I was so over it, and it was day one.
My dinner had consisted of an entire bag of salt and vinegar chips—a family sized one, thank you very much.
And I wondered why I bloated on my period.
Really.
The familiar sound of Josh’s truck pulling up outside my house made me groan. I’d told him not to come over because I wasn’t feeling well, and I wasn’t in the mood to figure out our clusterfuck of a situation tonight.
If he wasn’t going to listen to me, this relationship—or whatever it was—wasn’t getting off to a good start.
The truck engine went off, and a minute later, there were three knocks at my door.
“Go away!” I yelled.
I never said I had manners.
“Kinsley!” Josh knocked on the door. “Let me in.”
“I said go away!”
The handle jiggled. “Damn it, Kinsley!”
I hissed out a curse. Damn my terrible habit of forgetting to lock my doors during the day.
Not that it was the day.
All right, fine, I was awful at locking my doors all the time.
“I’ve told you about—what are you doing?”
I turned my head to the side and stared at him. “I have no idea what you mean.”
I did. I knew what he meant. I was in the universal period pain position. You know the one. Head flat on a pillow, ass up in the air, thighs drawn as close to my stomach as I could get them, and my arms wrapped around my clenching lower stomach. The occasional rock back and forth to try and coax the muscles into relaxing.
Totally normal.
“Why are you—you said you didn’t feel well.” Confusion marred his handsome features, clouding his gaze.
“I don’t feel well. I’m dying,” I confirmed. “My uterus is staging a coup and trying to murder me.”
His gaze darted across my body before he shrugged. “Good thing I came then.”
“What on Earth makes you say this is a good idea?”
He held up two brown paper bags in triumph. “I brought supplies.”
“Supplies.”
“Uh-huh. And don’t worry, I went to Dartree Mountain so nobody saw me.” He grinned. “Are you ready for this?”
“No. No woman will ever be ready for a male savior when she’s on her period. She doesn’t want to be looked after. She wants to curse the world and damn all reproductive systems forever. Cry. Scream. Shout a little. It’s worked for centuries. I see no reason to change the system now.”
He paused. “So, I’ll start, then.”
I rolled my eyes, and he took that as his cue because one by one, he unloaded things from his grocery bags.
“Chocolate. Chips. Muffins. Ice cream. Lemonade. Wine. Cookies. Cheese. Ibuprofen. Tylenol. Aspirin. And—”
“Are those sanitary pads?”
He looked down at the green cube and frowned. “That’s what the woman in Walgreens said.”
“You asked a woman in Walgreens about sanitary pads?”
“I wasn’t going to ask a man.” He met my eyes. “Are they the wrong ones?”
Weirdly, no. But then everyone I knew used them, so…
I pushed myself up to sitting and crossed my legs. My lips pulled to one side as I stared at the little packet in his hand. “No, they’re the right ones.”
He visibly relaxed. “Thank fuck for that, because there was a lot of colored packages in that aisle, and I was starting to feel like I was on the boat in Willy Wonka's damn factory.”
It took all my self-control to bite back the laughter that threatened to bubble up. “I can’t believe you did this.”
“You said you didn’t feel good. You said you were on your period. I put two and two together.” He shrugged. “I know you told me not to come, but I’ve bullshitted your brother enough today that I figured I may as well come over and make the lies worth it.”
“And here I was, thinking you were coming to make me feel better.”
“Kinsley, I bought you sanitary pads. If that isn’t making you feel better, I don’t know what to tell you.”
I grinned. I couldn’t help it. The smile burst from me with a giggle that overtook my entire body. The thought of him standing in a women’s health aisle buying sanitary products was just too much.
His own smile broke out across his face, and I grabbed a throw cushion to bury my face into because if I didn’t, I was going to explode into peals of uncontrollable laughter.
Not that it stopped me, actually. All it really did was muffle the inevitable as I curled up like a turtle retreating into its shell and let the cushion take the brunt of my amusement.
“Well, it beats being yelled at.”
I looked up in time to see him pick up a grocery bag and head for my kitchen with it safely in hand.
Thank God. Otherwise I’d eat that before I tucked into everything else.
Honestly. I was like a rabid bear. You’d think I hadn’t eaten all day.
And I had.
Boy, I had eaten.
Between my incessant hunger and the zit that was rapidly turning into Mount Vesuvius on the underside of my chin, the junk food was a welcome addition to my day.
Josh wasn’t exactly a terrible one, either. In fact, he was an annoyingly delightful one, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
He walked back into the living room, drawing on a beer.
“I don’t have beer,” I said, frowning.
“I know. I brought my own.”
“You’re efficient,” I said appreciatively, taking the empty wine glass he held out.
He set his bottle on a coaster on the coffee table—be still my heart—and poured me a glass of the chilled wine.
Now I knew he’d been to more than one place. The grocery stores around here didn’t stock cold wine—or really wine at all, to be honest—but the liquor store did.
That, my friends, was almost enough to make me fall irrevocably in love with him right here, right now.
What?
I liked romance.
It wasn’t all lavish displays of flowers and fancy dates and grand gestures.
Sometimes, romance was cold wine and sanitary pads.
There was a sentence I never thought I’d say.
I sipped the wine—it was my favorite, after all, and nestled into place when he
