Status: Complete
Islands
Cliché
December 2, 2010 Capitals 1 @ Stars 2
December 4, 2010 Thrashers 3 @ Capitals 1
December 6, 2010 Leafs 5 @ Capitals 4 (SO)
December 9, 2010 Panthers 3 @ Capitals 0
December 11, 2010 Avalanche 3 @ Capitals 2
December 12, 2010 Capitals 0 @ Rangers 7
December 15, 2010 Ducks 2 @ Capitals 1(OT)
December 18, 2010 Capitals 2 @ Bruins 3
December 19, 2010 Capitals 3 @ Senators 2
December 21, 2010 Devils 1 @ Capitals 5
_____
I woke to the dim light of the room and the sound of Nicky’s even breathing. I was curled up against his bare chest, his arm draped around my waist. He looked peaceful, his lips slightly parted and hair disheveled. I had to get up to pee and I wondered how deep of a sleeper Nicky was, because I didn’t want to wake him.
Slowly, I moved my legs out from under my side of the blanket and slid from Nicky’s arm. I didn’t have far to go since we were sharing my little twin bed. I bunched up the part of the blanket I’d been under and used it as a replacement for my body, moving it under Nicky’s arm. By the time I was standing, he had stirred in his sleep but didn’t wake up. With a sigh of relief, I picked up his shirt that was littered on the floor. I crossed the small space between the bed and the door and buttoned it down before I went for the latch on the door.
The hallway and bathroom were completely quiet. I’d made the short trip between my current dorm room and the bathroom so many times since September when I’d been assigned the R.A. of the fifth floor, but never in my bare feet and a men’s white dress shirt. All the sounds I made seemed to be amplified tenfold against the silence. Nicky and I might as well have been on our own island.
In the bathroom, I checked my reflection in the mirror as I washed my hands. I didn’t think that I was glowing, but I definitely had I just had sex hair. Besides the hair and a bit of smudged eyeliner on my upper lids, I looked more or less the same as I had when I left the party with Nicky. I’d gotten ready hours earlier, before going to the Verizon Center with Jaden. It was a wonder I even had any remnants of eyeliner left to accent my icy blue eyes. I brushed through my hair with my fingers, even adding a little water to flatten it against my scalp.
My thoughts were on Nicky as I left the bathroom and walked down the hall back to my room. We’d spent some time talking about hockey when we were together, but not a whole lot of time, and sometimes I let myself forget who he was, what he did for a living. I wasn’t sure if the Capitals were having a practice on the day before the home game against the Penguins, but if they were, I wondered if what Nicky and I had just done would affect him in practice. There was also the fact that we ended up skipping out a good chunk of a party that had been thrown at his house. Would his teammates that were in attendance chide him for an explanation? Would he blush about it or delve into details?
My own cheeks felt hot thinking about it as I pushed the door to my room carefully. I knew the hinges would creak. I was trying to make as little noise as possible, mindful of the man sprawled out in my bed. It turned out that I didn’t have to be. When I entered the room, Nicky’s cheek was to the pillow and his gaze was on me.
“Hey,” I greeted.
A thin smile appeared on his lips. “Hey.”
I was standing at the bedside by the time the door clicked behind me. Nicky pulled back my duvet cover and patted the spot beside him, encouraging me to reclaim my spot. He made the bedspread look better, his Viking god’s body standing out against the minty green of my sheets.
“You weren’t here,” he spoke once I had settled in next to him. “When I notice, I couldn’t sleep anymore.”
I overestimated how sleuth I could be. I had been gone less than five minutes. But what he said was sweet, and I placed a kiss on his jawline. “Sorry.”
Nicky adjusted his warm body so that we were in close contact again. I let my hands fall against his chest and he closed his eyes as he searched for the right groove of my hip to rest his palm on, as if he were going back to sleep. His eyes flew open again when he discovered I wasn’t wearing any underwear. “That’s all you wear?”
“It’s not like I was gonna run into anyone in the hallway. “ I reminded him, “We’re alone, remember?”
He flashed a dreamy smile and whispered back to me, “Alone.”
His voice was something silky and gruff all at the same time. It brought me back to what we’d done in my dorm room. It almost sent a shiver down my spine, thinking about the way he’d touched me and held me and made me moan. It hadn’t been perfect, but it was as damn near to perfect as I’d ever had. I was thankful that Nicky was who he was, that he’d wanted to be alone with me. Not up in his bedroom with the party going on and not hurriedly in that guest room worried that someone could walk in on us at any moment.
“D’you know what time it is?” he asked, apparently forgetting about going back to sleep.
I craned my neck to the digital alarm clock illuminated on the desk, leaning my weight against him as I lifted myself from the bed slightly to get a proper look. I put it there purposely so that I had to get out of bed to turn it off and not be late for class during the semester. “It’s 2:48.”
“I’m kinda hungry,” Nicky admitted. “Didn’t have anything to eat since the locker room pizza after the game.”
“Well, I had to clear the refrigerator out before my freshmen left for the holidays. I have some cookies in here but that’s it.” I chewed on my lip, wondering if I should dig around for my phone in my bag and check for the nearest late night diner. Our options would be pretty slim at 3 in the morning. “Do you want me to try and find out what’s open?”
He shook his head against the pillow. “I was thinking…we go back to my house. Party’s over by now and left over food, probably. Are you hungry?”
“I could eat,” I answered. “We should go then.”
Nicky didn’t loosen his grip on me so that we could get up. He did quite the opposite, moving his hand from my hip to the small of my back. His free hand went to my hair, cupping the back of my head. He used that husky voice again and I wasn’t sure if his words were a statement or a request.
“Stay with me there until the morning.”
_____
The next time I woke up I was in a much bigger, much more comfortable bed than my own or the one in the guest room at my sister’s house. My surroundings were much more masculine as well. I’d gone home with Nicky to eat. Re-energized with food, we’d gone for another round in his bedroom. Though I was pretty sure that his arms were wrapped around me and we were spooning when I dozed off after sleeping with him again. I woke up tangled in his sheets by myself.
My instinct was to check my phone. Unlike my small dorm room, there were nightstands on either side of Nicky’s king sized bed, and I had put my cellphone there and plugged it into the socket shortly after we walked into the room. I reached out for it and pressed on the center ‘Home’ button at the bottom, the lock screen coming up. The notification bar at the top told me that I had a few new text messages. The most recent was from Nicky:
Went to practice at 11 with Stoffe. Back soon with lunch. Left a towel for you in the bathroom.
It was just about noon. I immediately felt bad that he might be getting off the ice at Kettler and I was still naked in his bed. We hadn’t exactly done a lot of actual sleeping.
I rose from the bed and went for the bag I’d brought from my dorm room. The nice thing about Nicky asking me to stay with him for the rest of the night while we’d been on campus was that I had a chance to bring my own clothes and a new toothbrush for the morning after. There was a rolled-up towel on the corner of the sink in the master bathroom, and I smiled at his thoughtfulness. I didn’t have to overthink whether or not it was appropriate for me to use his shower.
I had already brushed my teeth and was pulling my wet hair into a ponytail when I heard footsteps coming from the stairs. I didn’t hear the sound of the front door but I chalked it up to the fact that the bedroom was so far away from it. Nicky appeared in the reflection of the mirror behind me and I was assured that it wasn’t a robber.
“I didn’t think you’d be back this fast,” I told him as we were walking down the stairs to the main floor.
“Me either,” he responded. “We didn’t have on-ice practice. Bruce changed it, so only conditioning.”
“What time did you leave to go to the rink?” I wondered. “I didn’t even notice.”
“9:30, maybe.”
“What time did you fall asleep?”
“I don’t know. Probably around 6.” He shrugged. “The sun was up.”
I hid my laugh behind one of my hands. Math was my thing, and a simple calculation like that took me a split second to figure out that Nicky hadn’t really slept. At most, he’d taken a lengthy nap. “I am so sorry.”
“I’m not,” he answered with a smirk. “As long as is not the night before a game. Then I’m in trouble.”
On the large island counter in the kitchen, there were burgers, fries, and milkshakes from Ray’s Hell Burger—a local burger grill made famous by a visit by the president. I popped a few fries in my mouth—one by one—and Nicky told me the three different milkshake flavors he’d gotten. He’d gotten the vanilla for himself, which left strawberry and chocolate. I went for the chocolate and he stowed the strawberry away in the refrigerator.
“Stoffe will complain that I didn’t let him choose his own milkshake later,” he said.
“Where is your brother anyway?” I asked. “I thought he was with you.”
“He took the other car and decided to go shopping for some stuff before my parents get here,” Nicky explained before he took a bite of his burger. “We gotta clean up, too, before they get here.”
“What time do they get here?”
“In couple of hours,” he replied. “Don’t worry, I’ll drive you home after lunch.”
I was glad that the message was clear to both of us that I was not going to be meeting his parents and we didn’t have to have a discussion about it. It was one thing to meet a few of his teammates. Parents were a whole different story. That kind of thing was for couples who had been together for a while. It implied a very serious, long-term relationship. I may have been spending a lot of time with him, but we weren’t in a relationship as Mike had suggested we would soon be in, so I definitely wasn’t ready to meet his parents.
As we sat on the bar stools at the island counter talking through lunch, I realized it was the first time we were eating a meal together since the day I met him. When we’d returned to his house from Georgetown the night before, or early morning before, depending on how you looked at it, we just picked at leftovers of the catering. It wasn’t so much a meal. We’d come pretty far from the first meal we’d ever eaten together. He hadn’t had much to say to me then, before he touched my hand and told me he wanted to see me again.
Nicky was still quieter than most, but now it felt like he could talk to me about anything. Especially since it was winter break and students went back to their hometowns, I’d seen way more of Nicky than I had any of my friends. Entirely too fast he’d become a constant in my life.
“Can I ask you something?” he said sometime after we were finished with lunch, still sitting at the island, killing time before he drove me back to Rochelle’s house.
I answered his question about a question with my own question. “Is it about the Penguins game tomorrow?”
It was my assumption that he was going to try to explain to me why he hadn’t extended an invitation to the Capitals’ biggest game of the year. I already knew that his family was going to be there, and his friends from back home. Even if I sat in a different section, it would be weird to just be there to see him play and then go home after without talking to him. I still wasn’t a huge Capitals fan either; I liked them as much as I liked any other team not called the Colorado Avalanche. Dating Nicky didn’t mean I had to be dying to go to every single one of his games.
“No…” he returned, looking a little confused. “Uh, should I have asked you about that game? I didn’t think you care about it.”
“No, you don’t have to. I don’t care about it.” I shrugged, nonchalant. “Go on. What were you going to ask?”
“I, uh, I was gonna ask you…” he trailed off again, going silent and looking down at his hands momentarily before looking at me again with his sepia eyes. “Do you want to be my girlfriend?”
The color must have drained from my face. He caught me completely off guard. It was so far from what I was anticipating. It didn’t have anything to do with the Pittsburgh Penguins. It didn’t even have anything to do with hockey.
Girlfriend. It was a loaded word. It was a title. It meant that things were going to change, and that they had already. It worried me.
“I don’t want to be a cliché, Nicky,” I responded once I recovered from the shell shock.
“What do you mean?” It probably wasn’t the response he wanted or expected.
I sighed. “I don’t want you to think you have to ask me to be your girlfriend just because I slept with you.”
“That’s not why…” he didn’t finish his sentence. He even looked hurt.
Wasn’t it? Wasn’t that how whirlwind romances started crashed and burned, because two people moved along at a lightning pace, jumped into a relationship, realized it didn’t live up to the hype and didn’t want to be in it anymore, before one person awkwardly broke it off? When I told Nicky the night before that, yes, we were moving too fast but I didn’t want it to stop, I literally was only talking about the sex that was about to happen. We’d been in the room less than half an hour before all our clothes were on the ground. The sex was the only thing between us that wasn’t moving like a bullet train.
“You don’t know me very well,” I tried to reason.
“How can you say that?” he demanded. “I know you.”
“What I mean is…there’s a lot you don’t know about me. You’ll probably learn more about me three weeks from now, even more than what you’ve learned these past three weeks,” I clarified. “Don’t you want to know me better before you decide if you really do want us to be in a relationship?”
Nicky shrugged, looking dejected, and I almost changed my mind and gave in. I wanted to kiss him and tell him to just forget about what I said and that I was stupid. It would have been so easy. Because really, in what world would it be a bad thing to have a quiet and thoughtful guy as my boyfriend?
“You don’t want to be with me.” When he said it, I regained my composure and held my ground.
“That’s not what I said,” I shook my head. “I’m falling for you, Nicky—you have to know that. I just can’t answer you now.”
I touched his knee and was thankful when he didn’t pull away as I spoke again, “It doesn’t change the way I feel about you. Does it change your feelings for me?”
December 4, 2010 Thrashers 3 @ Capitals 1
December 6, 2010 Leafs 5 @ Capitals 4 (SO)
December 9, 2010 Panthers 3 @ Capitals 0
December 11, 2010 Avalanche 3 @ Capitals 2
December 12, 2010 Capitals 0 @ Rangers 7
December 15, 2010 Ducks 2 @ Capitals 1(OT)
December 18, 2010 Capitals 2 @ Bruins 3
December 19, 2010 Capitals 3 @ Senators 2
December 21, 2010 Devils 1 @ Capitals 5
_____
I woke to the dim light of the room and the sound of Nicky’s even breathing. I was curled up against his bare chest, his arm draped around my waist. He looked peaceful, his lips slightly parted and hair disheveled. I had to get up to pee and I wondered how deep of a sleeper Nicky was, because I didn’t want to wake him.
Slowly, I moved my legs out from under my side of the blanket and slid from Nicky’s arm. I didn’t have far to go since we were sharing my little twin bed. I bunched up the part of the blanket I’d been under and used it as a replacement for my body, moving it under Nicky’s arm. By the time I was standing, he had stirred in his sleep but didn’t wake up. With a sigh of relief, I picked up his shirt that was littered on the floor. I crossed the small space between the bed and the door and buttoned it down before I went for the latch on the door.
The hallway and bathroom were completely quiet. I’d made the short trip between my current dorm room and the bathroom so many times since September when I’d been assigned the R.A. of the fifth floor, but never in my bare feet and a men’s white dress shirt. All the sounds I made seemed to be amplified tenfold against the silence. Nicky and I might as well have been on our own island.
In the bathroom, I checked my reflection in the mirror as I washed my hands. I didn’t think that I was glowing, but I definitely had I just had sex hair. Besides the hair and a bit of smudged eyeliner on my upper lids, I looked more or less the same as I had when I left the party with Nicky. I’d gotten ready hours earlier, before going to the Verizon Center with Jaden. It was a wonder I even had any remnants of eyeliner left to accent my icy blue eyes. I brushed through my hair with my fingers, even adding a little water to flatten it against my scalp.
My thoughts were on Nicky as I left the bathroom and walked down the hall back to my room. We’d spent some time talking about hockey when we were together, but not a whole lot of time, and sometimes I let myself forget who he was, what he did for a living. I wasn’t sure if the Capitals were having a practice on the day before the home game against the Penguins, but if they were, I wondered if what Nicky and I had just done would affect him in practice. There was also the fact that we ended up skipping out a good chunk of a party that had been thrown at his house. Would his teammates that were in attendance chide him for an explanation? Would he blush about it or delve into details?
My own cheeks felt hot thinking about it as I pushed the door to my room carefully. I knew the hinges would creak. I was trying to make as little noise as possible, mindful of the man sprawled out in my bed. It turned out that I didn’t have to be. When I entered the room, Nicky’s cheek was to the pillow and his gaze was on me.
“Hey,” I greeted.
A thin smile appeared on his lips. “Hey.”
I was standing at the bedside by the time the door clicked behind me. Nicky pulled back my duvet cover and patted the spot beside him, encouraging me to reclaim my spot. He made the bedspread look better, his Viking god’s body standing out against the minty green of my sheets.
“You weren’t here,” he spoke once I had settled in next to him. “When I notice, I couldn’t sleep anymore.”
I overestimated how sleuth I could be. I had been gone less than five minutes. But what he said was sweet, and I placed a kiss on his jawline. “Sorry.”
Nicky adjusted his warm body so that we were in close contact again. I let my hands fall against his chest and he closed his eyes as he searched for the right groove of my hip to rest his palm on, as if he were going back to sleep. His eyes flew open again when he discovered I wasn’t wearing any underwear. “That’s all you wear?”
“It’s not like I was gonna run into anyone in the hallway. “ I reminded him, “We’re alone, remember?”
He flashed a dreamy smile and whispered back to me, “Alone.”
His voice was something silky and gruff all at the same time. It brought me back to what we’d done in my dorm room. It almost sent a shiver down my spine, thinking about the way he’d touched me and held me and made me moan. It hadn’t been perfect, but it was as damn near to perfect as I’d ever had. I was thankful that Nicky was who he was, that he’d wanted to be alone with me. Not up in his bedroom with the party going on and not hurriedly in that guest room worried that someone could walk in on us at any moment.
“D’you know what time it is?” he asked, apparently forgetting about going back to sleep.
I craned my neck to the digital alarm clock illuminated on the desk, leaning my weight against him as I lifted myself from the bed slightly to get a proper look. I put it there purposely so that I had to get out of bed to turn it off and not be late for class during the semester. “It’s 2:48.”
“I’m kinda hungry,” Nicky admitted. “Didn’t have anything to eat since the locker room pizza after the game.”
“Well, I had to clear the refrigerator out before my freshmen left for the holidays. I have some cookies in here but that’s it.” I chewed on my lip, wondering if I should dig around for my phone in my bag and check for the nearest late night diner. Our options would be pretty slim at 3 in the morning. “Do you want me to try and find out what’s open?”
He shook his head against the pillow. “I was thinking…we go back to my house. Party’s over by now and left over food, probably. Are you hungry?”
“I could eat,” I answered. “We should go then.”
Nicky didn’t loosen his grip on me so that we could get up. He did quite the opposite, moving his hand from my hip to the small of my back. His free hand went to my hair, cupping the back of my head. He used that husky voice again and I wasn’t sure if his words were a statement or a request.
“Stay with me there until the morning.”
_____
The next time I woke up I was in a much bigger, much more comfortable bed than my own or the one in the guest room at my sister’s house. My surroundings were much more masculine as well. I’d gone home with Nicky to eat. Re-energized with food, we’d gone for another round in his bedroom. Though I was pretty sure that his arms were wrapped around me and we were spooning when I dozed off after sleeping with him again. I woke up tangled in his sheets by myself.
My instinct was to check my phone. Unlike my small dorm room, there were nightstands on either side of Nicky’s king sized bed, and I had put my cellphone there and plugged it into the socket shortly after we walked into the room. I reached out for it and pressed on the center ‘Home’ button at the bottom, the lock screen coming up. The notification bar at the top told me that I had a few new text messages. The most recent was from Nicky:
Went to practice at 11 with Stoffe. Back soon with lunch. Left a towel for you in the bathroom.
It was just about noon. I immediately felt bad that he might be getting off the ice at Kettler and I was still naked in his bed. We hadn’t exactly done a lot of actual sleeping.
I rose from the bed and went for the bag I’d brought from my dorm room. The nice thing about Nicky asking me to stay with him for the rest of the night while we’d been on campus was that I had a chance to bring my own clothes and a new toothbrush for the morning after. There was a rolled-up towel on the corner of the sink in the master bathroom, and I smiled at his thoughtfulness. I didn’t have to overthink whether or not it was appropriate for me to use his shower.
I had already brushed my teeth and was pulling my wet hair into a ponytail when I heard footsteps coming from the stairs. I didn’t hear the sound of the front door but I chalked it up to the fact that the bedroom was so far away from it. Nicky appeared in the reflection of the mirror behind me and I was assured that it wasn’t a robber.
“I didn’t think you’d be back this fast,” I told him as we were walking down the stairs to the main floor.
“Me either,” he responded. “We didn’t have on-ice practice. Bruce changed it, so only conditioning.”
“What time did you leave to go to the rink?” I wondered. “I didn’t even notice.”
“9:30, maybe.”
“What time did you fall asleep?”
“I don’t know. Probably around 6.” He shrugged. “The sun was up.”
I hid my laugh behind one of my hands. Math was my thing, and a simple calculation like that took me a split second to figure out that Nicky hadn’t really slept. At most, he’d taken a lengthy nap. “I am so sorry.”
“I’m not,” he answered with a smirk. “As long as is not the night before a game. Then I’m in trouble.”
On the large island counter in the kitchen, there were burgers, fries, and milkshakes from Ray’s Hell Burger—a local burger grill made famous by a visit by the president. I popped a few fries in my mouth—one by one—and Nicky told me the three different milkshake flavors he’d gotten. He’d gotten the vanilla for himself, which left strawberry and chocolate. I went for the chocolate and he stowed the strawberry away in the refrigerator.
“Stoffe will complain that I didn’t let him choose his own milkshake later,” he said.
“Where is your brother anyway?” I asked. “I thought he was with you.”
“He took the other car and decided to go shopping for some stuff before my parents get here,” Nicky explained before he took a bite of his burger. “We gotta clean up, too, before they get here.”
“What time do they get here?”
“In couple of hours,” he replied. “Don’t worry, I’ll drive you home after lunch.”
I was glad that the message was clear to both of us that I was not going to be meeting his parents and we didn’t have to have a discussion about it. It was one thing to meet a few of his teammates. Parents were a whole different story. That kind of thing was for couples who had been together for a while. It implied a very serious, long-term relationship. I may have been spending a lot of time with him, but we weren’t in a relationship as Mike had suggested we would soon be in, so I definitely wasn’t ready to meet his parents.
As we sat on the bar stools at the island counter talking through lunch, I realized it was the first time we were eating a meal together since the day I met him. When we’d returned to his house from Georgetown the night before, or early morning before, depending on how you looked at it, we just picked at leftovers of the catering. It wasn’t so much a meal. We’d come pretty far from the first meal we’d ever eaten together. He hadn’t had much to say to me then, before he touched my hand and told me he wanted to see me again.
Nicky was still quieter than most, but now it felt like he could talk to me about anything. Especially since it was winter break and students went back to their hometowns, I’d seen way more of Nicky than I had any of my friends. Entirely too fast he’d become a constant in my life.
“Can I ask you something?” he said sometime after we were finished with lunch, still sitting at the island, killing time before he drove me back to Rochelle’s house.
I answered his question about a question with my own question. “Is it about the Penguins game tomorrow?”
It was my assumption that he was going to try to explain to me why he hadn’t extended an invitation to the Capitals’ biggest game of the year. I already knew that his family was going to be there, and his friends from back home. Even if I sat in a different section, it would be weird to just be there to see him play and then go home after without talking to him. I still wasn’t a huge Capitals fan either; I liked them as much as I liked any other team not called the Colorado Avalanche. Dating Nicky didn’t mean I had to be dying to go to every single one of his games.
“No…” he returned, looking a little confused. “Uh, should I have asked you about that game? I didn’t think you care about it.”
“No, you don’t have to. I don’t care about it.” I shrugged, nonchalant. “Go on. What were you going to ask?”
“I, uh, I was gonna ask you…” he trailed off again, going silent and looking down at his hands momentarily before looking at me again with his sepia eyes. “Do you want to be my girlfriend?”
The color must have drained from my face. He caught me completely off guard. It was so far from what I was anticipating. It didn’t have anything to do with the Pittsburgh Penguins. It didn’t even have anything to do with hockey.
Girlfriend. It was a loaded word. It was a title. It meant that things were going to change, and that they had already. It worried me.
“I don’t want to be a cliché, Nicky,” I responded once I recovered from the shell shock.
“What do you mean?” It probably wasn’t the response he wanted or expected.
I sighed. “I don’t want you to think you have to ask me to be your girlfriend just because I slept with you.”
“That’s not why…” he didn’t finish his sentence. He even looked hurt.
Wasn’t it? Wasn’t that how whirlwind romances started crashed and burned, because two people moved along at a lightning pace, jumped into a relationship, realized it didn’t live up to the hype and didn’t want to be in it anymore, before one person awkwardly broke it off? When I told Nicky the night before that, yes, we were moving too fast but I didn’t want it to stop, I literally was only talking about the sex that was about to happen. We’d been in the room less than half an hour before all our clothes were on the ground. The sex was the only thing between us that wasn’t moving like a bullet train.
“You don’t know me very well,” I tried to reason.
“How can you say that?” he demanded. “I know you.”
“What I mean is…there’s a lot you don’t know about me. You’ll probably learn more about me three weeks from now, even more than what you’ve learned these past three weeks,” I clarified. “Don’t you want to know me better before you decide if you really do want us to be in a relationship?”
Nicky shrugged, looking dejected, and I almost changed my mind and gave in. I wanted to kiss him and tell him to just forget about what I said and that I was stupid. It would have been so easy. Because really, in what world would it be a bad thing to have a quiet and thoughtful guy as my boyfriend?
“You don’t want to be with me.” When he said it, I regained my composure and held my ground.
“That’s not what I said,” I shook my head. “I’m falling for you, Nicky—you have to know that. I just can’t answer you now.”
I touched his knee and was thankful when he didn’t pull away as I spoke again, “It doesn’t change the way I feel about you. Does it change your feelings for me?”