I Do (Hate You) by Sienna Blake

Shell

James and I sprinted all the way back to his villa while I pondered burning my own retinas out. When we made it inside, I leaned against the door panting with the exertion of our run.

“Come over here,” James said. “I know exactly what you need.”

“James, I am not in the mood for you to say something perverted about my ‘needs’ right now.”

“Clever. I wish I’d thought of that, but I’m talking about a different kind of need,” he said, dragging me to the kitchen phone. “What you need right now is…tacos.”

I hadn’t thought of food the entire day but when he said “tacos,” my belly let out a huge growl and my mouth started watering. James dialed room service and I pulled a room service menu from a kitchen drawer and whispered various orders to go with our tacos and he repeated them into the phone. “Mini burgers! Giant eggrolls! French fries! Hey, should we get a salad too?”

“You really think we could eat something that requires a fork right now?” he whispered back and then said louder into the phone. “That, plus a six-pack of beer would be great. Thanks!”

“No fancy whiskey tonight?”

“Beer pairs better with handcuffs,” he said. “I prefer whiskey in coat check rooms.”

I pretended I didn’t hear that last part. I was having a hard enough time not jumping his bones without him bringing up one of our past sex romps. If I thought too hard about the night we had hot sex in the coat check room, I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off of him.

I hid in the little closet by the front door when room service arrived and James loitered awkwardly outside the door. If the waiter thought anything was weird, he didn’t say so. When the waiter left, we pounced on the floor. James had laid out a picnic rug that he’d found in that closet for us to eat on with a bunch of pillows we got from the back patio of his villa. We tried for a few minutes to eat across from each other, but it didn’t work with the handcuffs, so we bunched all the pillows together behind us and ate side by side.

“Is this the greatest taco of all time or am I just starving to death?” I asked James.

“Try the mini burger. It’s amazing,” he said and held one up to me. I tried to grab it with my free hand, but I was still clutching half a taco. “Oh, just take a bite while I hold it.”

With everything we’d done together today, for some reason, feeding each other seemed like the most intimate.

“Oh God, you’re right. That is sooo good,” I said, mouth still full of burger.

“You’ve got a little something there near your mouth,” he said, pointing toward my lips.

I patted and rubbed around my mouth but couldn’t find anything while he laughed at my incompetence. James finally reached over and wiped ketchup off my chin.

“I would have found it eventually,” I said.

“It was too painful to watch you try,” he said and licked the ketchup off his finger.

I looked around for something to distract me from the licking and saw there was only one eggroll left.

James saw it too and yelled, “Oh no, you don’t!”

Our hands touched the delicious morsel at the same time, and he held one end while I held the other in some type of eggroll standoff.

“Let go,” I said.

“You let go. That’s my eggroll,” he said. “I saw it first.”

“You ate the last three!”

“Just let go and nobody gets hurt,” he said, leaning in so closely that I knew he was planning something, but I wasn’t sure what.

“Do your best,” I said in my most threatening voice.

He let go of the oversized eggroll. I thought I had won the war, but that’s when he went in for the tickle. He dug his fingers under my outstretched arm, and I screamed with laughter and tossed the eggroll into the air. James stopped tickling me to try to catch it with his free hand but just kept fumbling it like he was a very bad juggler.

“That’s cheating!” I screamed.

“All’s fair in love and war and eggrolls!” he countered, finally getting his hand wrapped around the food and shoving one end in his mouth.

“It is? Alright then.”

I snatched up the last taco and chucked it at him, hitting the side of his head with a splat. I laughed so hard that my sides hurt but he never let go of the eggroll.

“You think just because I have hot sauce dripping into my ear canal that I’m going to let go of this eggroll? Dream on!”

“Fine. You win! You are the eggroll champion,” I conceded as he took the last bite of the eggroll. He grabbed for a cloth napkin and began wiping at the sauce on his face.

“Oh, thank God. The hot sauce is in my eye now and I might go blind!”

He was mainly just smearing the sauce around, so I poured a bottle of water on one of the napkins and wiped it off his face and out of his ear.

“Better?”

“Better.”

I couldn’t help but think that Rupert and I had never had a night like this. He had taken me to the finest restaurants in Australia and a few times in Europe, but we’d never had a picnic, much less one with a food fight.

I jumped a little when James asked, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Uh…no… I mean…I don’t know…maybe?” I stuttered out, then cleared my throat. “What are you thinking?”

He looked me dead in the eye, serious as fuck and whispered, “There’s only one sausage roll left.”

We both dove for it at the same time and my cuffed hand was almost on the roll until he yanked his hand back, sending me crashing back into him. I scrambled up on my knees to try to get it with my other hand but that sent him off balance and we toppled into the food with him on top of me.

It was possibly the funniest thing I’d ever done, but I wasn’t laughing. James was lying on top of me and we were staring into each other’s eyes. Even handcuffed, he was still able to hold his weight up and off of me so he didn’t mash me into the floor.

I screamed into my own head how I was engaged to be married the very next day and this was SO, SO wrong, but I still couldn’t break eye contact. By the look on his face, James wasn’t going to make the first move. He knew the position I was in and how big a deal this would be.

As I listened to his quickened breathing and watched him unconsciously lick his bottom lip, I was finding it harder and harder to hold on to logic over lust. I was just about to give in to the kiss when I summoned up my last bit of reason and blurted out, “I need a shower!”