Eventually, the room begins to change.
There it is. Tomorrow.
The day she warned me about.
The morning light slips through the curtains, touching her face first, soft and pale across the skin I spent half the night memorizing. It finds the curve of her cheek, the beautiful line of her mouth, the faint shadow beneath her lashes. It makes her look softer than she is.
Her lashes flutter once. Her fingers curl against my chest and her body shifts beneath the sheet, stretching slightly, still wrapped in the warmth of a night neither of us knows how to handle now.
Her eyes open slowly. A flutter. A blink. Sleep clings to her for one last second before awareness begins to move in. I see the exact moment she remembers where she is. The ceiling. The room. The bed. My arm around her. Her body pressed against mine.
“Morning,” I say.
Her eyes narrow. “Were you watching me sleep?”
I let my mouth smirk. “No.”
“Liar.”
“Fine. A little.”
“It’s creepy.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
For one fragile second, her mouth curves into a smile, before it fades, and I feel the loss of it. The room shifts with her expression, the warmth between us thinning as morning drags every ugly truth back to the surface.
Her phone starts ringing from somewhere on the floor. The sound cuts through the room, far too loud for the kind of silence we’re lying in.
Skylar sits up, taking the warmth of her body with her. The empty space she leaves against my side feels immediate. A cold little preview of what this bed will feel like when she walks out of it.
Chapter 12
Skylar
One second, I’m wrapped in Zane’s arms with the warmth of his body against mine, his chest beneath my cheek, and the morning light spilling across the room as if it has absolutely no idea what happened in here last night and frankly has no business being this cheerful about it.
The next moment, reality arrives in the form of my ringtone, which has always had terrible timing and apparently sees no reason to change that now.
I sit up and feel the exact moment his arm falls away from my waist. The loss is immediate and I am not going to think about what that means at six in the morning, with my hair doing God knows what and my brain still somewhere back in last night.
The bed shifts beneath me as I lean over the edge, searching through the wreckage of clothes scattered across the floor. Mybra is near Zane’s boot. My skirt twisted around the bed leg, turned inside out, because apparently even my clothes went through something last night and needed a moment.
The ringing keeps going.
“Shit,” I mutter, grabbing the skirt and shoving my hand into its pocket.
My fingers curl around my phone and I pull it free.
Cassie’s name flashes across the screen in large, accusatory letters.
Of course it’s her. Nobody else calls this aggressively before coffee unless someone has died, someone needs bail, or Cassie has decided that silence is a personal attack and she will not stand for it.
I answer before it stops. “Hello?”
Half a second of breathing. Then, “Well, fuck me sideways. You’re alive.”
I close my eyes. “Good morning to you, too.”
