What Love Is

Chapter 13

I don't have anything to say about dear Chapter 13. Except for that it was really difficult to write in school.

-Brittany

As a young child, Rowan had always entertained the idea that people lived exactly 99 days, and on the hundredth day, they passed away and went to heaven. There was no other way around it; when one turned a hundred years old, it was their day to die. Usually there were no exceptions, and this notion only disappeared when her mother contracted cancer and the world had fallen over on its axis. But for the most part, every hundred year old person died on the same day.

She wasn’t going to make it to a hundred.

Today was her day, and she was dying.

Well, it was what it felt like, at least. Fire was consuming her body, crawling up her skin, licking at her insides. Insides, namely, being dangerously low in her core, going lower and lower into the place where being with someone of the other gender suddenly got extremely serious.

Rowan burned where his hand rested on her waist, leading her up the stairs. She wanted to break down and weep on the steps for time her body spent crying out in need, with the object of her affection so close to her. Time was being wasted, dammit!

“I think a hot shower would be a good idea,” Drew murmured gently in her ear, and she flinched where his breath struck the sensitive cartilage. “You’re still shivering. Would you like to go first?”

Why don’t we do it together? She looked up at him out of the corner of her eye, wondering if he was imagining the same thing, or he just wasn’t keen on entertaining the idea. It was a wonderful idea in her mind, why shouldn’t it be in his?

He had a stupid smile plastered on his face with his eyes trained on the space in front of him as they climbed. She wondered at that grin for a quick moment, drawing her gaze away, trying to imagine what was going on in his head.

Was he testing her? Giving her a last minute to think about what she wanted to do? Ha.

There was no going back.

“Could just take it together,” she loudly replied, making sure her bold voice got the point across. She was sick and tired of running around in circles with him. If sleeping with him wasn’t enough to show that she was falling ridiculously head over heels, she had no idea what else could possibly convince him.

“That’s a good idea,” Drew answered, and Rowan glanced up in enough time to catch his wink. Her stomach did an excited flip. How long was it until they reached his apartment? Why did they take the stairs? Was he trying to prolong her agony?

“Why did we take the stairs, again?” Drew spoke her thoughts aloud, and she smiled. He was feeling it too, then; the inexplicable human urge to tear each other’s clothes off.

“We sort of just wound up here,” she absently replied, mind wandering off into dark corners where her imagination played with images of their bodies tangled together. They did wind up on the stairs, after they’d wound up kissing in the lobby, with her back against the wall and trapped under his body. They’d spent a decent three to four minutes there, until Rowan had pointed out the security camera watching them from the corner.

Her heart began to slam in her rib cage as the landing for his floor came into sight. Three floors up and her libido was beginning to become uncontrollable and crazy, and she was not sure for how long she was going to be able to control herself.

“Rowan?” he asked, digging in his pocket for his keys. She leaned shakily against the wall, still feeling where his fingers had rested in the curve of her waist. With his shirt plastered to his chest, she could see the outlines of the planes and muscles on his upper body, and her memory immediately winged back to seeing him standing half-naked after a shower, and she gulped.