Chapter 7: Locking lips in his apartment

I walk back into the living room to sit on the couch to wait for him. I get comfortable before pulling a blanket over me and watching the TV where Chandler is talking to his friends about how he can't figure out which sister of Archie's he slept with. After a few minutes, Archie walks out in some black sweatpants and a t-shirt with a picture of the Statue of Liberty on it.

We decide to order Chinese food and while we wait for it to arrive, I lay with my head on his shoulder while we both watch the show. After about 15 minutes of comfortable silence, except for the TV, I look up at him with a soft smile and he does the same. I lean forward and connect our lips in a soft kiss before it starts to become rough when he tangles his hand in my hair and rubs his tongue with

mine.

I set my hand on his thigh without even thinking about the implications he could make from it. I sit up a bit without disconnecting our lips and wrap my arms around his neck as his free hand is placed on my lower back as it slowly slides down.

He disconnects our lips as he grabs my thigh and throws it over his legs so I'm straddling him while his hand in my hair grips my neck to pull me down. He starts to place wet kisses on my neck and I realize he starts sucking on it, definitely leaving a mark while I try to find the courage to pull him off, but it just feels so good.

There's a knock at the door and Joey pulls away to stare at it before he goes back to kissing my neck, probably wanting to just ignore it and wait for them to leave. I shake my head, pushing him back. "it's probably our food."

He nods his head while | slides off of him as he gets up to answer the door. I pull the blanket over me while I tense up to calm my body down since I know we won't be going any farther than that for a while because I don't think either of us is ready for all that.

He closes the apartment door before setting the brown bag on the coffee table before he sits next to me. He pushes my head to the side to look at my neck and I notice the small smirk on his lips. "What?"

"You might want to hide that when you go home," he tells me, lightly tapping on my neck where he was sucking on it a minute ago. I groan, leaning back into the couch as I reach up to cover it with my hand and my face starts to heat up in embarrassment.

"Well, thanks for that," I tell him as he passes me my chicken lo mein and white rice with a fork and a bottle of coke. I sit up to be able to eat comfortably while he takes out his fried chicken and jollof rice.

"You started it, so that's on you, not me, he says with a chuckle as I scoff with a small smile as we start to eat. After we finish, we put the rest in the fridge and I notice how tired Archie is by the way he slumps on the couch and his eyes flutter.

I reach over and run my fingers through his hair, planting a smile along his face as he looks over at me. "I'm still mad at

you, but you're still cute." He chuckles, sitting up to place a kiss on my lips before lightly tapping my neck again to make me shiver in pleasure.

My neck has never been a sensitive spot for me, but with him, it's like my whole body was meant to shiver when he touched it. He pulled me down on the couch to spoon with him while we set our eyes on the TV as the laugh track played. I started to get tired along with Archie, whose arm laid over my stomach as he was slowly falling asleep behind me. I took his hand in mine and held it to my chest I heard a sigh of contentment as I imagined him closing his eyes to fall into a deep sleep.

I woke up with the light blinding me from the balcony door as a strong arm held me tight against their body. I find a way to get out of the grasp and when I do, I sit on the edge of the couch as I look down at the beautiful man that's still asleep.

He has one arm thrown over his face to cover his eyes from the sunlight while his shirt has risen as he's moved around during the night. I can see his soft, muscular skin that's now exposed and I  just want to reach out and touch him, but also knowing that would seem pretty weird.

I settle on running my hand through his hair as he slowly becomes less tense from whatever he's dreaming about. I slowly get up as I notice the TV has the N*****x screen asking if I'm still watching since it was running all night. I make my way to the kitchen because why not make some breakfast for him when he wakes up?

I'm surprised they even have breakfast stuff because of the low amount of food that's in the fridge. I pull out the eggs and bacon along with the pancake mix before taking out pans to place on the stove to heat up while I text my mom to tell her that I'm alive since she texted me twice after I told her that I was staying at "Jenny's" since she would hate if I was staying with a guy I barely know.

Halfway through making breakfast, I feel like someone's staring at me so I turn slowly to see Archie leaning against the kitchen wall while he looks at me with a smile. I jump back in surprise, making him chuckle before walking over to me.

"What're you doing?"

"Just making breakfast," I tell him as he wraps his arms around my waist to kiss me before going over to the shelf to make some coffee for both of us. I flip a pancake as I wait for everything to be thoroughly cooked before taking it to the coffee table for us to eat.

We sat down to eat as friends played again. "So I have to go home to help my dad with something for a few hours, but that's not until later, so we have a few hours left to ourselves."

I nod my head as I take a sip of the hot coffee with milk. "Can I stay here again tonight or is that too much?"

"No, that's fine, we'll just have to go get your stuff for school tomorrow first. But you're okay to be here by yourself for a few hours?" He asks, biting off a piece of bacon.

"Yeah, I'll be fine," I told him. After we finish eating, he gets dressed in some light skinny jeans and a fitted black t-shirt that's from some beach that I've never heard of before.

He gives me some skinny jeans that are way too long I have to roll them up and a purple long-sleeved shirt that's super soft. I walk out of the bathroom to see Archie typing on his phone before he looks up at me with a smile.

"Hey, those fit pretty well"' he motioned to the jeans that were a bit too big and long, but otherwise, they fit and were pretty comfortable.

"I mean, they're like ten feet too long for me, but they're pretty comfortable," I tell him and he chuckles as we walk towards the apartment door to go to his car.

"Okay, Mr. Dramatic, let's go," he tells me as he reaches back to grab my hand and pull me out of the apartment and to his car where he opens my door for me before going over to the driver's seat. He puts the radio on as he speeds off towards my house.

"So I might've looked in the bedroom last night while you were showering" I admit to him and he chuckles, not thinking it's too big of a deal. But those pictures kinda freaked me out because of the guy in the robe who was at their wedding and whatever the other ceremony was. It just struck me as weird because the robe he was wearing reminded me of a cult or whatever.

"Find anything interesting?"

"Yeah, I was looking at the pictures and

I'm just kinda confused about the guy in the robe at your parents' wedding" I tell him and I can see the way his eyes widen in fear before he suppresses it by clearing his throat, which immediately tells me that there's something he's hiding that he doesn't want me to find out.

"That's the minister at the church that my parents go to. They like him so they asked him to do all the ceremonies that they ever have" he tells me. "What was the other ceremony in the pictures? The one where your mom is wearing the yellow dress? I'm just curious," I ask him and again, that look of fear enters his eyes before he suppresses it by looking at the car that's passing him.

"That was just.. a pre-wedding thing. They wanted to, like, express their promise to each other, so they had, like, a ceremony to exchange promise rings since they were too young to do the whole thing" he tells me, but I can tell he was making this up as he went by the way he was hesitating and using the word "like" a lot.

"Oh, okay," I say, not wanting to push him too much because if he didn't want to tell me, then it's not my business to pry. I notice the way his shoulder relaxes when I drop the subject and that makes me even more inclined to pry, but I don't because it's his choice of whether or not he wants to tell me the secret.

After about 10 minutes in the car, we pulled up to my house and my parents must have been at my grandmother's house or lunch because their cars weren't in the driveway. We walked into my house where we saw Jasmine sitting on the couch, watching some sci-fi movie with her phone in her hands. When she hears the door open, she looks up with a confused look.

"I thought you were at Jenny's?" She

asks as she picks up the remote to pause the movie that's playing so she can hear us.

"I was, but I needed to get my stuff for school tomorrow," I tell her as I notice that some of the pictures are now hanging on the walls in frames, which means Mom got tired of the bare walls and finally got around to it.

"You're sleeping at her house again?"

Jasmine asks as she gets up to give me a

hug.

"Yeah" I lied because if I told her, she'd probably tell Mom and I'd get into serious

trouble because I'm not where she thought I was.

"Oh, okay," she says as she goes back to the couch to pick up her phone. Archie and I make our way through the living room before she stops us. "nice hickey, by the way."

I look over at her as she smirks at her phone as she continues typing. I turn to Archie with a glare and he holds his hands up in surrender as he backs up. I clear my throat, looking at my sister. "I fell".

"Sure, you did," she says with a giggle before she presses play on the movie and I walk up the stairs with my hand over my neck where the dark mark lays out on my skin.

We walk into my room and Archie looks around before going to sit on my bed while I pick up an extra bag to put some clothes in. I picked out my outfit for tomorrow before putting my school stuff in my backpack since I guess we had to go to school.

"Your room's cute, you unpacked quickly," he tells me while he inspects the pictures that I had hanging above my bed of my family and friends that I had memories with. I noticed how he picked up a picture that must've fallen onto the ground a Polaroid that my friend Jessie took of me on her bed after prom last year.

I was hugging a pillow to my chest my hair was sprawled all over my face and I had my eyes closed.

I watched as he slyly put it behind his phone case to keep it there so he could have it. I saw the way he smiled at it before putting his case back on and looking up at the rest of the pictures. I set my bags on the ground before walking over to him and sitting next to him I pointed to a picture of my friends and I holding a trophy in a parking lot of some high school at the championship for dance team.

"That's one of my favourite pictures."

He smiles. "What's the trophy for?" "Dance, we won overall during the championship off of a routine that I helped choreograph. I was a mess when they called our name because I thought it was so bad and that we weren't going to even place, but we ended up winning."

He chuckles.

"Don't even know you're own talent, right?"

"I guess you could say that," I whisper, staring into his eyes that hold an emotion that I can't place a finger on.

He wraps his arm around my waist and pulls me closer to him as he kisses the top of my head.