You Irritate Me // Nigel Barker (Chapter 18)

“We should get some sleep,” Kinsey said. Taylor rolled over to wrap his arm over her stomach, holding her firmly in place against him. “Taylor, I’m serious.”

“So am I. Let’s go to sleep,” he stated into her upper arm, placing a light kiss there before snuggling in. Kinsey shook her head amusedly before trying to pull herself from his grasp again. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to bed,” she said as if the answer was obvious.

“You’re in bed,” he said, “Kinsey, no one else is here. You can stay here all night.” Kinsey immediately felt like a grade-A moron and dropped her head back to the pillow below.

“Sorry… force of habit,” she mumbled. He laughed lightly, his breath tickling the exposed skin of her arm.

“Well, if you don’t want to stay in here, you don’t have to. But, I don’t know why we shouldn’t take advantage of the opportunity while it’s presented.” Kinsey wished she could see him through the dark, to see what the expression on his face was. She wondered if his expression mirrored the feeling she was experiencing. Kinsey had, in her twenty-three years, shared a bed with several men. But she had never been nervous to do so before. She had only just admitted that she had feelings for him, though she hadn’t let herself fully delve into the massive internal exploration required to assess out what those feelings were exactly, and now she was going to be sleeping beside him all night long. Due to their arrangement, she had never really thought about this moment because she had never believed it would be possible. When they had first slept together, she hadn’t even imagined a second time, but, here they were. Somewhere between friendship and something more is where they currently found themselves as they lay there in Taylor’s comfortable bed.

Before Kinsey’s brain could get too engrossed, she forced it into nothingness and concentrated on Taylor’s steady breathing and the sound of the ceiling fan circling lazily above them.

When her eyes opened again, she found the room still pitch black, but a glance to her left lead her to his alarm clock which declared that it was already nine in the morning. She stretched, a little contented squeak leaving her as she did so which brought Taylor out of his slumber.

“Huh?” he asked as his head bolted off the pillow. He fumbled noisily on his bedside table until his hand collided with something that Kinsey assumed to be the lamp he turned on a few seconds later. Kinsey was about to wonder how long it would take him to realize that she was there, but right then, he looked over at her and smiled. “Hello.”

“Good morning,” she returned, finding the nervousness she had felt the night before pleasantly absent. It had been a truly decent night’s sleep.

“You snore, by the way,” he stated before pushing himself to a sitting position. Kinsey felt her mouth drop open and she narrowed her eyes at him before mirroring his pose, too aghast to notice that the blanket had slid to her lap, exposing her fully naked torso to him and therefore distracting him completely.

“I do not snore,” she demanded before softening, “…Do I?”

“If you did I forgot all about it now,” he grinned, wiggling his eyebrows at her before tackling her gently to the mattress and working his mouth from her clavicle down. Kinsey sighed and dropped it, instead focusing her attention on the wonders his mouth was working. Right as his tongue dipped lightly into her belly button, her stomach growled loudly, prompting him to laugh loudly and drop his forehead to rest there. “When did your stomach get a new speaker system? I have never heard it growl as loud as it has for the last day.”

“It’s always been like this, you just never noticed before,” she teased, brushing his hair back from his face when he tipped his head up to look at her. He thought about something for a beat before looking back down at the flat plane of her stomach, pressing a kiss there before sighing.

“We were really stupid,” he said softly. She propped herself up on her elbows to look at him better.

“We’re just a little slow on the uptake, that’s all.” He reached up and grabbed one of her hands in his, kissing her knuckles before sitting up.

“I guess. Now get up so I can feed you before your stomach tries to eat itself.”

“I can feed myself, thank you very much,” she sassed, standing and heading for the door.

“Aren’t you going to put something on?” he asked.

“Why?” she asked, giving him a little wink before heading out his door.

They spent the morning eating breakfast and watching TV. Kinsey had eventually gone upstairs to put on some clothes after the bacon grease from the skillet had come dangerously close to splattering her bare skin and Taylor had insisted that she either stop cooking or go cover up with something, which had led to a brief spat about how Kinsey suspected Taylor was the only guy on the face of the planet who would tell the girl cooking him breakfast naked to put some clothes on.

Once they had showered and gotten ready, they settled down in the living room again, this time just to talk.

“You know, I thought of something the other day, something Isaac and Zac were talking about awhile back,” Kinsey started, “They mentioned something about that day we first swam in your new pool. And how you got mad about something that day. What was it?” Taylor took a deep breath and laughed uncomfortably.

“I was kind of hoping you’d forget about that,” he admitted, suddenly finding the fringe at the edge of the throw pillow beside him very interesting.

“Well, I didn’t. So fess up,” she teased, reaching her foot forward so her big toe could poke his thigh gently.

“Well, we weren’t exactly used to seeing you like that. I mean, just seeing you in your room earlier that week had been weird enough. It was like you’d gone from a little girl to a woman while we were gone. And then it was just very obvious, or it should have been. But I was still pretty clueless and instead just channeled anything I was feeling towards you into something else. Or at least looking back on it now, that’s what it seems I was doing,” he told her, “But anyways, when you went in the house to call Tif to see if she wanted to meet us for the first time the next day, Isaac claimed that I was watching you walk away towards the house.”

“Were you?” Kinsey interjected with a smile.

“I don’t know. Probably,” he laughed, “But, he confronted me about it. And see, for a few years by then, they had been giving me a hard time about you, saying that I liked you because I teased you so much. You know, typical kid stuff. So, Isaac said that I was watching you walk away and I, of course, said that I wasn’t and that you were Kinsey and you were off limits.” Taylor paused and sighed again. “And at that point, Zac accused me of saying that because I wanted them to stay away because I wanted you for myself.”

“Wow,” Kinsey said after a moment, “I can’t believe at that age Zac was able to un-spaz enough to form that coherent of a thought.”

“Right?” Taylor asked, but his voice sounded lifeless instead of light-hearted.

“What’s wrong?” Kinsey asked. He shook his head as if to indicate that he didn’t want to answer, but when Kinsey continued to look at him expectantly, he did anyway.

“It’s just annoying how everyone seemed to know but us. Our parents, my stupid brothers back when we were kids…” Kinsey opened her mouth to tell him Brenna’s comment that lead Kinsey to believe that people had been talking about them for quite some time, but didn’t, because then she’d had to tell him that Brenna knew they were sleeping together and she wasn’t sure if Taylor would want that information. “It just feels weird having our parents think we’re together and everyone else thinks it’s funny, the thought of us being together, when they used to think I liked you.”

“Well, in the last several years, we certainly haven’t given them a reason to think that we have any emotions between each other besides irritation and a fucked-up kind of friendship,” Kinsey shrugged, “You really can’t blame them for eventually giving up the thought.” Taylor nodded.

“I think we should tell them about us,” he said simply, his gaze fixed somewhere across the room.

“I’m sorry?” she asked, hoping he would oblige her by repeating himself since there way no way he could have said what she thought he had.

“Kins, they’re going to find out. It’s going to happen. And I would much rather that we tell them then having them walk in on us sometime. That would be… well, awful in many more ways than one.”

“What are we going to tell them, Taylor? We don’t even know what this is.”

“Exactly! That’s why it’s the perfect time. We can just tell them that something happened this weekend that made us really think and talk. That way, we can keep taking it slow, but we don’t have to hide it from them any more.”

“Do you really think they’re going to believe that? That we drunkenly slept together or something and it’s made us decide to… to what? Date? Because we haven’t really talked about that yet.”

“Fuck Kinsey, I don’t know,” he said, “This is all so aggravating.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that this all feels really good and it makes a ton of sense, but it’s like we have to overanalyze everything because of the way we’re used to dealing with each other. If we had met in a bar and started sleeping together and spending time together the way we have been, we would be calling ourselves a couple by now. But we can’t do that because it would freak everyone out because they haven’t seen the progression the way we have. And yeah, it feels weird to say that I want to date you when we have been nothing but pains in each other’s asses for so long, but I don’t think we ever really were, not really. I don’t think all those things really pissed me off.”

“Ditto,” Kinsey replied, shocked to find her thoughts from the night before coming freely from Taylor’s mouth, “So, let’s just buck up and tell them. If we don’t want to tell them about the last several weeks, we can just say that we got really shit-faced last night and wound up kissing and sleeping together. And when we woke up in the morning, we decided that we should talk about it and we wound up admitting that it hadn’t felt weird at all and we’ve decided to just keep it in consideration or something. I don’t know… I’m bad at this stuff.”

“I don’t exactly have a lot of experience in this area either,” Taylor said, “The whole point of this was to stop lying to everyone, but I don’t know how we can tell them the whole truth and have them understand.”

“We understood with Isaac and Tif,” Kinsey pointed out.

“Yeah, but that was once they were fully in the relationship phase and they could just blow past the friends-with-benefits stage without people getting too bunged about it because everyone was focused on the fact that they were a couple.”

“Then, let’s just go with my plan. Either they’ll buy it or they won’t. If worse comes to worse, we can always just become friends with benefits right in front of their faces.”

“We’ll tell them tomorrow night, when they get back,” Taylor nodded in agreement after considering the suggestion for a moment.

“So what do we do now?” Kinsey asked once they’d come down from the enormity of their decision, “The night is young and all I want to do is put away my clothes which are now totally wrinkled upstairs.”

“Then go put away your clothes and we can figure it out after that,” Taylor said leaning back into the couch and grabbing the remote, but then getting up with a heavy sigh once Kinsey just sat there and glared playfully at him. “Fine, I’ll come keep you company while you do it.”

“That a boy,” she grinned, grabbing him by the front of the shirt and pulling him towards the hallway.

“What are you doing?” Kinsey asked about five minutes later as she continued to putter around her room, putting away the new things she’d purchased even though the hours they had spent folded sloppily in their bags had left them with light wrinkles. Taylor was currently going through the clothes in her closet one piece at a time, obviously judging each piece carefully, making appreciative faces at some and disgusted faces at others.

“Trying to figure out your fucked up fashion sense,” he told her.

“That coming from the guy wearing a pink scarf,” Kinsey rolled her eyes.

“It’s mauve.”

“Yeah, because that makes it so much more manly,” Kinsey retorted with a smile, expecting a response from Taylor but finding him completely silent instead. Assuming she had just severely bruised his male ego with her statement, she turned around ready to apologize but found him gaping at an item buried deep in the back of her closet. She didn’t have to follow his line of sight to know what he was looking at. “Shit…”

“Why do you have this?” he asked, immediately following with, “Never mind, I don’t need to know. All that matters is you’re putting it on right now.” His hand reached forward and took the black corset from its place at the very end of the row. Part of Kinsey wanted to be embarrassed, but that part of her was quickly silenced when she took in the lust-filled eyes Taylor was looking at her with.

“That’s just one part of a whole ensemble, you know,” she teased, stepping up to take it from his hands, “There are matching panties and garters to go with it.”

“I had no idea you were such a freak,” he laughed before sobering, “Now put it on and be in my room in five minutes.”

“Or what?” she asked, already heading to her underwear drawer to retrieve the rest of the outfit.

“Let’s just say you don’t want to find out,” he said, placing a lingering kiss to her lips before hurrying out of the room. When he had seen the corset, he had looked like a little kid who had just spied the ice cream truck down the street, so Kinsey immediately busied herself by changing into the skimpy outfit and touching up her makeup and hair before heading for his room. She felt a rush of thrill course through her as she looked at herself in the mirror. She had only worn this very sexy lingerie for one other guy and he had not been nearly excited about it as Taylor had seemed before even seeing it on her. That and there was the fact that being with him when they could leave the door open and not worry about how loud they were being was utterly fantastic. As she had just learned the night before, she had severely underestimated how good sex with Taylor would be when uninhibited. Severely. But all thoughts about that immediately flew out the window when she entered his bedroom and saw that Taylor was busy setting up his new camera on a tripod next to the bed.

“You’re messing with me right now… right?” she asked, though she already assumed that he wasn’t.

“I need to make sure the camera works,” he told her with a half smile as if his intentions were purely consumer driven, “You look incredible, by the way.” Kinsey felt herself instinctively cross her arms over her chest. She had never let a guy take naked pictures of her before and now did not seem like a particularly good time to start. There was just something about it that seemed so final with the potential for so much future judgment. Almost every girl she knew who had let her boyfriend take naked pictures of her had wound up regretting the decision immensely when he used them as break-up fodder or she found out he had shown them to his buddies.

But then she remembered that Taylor wasn’t her boyfriend, not yet at least. Was she really ready to do this with him? As Kinsey watched him continue to absently tinker with the camera while watching her out of the corner of his eye, she sighed and took a step forward, figuring that she had already abandoned many of her other principles in the name of Taylor Hanson, so she might as well add one more piece of kindling to the already raging fire. That, and the idea, now that she really thought about it, was kind of exciting.

The very fact that someone actually wanted pictures of her in sexy lingerie meant that they liked the way she looked enough to commemorate such an occasion. And, she knew that Taylor would keep the pictures under lock and key because their getting leaked would inform everyone of their physical relationship. Now that they had made the decision to tell his brothers a little white lie in order to have to stop sneaking around, she knew he would do everything in his power to make that story hold true in their eyes. So, she knew she could trust him and that was why she threw back her shoulders and decided to at least give it a shot. She could always stop it if she wanted to, after all.

“Okay, we’ll do this, but only on one condition,” she told him and he nodded vigorously, obviously willing to make any agreement to get her to go along with the idea, “No one will ever see these but us. Got it, Nigel Barker?” He cleared his throat as he took in her proposal.

“No arguments here,” he laughed lightly, though his gaze was heated. Kinsey felt herself blush under his intent stare. She could feel him taking in every inch of fabric and exposed skin.

“So, what do you want me to do?” she asked, her fingers playing with the hooks of her garters which lay at the sides of her thighs.

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” he grinned before snapping the first shot.

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