“Come on, get dressed and grab some stuff. I want you to stay over at my place with me. I’m exhausted and you don’t look much better.” I huffed at him with mock indignation and he smiled, tapping my nose. “We can go take a nap and wake up at one p.m. to see what the stock closed at.”
“And after that?”
He smiled. “I’ll teach you how to surf.”
I quickly pulled on some jeans and crammed enough clothes and toiletries in my bag to last me a few days. Then I grabbed my laptop and purse and told Sid what we were up to. She had a huge grin on her face when we walked out, hand in hand.
We fell asleep on a day bed on his covered back patio with the cool sea breeze blowing through the screen walls and the sound of waves mercilessly pounding the sand. He was warm and hard and—unlike the first night we’d slept together in Vancouver—a peaceful sleeper.
He lay so still, I used him as a pillow, my head rising and falling with his gentle breathing. His heavy arm draped across my back, holding me close to him. It took me a while to fall asleep because I spent a long time watching him sleep. Then finally, I snuggled into the nook between his body and his arm, pressed my head to his shoulder and dozed off.
We woke up to the sound of his phone beeping incessantly. It took us both a minute of stretching and blinking—the bright early afternoon sunlight streaming in through the screen blinding us.
As if suddenly remembering, he sat up, turned off his alarm and opened the stock app on his phone.
“DME, come on…DME, where are you? Ah! Holy shit!”
I sat up beside him, rubbing sleep from my eyes, trying to get a glimpse over his shoulder. “Was that a good holy shit or a bad holy shit?”
His arm wrapped around my shoulders to pull me to him, and he kissed my hair. “That was a good holy shit. A very, very good holy shit. Closing price is just over forty-one dollars a share.”
“Holy shit!”
“I know, right?”
“That’s amazing.”
“Yep. Time for me to buy my tropical island and retire.”
I laughed, looking up into his face. He appeared pleased, but there was something else. His great victory had come at a high cost.
I cleared my throat and he looked up from his phone. “So, uh, what does this all mean? You’re unemployed. Does this mean I have to quit grad school to go to work and support you?” I joked. It was worded lightly, but there was still that issue of him having sacrificed his entire career because of me.
He smoothed a thumb over my cheek. “Don’t worry about the job. Depending on how trading continues, as soon as I’m vested in my shares, I might not need to work again for a long time, if ever.”
I pressed my lips together. “But it’s not just about the money. You’re not going to become an aimless beach bum at twenty-six years of age. We joke about it, but…that was a pretty huge sacrifice you made.”
“Do you still think it was stupid?”
I shook my head. “I think you believe I’m worth it.”
His eyes glowed with something—admiration, maybe?
“You are.”
That indescribable feeling filled my throat now and I could hardly swallow. I reached up and ran my hand over his delicious scruff.
“Then we’ll figure it out…we’ll find a new dream to work on together.”
He grinned. “Maybe I’ll go back to grad school and we could be classmates.”
He bent down and we kissed. It was a slow, sweet kiss. We’d rarely shared those kinds in the weeks we’d been frantically stealing time to hook up. But this was different, because now we knew…there was a future for us, and we didn’t have to cram every spare amount of passion, desire and lust into the few minutes we could pilfer from a work day.
“I don’t know…royalty hardly need to go to school,” I said, sticking my nose in the air with faux haughtiness. “And I think that, as a princess, I need to make my first royal decree.”
A slow smile formed on his lips. “And what is that, Your Highness?”
“You must have scruff at all times. Just the right amount of scruff. Not a full beard and not smooth shaven.”
He laughed. “Well, that will tricky. Keeping just the right amount of scruff is an art, you know.”
I laughed. “On the days you have scruff, you can kiss me as much as you want, wherever you want.”
His eyes darkened. “Well, talk about incentivizing. That’s talking like a true economic theorist. And I’ll take you up on that right after I have something to eat. I’m starving.”