Free Execution Style by Lani Lynn Vale

snorted. “That, I can tell. I bet you put ketchup on your eggs, too.”
    I grinned around a mouthful of burger and reached for the plastic fork in the bag.
    “I put ketchup on everything. Even my ham and cheese sandwiches.”
    He made a fake gagging gesture and shoved twelve fries in his mouth.
    “Have you thought about when you’re going back to work?” H HH e asked curiously.
    I nodded. “I don’t actually ‘work.’ I supervise. I call around, pay bills, collect payments. Which I’ve been doing from underneath my comforter since…,” I hesitated and grimaced, but he nodded in understanding.
    “That’s kind of cool, what you’re doing. How did you get that up and started?” He questioned, taking a sip of his drink.
    I eyed my to-go cup, but took a drink anyway, trusting him.
    He’d spent a lot of time with me in the last week, and knew exactly what I liked.
    I smiled when I tasted not one, but four drinks. “You got me a suicide?”
    He nodded. “I felt like a dork getting a little bit of every drink they had, but it was fun. I don’t see how you mix all those carbonated drinks, though.”
    I shrugged. “YOLO.”
    He turned his head in confusion. “YOLO?”
    “You know, YOLO? You only live once? The song?” I confirmed.
    He shook his head with exaggerated slowness.
    “Not a fuckin’ clue,” h e said with wide eyes. “Then again, if it’s pop or R&B, I don’t listen to it. I’m more of a classic rock kind of man. I only listen to it when I’m working out and lifting weights. There’s a certain ‘tone’ one should set while doing that. It should get your adrenaline pumping. Not make me want to be a girl.”
    I stuck my tongue out at him and he laughed at my reaction.
    “You’re horrible,” he muttered.
    I shrugged. “Do you want to watch a movie?”
    He shook his head. “Nope. I want to play some cards.”
    I leaned forward, my bare breast touching the cool wood of the coffee table, causing me to shrink back in surprise.
    “Shit,” I hissed.
    “Out of curiosity, why aren’t you dressed yet? I was gone for nearly twenty minutes,” he asked as he finished the last of his fries.
    I blinked, wondering how I should tell him that I’d been wallowing over the fact that he’d left me.
    “Umm,” I said. “I was…ummmm.”
    He grinned.
    “You thought I’d left, so you were laying there in a depression?” He offered playfully.
    “More like I was trying to think of ways to torture you for leaving without a backwards glance,” I said dryly. “You’re saying I couldn’t do a thing to you to torture you?”
    He shook his head. “I’m a SEAL, baby. You can’t do anything to me that I haven’t experienced before.”
    I launched myself at him.
    Challenge accepted.
***
    We laid there in silence for a few moments, both of us allowing our heart rates to return to normal before either one of us moved.
    I was now wearing Miller’s button up shirt, and he was tickled to death. Or so he said.
    I’d worked up quite a sweat trying to convince him that I could torture him to death with tickles. But it’d worked differently than I’d expected. He’d started laughing at my inability to tickle him, and I’d taken it upon myself to prove to him that he was ticklish somewhere .
    In the end, it’d been his laughing at my failed attempts that got him.
    “Do you think you’re pregnant?” He rumbled quietly.
    The sweat on my skin was cooling rapidly, and goose bumps started to roll over my skin.
    Was it bad that I wanted to be pregnant with his child?
    I’d always wanted to be a mother.
    In fact, when I’d originally entered the relationship with Mitch, I’d been thinking about that going into it.
    My biological clock had been ticking, and at the age of twenty nine, it was time, at least, in my opinion . I was ready to be a mother.
    That’d been why I’d chosen Mitch.
    He was stable relationship material.
    Everything I thought I’d wanted.
    What I hadn’t realized, though, was that I