Defining Love: Volume 3 (Defining Love #3) by Elizabeth Reyes Page A

before I’d jumped in his arms and admitted how crazy I was about him.
    So even though it’d only been a little over a week, if he didn’t
have to be gone a few days a week, I’d be with him every moment I could.
There’d be no way to hide what was going on between us from everybody. I now
planned on making sure all my days off from work were the days he had to report
to the station. Edi had no clue anyway what days I worked with him and what
days I didn’t. Seeing me home several evenings out of the week would seem
normal, especially since each day I’d hung out with him after everyone left,
I’d stayed later and later. If Aaron noticed I was switching the days I usually
came in around so much, I could tell him half the truth.
    Thankfully, Bea had refrained from talking about the situation
between Mia and Aaron. She’d also begun seeing someone new, and apparently,
that served as a distraction because I often saw her giggling on the phone or
smiling a little too big when responding to someone’s text. I seriously doubted
Mia was up to silly banter yet.
    Today we were packing up. Earlier this week, Aaron had taken us
all to see the new office slash warehouse we’d be working at from now on. It
was about eight blocks from my apartment, much closer than his house. I was
already planning to walk there the days Aaron couldn’t pick me up so as to not
bother Eileen or Bea. Edi and I hoofed it much further sometimes when running
errands.
    “Why are there two trucks outside?” Bea asked as she entered. “We
really have that much to move?”
    Aaron walked out of his office. “The second one must’ve just
gotten here,” he said, headed toward the front door. “It’s a delivery truck,
though they’re also picking stuff up.”
    Bea and I exchanged blank stares. I had no idea what he was
having delivered. Aaron and I had been there a good hour, and he hadn’t
mentioned it. But then we hadn’t done a whole lot of talking since we knew Bea
would be getting there soon.
    Remembering that, I looked down to make sure I hadn’t carelessly
left any buttons undone as I’d already done once earlier in the week. I’d gone
back to concentrating on boxing up everything in my desk until I heard Aaron’s
voice directing someone to take this and that.
    Both Bea and I turned to see two guys navigating the hallway,
carrying furniture. Then I saw it. The mattresses in his bedroom were being
carried out as well.
    “He got a new bed?” she asked.
    I glanced at Bea. She still looked confused, and I pretended to
be just as confused by shrugging then continued with my packing. I did my best
to hide the excitement about this. Save for the fact that I still didn’t know
how things between Edi and me would end up, it was impossible for me to believe
this fairytale was actually happening to me.
    Just two days ago I admitted this to Aaron, minus the part about
Edi of course. We’d just gotten done fulfilling yet another one of my
fantasies. This one completely naked in the hot tub out in his back yard after
everyone had left for the evening. I had mentioned how it might be
awkward—uncomfortable—to spend so much time and be intimate in a house where I
knew my boyfriend had lived with another woman.
    The fact that he’d been with her so long yet never moved her in
was just dumb luck for me. One of my foster moms used to say, “ Men make
houses. Women make homes .” She had explained to my sister and me that,
while her husband was the one who ultimately paid for the house we all lived
in, the woman was always the one who provided the things that made it a home:
from the decorations to the smell of Mom’s cooking throughout, even the neatly
folded stacks of fresh smelling laundry all over the front room or her bed on
laundry day. It stuck with me because it rang true in every foster home we’d
been placed in before and after that. It would’ve definitely been weird making
love to him in a house I knew Mia had made a home— their