Coda Books 04 - Strawberries for Dessert (MM)

Saturday afternoon to buy what he needed for dinner. “I’m nervous about this,” I confessed as we got out of the car and started walking toward the store. “It didn’t go well last time.”
    “It won’t be like that again,” he assured me.
    “How do you know?”
    “Because you trust me now,” he said, as if that made all the difference. Had I not trusted him before? I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I was used to feeling that way around him, and I decided to let it go.
    “What are you making?” I asked him as we walked into the grocery store. “You could make the cioppino again. He liked it so much last time he practically licked the pot clean after you left.” Of course that made me think about why Cole had left early that night and the horrible fight we had the next evening after the show. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was so—”
    “You were forgiven a long time ago, love,” he said, interrupting me. “But I love that you’re suddenly so repentant. And I’m not making cioppino.”
    “What are you making?”
    “It’s a surprise,” he said, in that voice that told me I wouldn’t get any more info out of him, even if I begged. “Should we get bread here or at that shop up the street?”
    “Let’s just get it here. We should buy a pie or something too,” I told him. “He likes dessert.”
    “We could have strawberries for dessert,” he said, picking up one of the little plastic containers of fruit and smelling it. “They’re perfectly ripe. You can tell just by the smell. Here.”
    He held the container up to my nose. The smell of strawberries was associated with him so strongly in my mind, and upon smelling them I immediately thought of how it felt to have his thin body underneath me, to be inside of him, to have my nose buried in his cinnamon-colored hair.
    And suddenly, I had a raging hard-on.
    What the hell? I was in the middle of the grocery store! I turned toward the racks of produce to hide my predicament from anybody who might be looking my way. I closed my eyes and tried to think of baseball. Or mowing the lawn. Or anything but the way he smelled, and the sounds he made when—
    “My goodness, love,” he said, interrupting my decidedly too- erotic thoughts. “Do you have a strange fruit fetish I don’t know about?”
    I glanced over to find his eyes on me, and not surprisingly, they were full of laughter. “It’s you,” I whispered in embarrassment.
    “Me?”
    “Your hair.” He still looked a little bit confused, and I had to say,
    “It smells like your hair!”
    I saw the comprehension in his eyes. I could also see how much it pleased him. “Strawberries,” he said. “That’s very interesting. Anything else?”
    I felt my cheeks turning red as I thought again about his hair—the color this time, rather than the smell—and his skin. “Cinnamon,” I admitted quietly. “And caramel.”
    Now he really looked amused. “All that’s missing is the whipped cream.”
    And that of course brought a whole new set of images to mind.
    And those images did absolutely nothing to alleviate the tightness in my groin. “You’re not helping,” I hissed at him and he laughed.
    “I wasn’t trying to, love.” He stepped closer, stood on his toes a little so he could whisper in my ear, “Too bad you’re stuck here. If we make it home in time, I might let you have dessert first.”
    “ Still not helping.”
    “Would this be a bad time to tell you how much I’ve been thinking about your ties lately?”
    “Oh my God,” I moaned, and he laughed. I pushed him away, which only made him laugh louder. I grabbed the basket from him. If I carried it strategically, it would cover the embarrassing bulge in my pants. “Can we hurry this up?”
    “Anything you want, love,” he said in amusement. He turned and headed further into the grocery store, and I followed behind. I figured wandering through the aisles behind him would help take my mind off of sex. As long as we didn’t encounter any more strawberries. Or cinnamon. Or caramel. Or whipped cream.
    Yeah, this was going to work.
    Especially since he was in front of me, and I could see that butterfly on the back of his neck and the curve of his back where it arched into the soft globes of his ass. I was driving myself crazy, and he was laughing at me the entire time.
    We finally had everything he said he needed, plus the strawberries—we had to go back to the produce section to get them, which didn’t help—and we