“Cripes, I can’t find my Kindle,” I say.
Sweet Cheeks, my boyfriend, lowers his head and pedals furiously in the den. He’s on the stationary bike, in the middle of a workout and doesn’t want to hear it, thinks he’s going to get blamed again. As well he should. Only yesterday I found my Kindle stuck between the pages of a Grisham paperback. Sweet Cheeks, under my glare, had shrugged and said he needed a bookmark.
It’s tough living with someone stuck in the last century, but I never get overly mad at him. If he wants to read old-fashioned books, it’s okay with me, just don’t lose my e-reader!
He’s ten minutes into his session and already breathing hard, trying to work off a hangover from too much red wine last night. He looks at me with his brooding black eyes, brushes his hair off his forehead, and flashes me the lopsided grin that always weakens my knees.
“Did you look in the freezer?” he says.
I grin back at him.
“You are such a bastard,” I say.
It’s not fair to bring up the Kindle hunt that went on for days, with me finally finding my precious e-reader under a bag of frozen peas. I really couldn’t be blamed. I was cooking, something I rarely do, reading while I stirred the pasta, and, well . . . I guess that time was my fault instead of his. When Sweet Cheeks suggested I warm the frozen Kindle in the microwave, I’d shot him a glare and propped it on the window sill, whispered sweet nothings until the frost melted off the edges. It had taken days for the letters to stop jumping around, something I blamed on post-traumatic memory. (Mine, not the e-reader’s.) Sweet Cheeks had suggested I go back to old-fashioned books to avoid this kind of thing in the future, said he used to hide his wallet in the freezer and the cold never hurt his money. I told him a piece of high-tech electronics is far different from a one dollar bill, and he’d glared at me while he hunted for the remote.
“Come on,” I now say, “what did you do with it this time?”
He’s sweating, a shine on his skin, has a towel around his neck and his t-shirt is darkening around the collar. “Did you look in the oven?”
“The oven!”
“You do lose things in the strangest places,” he says.
I go to the kitchen and look in the oven, holler back toward the den. “Not there.”
He comes in and plants a kiss on my neck, hugs me from behind.
“It’ll show up,” he says. “It always does.”
He’s right, but I want it to show up now. I’m in the middle of a hot read, Fifty Shades of Grey, and I NEED to find out what happens next.
