She cut me a look. "You've been getting those perks for two years, Buchanan. Don't even pretend you didn't put on a solid ten pounds that first year I started baking." Quite pointedly, she looked at my stomach, which we both knew was covered in muscle.
"That's rude," I mumbled under my breath. I flexed my bicep. Nero licked my elbow since it was right in front of him. "Yeah, ten pounds in my left arm maybe."
The noise she made roughly translated to you are ridiculous. She made that sound at me a lot.
Of course, the sad truth of the matter was that I was ridiculous.
Not once in the past five years had my feelings lessened for her. I had just learned to live with them. In my junior year of undergrad, I was taking a class on brain pathology in injuries, and a man came to talk to us about how he learned to live without his right arm after it was amputated.
He told us about how, even years after he lost his arm, his brain still triggered sensations to the limb that was no longer there. The adult brain, in particular, struggled to reorganize after the loss of a limb, and given that four out of five amputees suffer from phantom pain symptoms, some of which were incredibly debilitating, it was a lesson that stuck with me.
I wasn't fool enough to think that me loving Jocelyn was on par with a man who’d lost his arm, but something about the way he talked plucked at a chord inside me. Sometimes my brain struggled to remember that we were just friends. She'd never dated, never even hinted that she wanted to. She'd never given me a longing glance. Never stared at my mouth like she wondered what it tasted like.
But my hands never, not once, stopped wanting to reach for hers.
My fingers always, always itched to dig into her crazy hair and see what the curve of her scalp felt like.
My brain knew what this relationship was, but sometimes, the signals it sent to the rest of my body didn't always match up with the truth of our situation.
We worked out together a lot, Joss and I, and when she got frustrated with the limitations of her body, I always wanted to wrap my arms around her. I wanted to pull her into the curve of my body, absorb her dissatisfaction into my skin, and carry it for her.
That was the irony when she made noises like that. She had absolutely no clue how ridiculous I really was.
The driveway at my parents' house was empty, and I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. I didn't really feel like sharing her, and my entire family was as in love with Joss as I was.
Well, not really, but it felt like it sometimes.
There was no other explanation as to why my mom and dad didn't blink when I asked them to renovate the single stall garage at the back curve of the driveway into an apartment for me. It was hard for Joss to hang out in my old bedroom because it was upstairs, and she hated for me to carry her.
Now I had a freestanding living space with absolutely nothing to impede her coming and going because, in true Buchanan-curse fashion, I'd done all the research on making it fully accessible for her.
After parking my truck, I held the door open so Nero could hop out and run into the woods lining the property while I got Joss's chair out of the back.
"Want me to take that?" I asked as I watched her struggle a little to grip the box while transferring into her chair.
"No way, you'll eat it before I'm even fully seated."
I considered that. "Depends on what's in there."
That was when her face did something weird. She blushed. All along the tops of her high, perfect cheekbones, her skin turned a delicate color I'd never witnessed.
The peonies in my mom's garden pink.
As soon as she'd settled her feet, she pivoted and wheeled toward my place. "It's a dill pickle cupcake, and it's mine."
"Gross," I breathed, jogging to catch up to her so I could open the door.
"Right?" she said on a laugh. "But I can't not try it."
"Sure, you can. You can realize it's a dill pickle cupcake and that you like your taste buds better than to subject them to that."
Joss was still laughing when she wheeled inside. Over her shoulder, she gave a short whistle. Nero came bounding toward us, his pink tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth. All ninety pounds of him skirted around us so he could hop up on the edge of the couch he always claimed as his.
My apartment had a small kitchenette lining one wall, which I pretty much only used to make coffee in the mornings, a light gray L-shaped couch facing the TV I'd mounted on the far wall, and my king-size bed hidden behind a half wall partition that gave me the illusion of privacy. Past that was the bathroom.
I'd chosen to forgo a table in the kitchenette because it was one more obstacle for Joss to get around, and we always ate on the couch anyway.
"You're the cleanest twenty-three-year-old man I've ever met," she said as she lifted herself out of the chair and onto the couch. Bracing her weight on her arms, she scooted back until she could pull the handle that lifted the reclining footrest. Nero stretched out, shoving his head against her thigh.
It wasn't necessary for me to look around because I knew nothing was on the floor. No piles of clothes and no shoes tossed in the general area of where I slept.
I opened my mouth to make a flippant comment, but I took a second to watch her face first. Joss probably said it without expecting a reply, so she wasn't even really looking at me. I must have been quiet long enough that she noticed. Her
