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“Yes. Both was overkill. No more bikinis for you,” I decided on the spot.

Her eyes narrowed. “You are not going to tell me how to dress.”

“I just did.”

“You know what? I’m not fighting with you right now.”

“Hey!” I exclaimed. “Fighting is just an angry way of caring, you know.”

I waited for one of her pithy comebacks.

She wasn’t playing. She pointed at her door. “Give me some privacy. I need to get dressed.”

I sighed and got up. “Come see me when you’re dressed. We need to talk.”

She took her sweet time. I was in my office staring at my computer screen when she finally showed up.

“We have a problem,” I told her.

She sat down on my sofa. “We do?” she asked, sounding disinterested, like things were business as usual, and I was just going to send her on some unpleasant but relatively normal errand.

I got up and joined her, sitting right next to her and looking straight into her eyes.

I wanted to touch her. Would she be warm? Would she lean into my touch, or would she recoil?

I took off her glasses, and she tried to snatch them back.

I set them on a side table out of her reach. “You’re nearsighted. You don’t need them for this conversation.”

I gazed deep into her eyes, brushing her hair back from her face.

She looked highly suspicious and vaguely offended. It was probably a fair reaction for what I was about to say. What I quite simply couldn’t keep myself from saying.

I was shaking a bit. That’s how much I couldn’t keep it in.

What the hell was wrong with me?

She was driving me crazy. No design for it on her part, but that somehow made it all the more irresistible.

I couldn’t seem to stop myself from harassing the poor girl.

“You can wear bikinis,” I finally began with. “That was out of line, me telling you what to wear.”

“Gee, thanks, I was real worried about it,” she responded, exactly on brand.

I smiled. It was out of hand. I’d never wanted so much to fuck someone for their personality in my life.

I tried to keep my body calm as I searched for how to start this little headfirst dive into insanity that I had decided on over the long, sleepless night.

“We need to be face to face for this, no craning our heads sideways to look at each other,” I mused out loud.

“What are you talking about?”

In answer, I picked her up and arranged her on top of me, straddling my lap.

She was wearing a T-shirt and boxers, and I was wearing close to the same thing, and the two materials together weren’t thick enough to keep me from feeling her taut flesh underneath. Our lower bodies were flush just how and where they needed to be.

God, I wanted her.