winnie-the-Pooh spin-off.” And I believed her. Like I believed that Lady Gaga is a known satanist, or that badminton racquets are made from human bones and intestines. Chaotic goth misanthropy and creepy deadpan sarcasm are her brand, and I should know better than to take her seriously. Problem is, every once in a while she’ll throw in a crazy-sounding story that upon further inspection (i.e., a Google search) is revealed to be true. For instance, did you know that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was inspired by a true story? Before Rocío, I didn’t. And I slept significantly better.

“Don’t believe me, then.” She shrugs, going back to her grad school admission prep book. “Go pet the leper armadillos and die.”

She’s such a weirdo. I adore her.

“Hey, you sure you’re going to be fine, away from Alex for the next few months?” I feel a little guilty for taking her away from her boyfriend. When I was twenty-two, if someone had asked me to be apart from Tim for months, I’d have walked into the sea. Then again, hindsight has proven beyond doubt that I was a complete idiot, and Rocío seems pretty enthused for the opportunity. She plans to apply to Johns Hopkins’s neuro program in the fall, and the NASA line on her CV won’t hurt. She even hugged me when I invited her to come along—a moment of weakness I’m sure she deeply regrets.