AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I gaped at his back.
This was our first date and he'd brought me back to his house after telling me to dress warmly because we'd be outside?
What the hell was he playing at here?
"Damien-"
I snapped my mouth shut as he pushed open the door and held his arm out for me to enter.
Chapter Seventeen
What I saw of the house was small, the rooms not very big. The living room had been packed with shelves that were crammed full of movies, an overstuffed couch, and a huge television. There hadn’t been room for much else in there. I would have liked to take a look at the movies, but Damien didn’t give me a chance to. You could tell a lot about a person based off of what they filled their shelves with, and I wanted that look into Damien and Julian’s home life.
The kitchen was long and narrow, and I didn’t think you could have the fridge open at the same time as the drawers across from it. There were no dirty dishes piled up like one would imagine finding in the house owned by two bachelors. The place was spotless, the counter space bare. There was a total of four other doors besides the one Damien headed towards, and every single one of them was closed.
“Why do you live in such a small house?” I asked him curiously. “I heard you have a whole entire room at the Alexander house that’s just filled with your clothes. Why don’t you guys just move to a bigger house? Or, move into the big house with the others?”
We stopped in front of a door at the end of the hallway and he opened it up. Once again, he held the door for me to walk through, and I sighed. It was very sweet when he did that for me, and I decided I liked it.
"If it were up to me I would live at what you've been calling the big house," he said as he ushered me outside. "But, for whatever reason, Julian won't live with Quint. They are the best of friends at times, but he claims he'd kill him if he had to live with him. He moved into this place a long time ago because it was better than being home for him. And I moved in with him because he didn't want to be alone, and I know exactly how it feels to not want to be alone. So, now we're here, and even though we've outgrown the space, Julian sees it as home and has no desire to leave. And I have no desire to leave him alone."
I had once enjoyed being alone and wouldn't have understood him, but since they'd burst into my life I'd gotten used to being around good people all the time, and didn't enjoy being alone much anymore. I liked living with Dash because I liked knowing that he was there, but he still gave me my space so I could pretend to be alone if I needed space to do so.
The backyard was fenced in with a high, wooden fence and, was much like the rest of the house; that's to say it was small. A brick patio ran the whole length (not that it was much) of the back of the house and out a good five feet. There was a circular table with a glass top and an umbrella stuck through a hole in the center of it. The umbrella was open, and the entire pole had been wrapped up in fairy lights. In fact, the entire fence had been covered in strands of fairy lights except for a part of the back wall that was instead covered by a large screen. There was a small table on the patio that had a movie projector on top of it.
"This is-" I was going to say cool, but stopped short when I caught sight of what was on the grass in between the brick patio and the screen.
There was a large, thick looking round rug covering the grass. There were blankets and pillows piled high on the rug and a small, white cooler sat off to the side of the rug.
"What's..."
"Our first date," Damien said dramatically as he waved his arm low and in the direction of the rug. "Is dinner and a movie."
This was definitely dinner and a movie done the right way for any kind of date, but only so long as Damien hadn't made whatever was in that cooler. I hadn't eaten anything he'd made yet, but I sure had heard the horror stories the other guys had told me about when they'd been forced to try his cooking out.
I didn't want to die, and if rumor was to be believed, it was a definite possibility.
Damien must have read some of my thoughts on my face because his body started to shake with his laughter.
"Everything in the cooler is store bought and made by Julian, I promise you," he told me. "Julian picked it all out. He lets me pick out all of his clothes for him, but I'm not to be trusted with what goes inside our refrigerator."
He rolled his eyes and gave my hand a gentle tug. I followed him to the edge of the circular rug and watched in fascination as he kicked off his shoes. We weren't going to have to take anything else off, were we? I certainly hoped not. Damien might be comfortable touching me, which I'd only learned the other night, but I wasn't yet interested in taking my clothes off around him. Not that he hadn't already seen the whole package in all of its glory, because he had. But the situation had been extreme, and not in any way sexual; it had only been treated as such by my outrageous Salt and Pepper twins. It's not that I didn't find Damien attractive, because I did, anybody would. I just wanted to get to know him a little better and be more comfortable with him and around him before we took things to a physical level beyond cuddling. I wanted a bond with him first, that's how I wanted it to be with all of my guys. It was important to me that I not be like Vivian in any way, shape, or form, and Vivian had been the Queen of allowing people to take liberties with her body.
I wanted a bond first, and I wanted ties that wouldn't easily be severed. I had them with Quinton, and I had thought I was there with Ty until he'd told me about this Annabell stuff, but now I wasn't so sure how solid our bond was. His lies and bullshit could threaten everything for all of us. But I wasn't going to think on that now, I would do it later when I was in bed and trying to sleep, and it would keep me up for hours and I wouldn't be able to stop myself.
Right now, I had something else to think about, something not as important, but it kind of felt like it at the moment, because Damien,freaking Damienof all people, dropped to his knees at my feet on the rug.
"What are you doing?" I asked in a high, surprised voice.
He looked up at me and he wasn't joking or laughing now. He was dead serious. I sucked in a breath at the look in his eyes and watched in wide-eyed fascination as he lifted my right foot and placed it atop his bent knee. He took hold of the zipper on my boot and began pulling it down slowly, inch by inch, while he looked me in the eyes.
I was beginning to think Damien and I weren't on different pages when it came to our relationship, but we were reading entirely different books, instead, and he seriously thought I needed to play catch up and get with the program.
I watched him, stupefied, as he pulled the zipper all the way down and gently removed the boot from my foot. He set it aside on the edge of the rug with care then he came back to my foot that was now on his knee and covered in a bright yellow fuzzy sock, just like my other foot was.
He looked down at my sock for a second before his eyes came back to mine and he grinned at me.
"You are a very odd girl," he said around his grin. "Did you know that?"
