My Dad's Best Friend Moved Into My Spare Room After His Divorce, and the Promise He Made My Father Lasted Four Days novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: One A.M. in the Kitchen

During a Sunday thunderstorm Lori finds Ed at the open refrigerator, and the kiss against it ends with her teeth in his shoulder and him walking away on his word until a saw starts up in the basement.

The storm came across Nebraska on Sunday night.

I lay in my attic bed and counted between the flashes.

Two days of Ed Atherton in my house had gone like this.

He said "morning" and "thanks" and "I'll get that."

He fixed the screen door without being asked.

He ate standing up at the counter, with his back to me, and rinsed his own plate before I could take it.

He called me "kiddo" once, on Saturday, and then looked like he'd bitten a nail.

Thunder shook the window glass.

Two floors down, I heard a dog's nails cross the kitchen linoleum and stop.

I went down in the shirt I slept in and a pair of shorts that had stopped being decent in 2021.

The kitchen was dark except for the open refrigerator.

Ed stood in its light, in gray sweatpants and nothing else, eating cold chicken out of the container with his fingers.

His back was a wide plain of freckled muscle with an old white scar running under the left shoulder blade.

I had seen him shirtless exactly once before, at a Fourth of July lake party.

I had carried that picture around for four years.

He turned.

He didn't hide the chicken.

"It's one in the morning," I said.

"Walter doesn't like thunder."

"Walter's lying under the table with his eyes closed."

"He's very brave about it."

I got a glass down and filled it from the tap, mostly to have something to do with my hands.

"That's my mother's chicken," I said. "From her recipe. I made it for you."

"It's good."

"It's the only thing in this house I make well."

"It's good, Lori."

He said my name the way you put down something that might go off.

Lightning lit the kitchen white.

All the little magnets on the refrigerator door showed up at once.

A Huskers football schedule.

A dentist reminder.

A photo-booth strip of me and my mother, from before.

Then the power went out with a soft sigh, and the refrigerator light went with it.

In the dark I could hear him breathing.

"Stay there," Ed said.

"I live here."

"I know you live here. Stay there anyway."

I took one step toward his voice.

"Lori."

"You've been calling me kiddo."

"I stopped."

"You've been standing at the sink with your back to me for two days."

"That's called manners."

"It's called being a coward."

He laughed, one low breath through his nose.

"Probably," he said.

My hand found his chest in the dark.

It was warm and heavy and his heart was going harder than the storm.

"You gave my father your word," I said. "I heard it on the lawn. I'm not asking you to break it. I'm asking you to put the chicken down."

A pause.

The lid of the container clicked.

I heard him set it on the counter.

Then his hand closed around the back of my neck, and he kissed me.

It was not careful.

It was a mouth that had been sitting on its hands since Saturday morning.

It opened mine and went in.

I made a sound that embarrassed me.

He walked me backward until my spine hit the refrigerator, and a magnet clattered to the floor.

"Lori," he said against my mouth. "God."

"Don't talk."

"I'm going to stop."

"Not yet."

His palms went up under the hem of my shirt and over my ribs.

When they closed over my breasts, I pushed up onto my toes and into him.

He had hands the size of dinner plates.

They covered everything.

His thumbs dragged across my nipples until I swore.

"These," he said roughly. "Take it off."

I dragged the shirt over my head and let it drop.

He put his mouth on me.

I put my head back against the freezer door and said, "Oh, fuck."

He took one nipple between his lips and sucked until my knees went.

Then he took the other.

His beard scraped me and his tongue was slow, and the contrast was going to kill me.

I got my fingers into his hair and held him there, and he made a noise in his chest that I felt against my skin.

His hand slid down my stomach and under the waistband of the shorts.

I had nothing on under those shorts.

I had not planned that part.

He found how wet I was and went still.

"Jesus Christ," he whispered.

"Yes," I said. "That's what I've been saying."

Two fingers slid through me, slow, then up over my clit, a heavy circle, and my hips came off the refrigerator.

"There," I said.

"Here?"

"Don't stop."

He didn't.

He worked me with his whole hand, the heel of it rocking against me while his fingers curled inside.

He kept his mouth on my breast through all of it.

Lightning came again and I saw his face, eyes shut, jaw tight.

The thunder hit right on top of it.

I bit down on his shoulder to keep from screaming.

I came with my teeth in him, shaking, his fingers moving through every pulse until I had to catch his wrist.

"Okay," I gasped. "Okay, okay."

He held me up against the refrigerator while my legs remembered how to be legs.

His breath was ragged in my hair.

I reached down for the front of his sweatpants.

He was hard as a rail, and I had barely closed my hand around him when he caught my wrist.

"No."

"Ed."

"No. I can't."

"I can feel that you can."

He stepped back.

It was a very small step and it felt like a mile of road.

"I gave my word," he said. "I told him in my own voice, Lori. He's the closest thing I have to a brother."

"You gave it to him. You didn't give it to me."

"It's the same word."

"It isn't."

"It is to me."

The power came back with a hum.

The refrigerator lit his face.

He looked wrecked, and a little sick, and exactly as beautiful as I'd always known he would.

My shirt was on the floor, and the bite was already a dark crescent on his shoulder.

I was standing in a lit kitchen in nothing but a pair of shorts, and I did not pull my arms across my chest.

Ed looked at me, once, from my face to my hips and back.

"Put your shirt on," he said hoarsely. "Please."

"No."

His jaw worked.

He picked up the shirt himself, set it gently in my hands, and walked past me to the basement door.

"Ed."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Just don't think this is over."

He paused with his hand on the doorknob.

He didn't turn around.

Then the basement door closed behind him, and I stood in my kitchen with my shirt in my hands and a magnet at my feet.

Four minutes later, from under the kitchen floor, a table saw screamed to life.

It ran until it got light.

← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend