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“But I am,” he answers nonchalantly.

“You’re right. You are a hopeless romantic, and I love you just the way you are.”

At the foot of the stairs leading into the minimalistic, wide, airy-as-fuck, expensive, smart, futuristic, and overall quite dope living room, Lily tiptoes. She grabs Every’s hair in her two small fists and pulls him down to eye level because he is just, oh, so tall. Light as a feather, she presses her lips onto his soft mouth, marking the second kiss in the whole book.

Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder, they say.

And that’s probably true considering the serious the look on her man’s face right now. He twirls her long red hair in his fist, feeling the smoothness of the silky strands. She feels his other large hand caress her back, stroking from her neck down her spine, resting right above her totally natural bubble butt.

His eyes darkened, thanks to the instability of the overhead lighting of the room.

Damn, here we go again.

We sure have to kill the mood with yet another corny line.

But whatever. This may be a satire, but it is also necessary to feed the starving readers.

She deepens the kiss, pulling him stark against her double Ds. Lily feels his hard pecs peeking from the V of his satin robe, and smooths her hands onto the surface. Her tongue thrusts into his mouth in a French kiss, because that’s just what curious heroines do. Then she moans, because this too seems to be mandatory in every make-out scene sequence.

Really, why do we need to kill the whole romantic mood they are trying so hard to set right now?

She feels him groan into her mouth, and tastes him, sweet like vanilla. Lily breathes, surrounded by the scent of sea salt, cinnamon, and sandalwood, mingled with his new lavender shampoo.

Vanilla and lavender—those sure symbolize her man pretty well.

Then they part, both of them breathing hard, a string of saliva connecting the two puffy, red lips. The facial ones.

“Every,” she murmurs onto his chest, resting her forehead against his thick pecs.

“Sugartits,” he says, just because we need to kill the mood even further.

It’s totally dead and gone and buried now.

Lily-girl, panting and blinking like an idiot, looks into her sweet man’s dark eyes, dark now thanks to the dim lighting of the room. A single overhead lamp illuminates the space, and in a corner, a two-stories-tall Christmas tree blinks softly. It is bigger than even the one at Larry and Lorry’s Mom and Pop shop that Lily used to frequent when she was in high school, for some unknown reason. She realizes the existence of the pretty tree now, and does a happy little spin in her oversized reindeer sweater that is actually her man’s because she doesn’t have such good clothes like that.

Guess they’ve only started to keep up with the jolly holiday spirit one week before Christmas.

Should’ve been a month.

Too bad they were too caught up with Fernando.

“What was that?” he asks her.

“Our second kiss,” she manages to breathe out.

“Just our second? Damn, I need to give you so much more, then. I’ve neglected you, babe.”

So mushy.

But that’s a childish thing to complain about, isn’t it?

Lily walks over to his top-of-the-line, dark leather sofa. The one that probably costs more than her ranch house’s whole mortgage and sales, if they actually paid it. Another cup of premium lemon iced tea is waiting for her on the oaken side table, because in this house, there is nothing that is less than premium.

Another thing she realized right when she was first introduced to this place about an hour ago, after a teleportation followed by a short limousine ride, was that everything is just so simple. A sofa. A side table. A corridor leading to the kitchen. And a bar. But somehow, it radiates this air of expensiveness that she had never experienced in her poverty-ridden life.

The kitchen drawer at her old ranch home might have had a Chanel logo sticker on it as a decoration, but this place of her man’s, with its blank walls and somewhat even bleak interior, is on another level.

Because of course it is; he’s the generic CEO billionaire love interest after all.