His chest rises with a breath, and he slips both of his hands around me, his fingers curved around my lower back. “Whatever you want it to be.”
Strange. What’s in it for him? A quiet falls between us, though, and it isn’t uncomfortable. It’s kind of nice. Minutes pass, and I settle deeper into him, my palms resting on his shoulders, the side of my forehead against his cheek. Then I slip down, and I’m burrowed into him. He readjusts us—pulls my arms in front of him, taps my side so that I shift into a seated position, the pressure off my knees. We’re basically hugging now, only I’m in his lap and I’m not really hugging him back. I’m kind of just… here. Held.
And weirdly, I’m getting tired. Though I never get tired, and it’d be so, so cruel and unusual that after years of trying sleep hygiene and blue-light blockers,thisis my insomnia cure. “Am I hurting you?” I mumble. A coded warning:You might be here for a while if you don’t complain.
He lets out a small laugh. “No.”
“Do you do a lot of training? To drive?”
“Yes.”
He smells as good as he feels, too. Being close to him had been a preview. The jacket, a tease. “You can’t call me Arcadia in public. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay. What gave me away?”
“Lying about the wedding. Your sense of humor.” He pauses. “You always finish your food.”
I think back to Grandma’s restaurant, the years of not having enough. How deeply being a model fucked with my head. “Oh.”
“I have a list,” he says quietly. “If you want to see it.”
“A list.”
“I keep a journal.”
Things that shouldn’t be hot, but are. “Weirdo.”
“Wounded.”
Slowly, I trace my fingertip over a muscle in his torso, near his clavicle. “Are you getting off on this?”
He doesn’t immediately reply. “Mentally. You could say that.”
Heat rises in my cheeks. “Is it physically impossible for you to lie?”
“I don’t like to.”
But you like me.He’d said that at the gala, in so many words; I think the exact phrasing had beenI can’t get you out of my head.
I must be a puzzle to him, too.
“Can I sleep here?” I ask. “I know Qualifying is tomorrow, so you can say no. You should say no.”
His head turns. I think he might press another kiss to my temple, he seems like he’s going to, but he doesn’t. “You can sleep here.”
“I won’t be in the way?”
“Arcadia,” Faust says bluntly, and again, chills. “I get up at four a.m. You’re the one who’s doing yourself a disservice.”
“Jesus. What time is it now?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
So, too close to midnight. I have so many more questions thatI want to ask him, but I’ve already kept him up too late, and he’s already doing this for me. Or with me, I guess. When I go to grab my toothbrush and a sleep shirt from my own room, the contentment on his face is impossible to excuse away. He’s downright peaceful as he brushes his teeth beside me at the double vanity, the messiest part of his room by far—if you could call it that. This freak has lined up his pill bottles under the mirror from largest to smallest, the labels cleanly turned out.
Nortriptyline. Excedrin. Ubrogepant, in that order. Faust catches my eye in the mirror. “Migraine medication.”
