The Risk of Falling

Chapter Twenty-Three: For The Love of Desks

A/N: Hi everyone! So sorry if I'd been absent the past couple weeks. I had a real trying time, stressed out with work and also sick. I really couldn't muster any energy to write. It took me a lot longer to get through the newest chapter. I'm hoping I can have another one uploaded soon after this to make up for the gap—fingers crossed. 

So it's game on for Max and Luke and I think after the last twenty or so chapters of some slow burn I put you through, you guys deserve to enjoy this one. Hope you have fun!

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It was almost déjà vu except that when I opened my eyes this morning, a pair of bright, crystal blue ones were already gazing at me—wide awake and smiling.

No shin-kicking this time. 

If anything kicked, it was my heart, right into overdrive, when I realized that I was pressed close to Luke's warm and very naked chest.

"Where did your shirt go?” I croaked.

I shifted slightly in a secret attempt to discern if he was just as unclothed from the waist down.

I discovered very male and very bare legs entwined with mine around the ankles. It was skin to skin.

My heart nearly jumped out of me.

"Please tell me we didn't have sex last night and I was too doped up to have stayed conscious for it," I groaned, briefly squeezing my eyes shut.

Luke didn't say anything. The idiot just kept grinning.

Then I glanced down at myself, quickly realizing I still had my old college shirt and cotton shorts on. "Oh. But I'm fully dressed so I'm guessing we didn't?"

I totally sounded inane but I wasn't fully recovered yet. 

No, not from Lola's drama yesterday, but the fact that Luke was here with me because he chose to be.

“Are you very disappointed?” he asked, his grinning only broadening even more. 

“Yes,” I blurted out before shaking my head. “I mean, no, I’m not. I’d like to be conscious and fully participating for my first time. So I’m glad that it wasn’t last night when I was doozy with painkillers.”

Luke’s smile shrank by tiny increments as his brows drew in together in confusion.

“You’re telling me that you’re a virgin,” he said, shaking his head slowly as if it somehow helped him make sense of his own statement. He suddenly shoved the covers aside, revealing me in my super-sexy old and baggy sleepwear while he was looking like an underwear model in nothing but a black pair of boxers that did not conceal his very masculine interest.

“You’re telling me that some red-blooded male passed this all up,” he continued, his voice dropping an octave, as he snaked a hand around my left butt cheek and gave it a quick, possessive squeeze. He skated it up and under my loose shirt, following the dip of my lower back until it rested on the curve of my waist, his thumb rubbing heated strokes against the skin on my stomach. 

He lifted his eyes back up to me and they now blazed like sharp blue flames.

He leaned in, lowering his face just along the line of my shoulder where my shirt neckline gaped, his lips imprinting themselves on my skin with their heat before they could even make contact. 

I swallowed hard, my heart rapping against my chest so fast I swear I could feel the room vibrate with it. “With the implication of that statement that, uh… males aren’t that d-discerning as long as they’re r-red-blooded…” My eyes shut close, my breaths hitching on their way down my lungs as Luke continued to place very strategic kisses along his way to the side of my neck where it felt like an entire universe of nerve endings was centered. “Then, um… men will approximately h-have half the world’s population for variety. Some girl’s bound to b-be passed… up.”