Given that I bolted from Ben’s bedroom the second he fell asleep after Joel and Murph read him a bedtime story, she probably thought I was actively avoiding everyone. She was right. I thought she’d gone downstairs to watch a movie with Joel and Murph until I heard her voice coming from her room, probably talking to her parents, and I waited until it stopped.
So now I’m here, and she’s peering up at me, wondering why I knocked on her door only to stare at her. But my words won’t come. My tongue is heavy, and my mouth is dry.
Say. Something. Literally anything.
Her smile fades. “Win, is everything okay?”
Plastering a smile on my face, I stuff my hands in my pockets and take a step back. “Fine. Just wanted to say goodnight.”
I turn around and walk back to my room, where I close my door, lean my forehead against it, and mentally call myself an idiot for ten seconds. As I head to the book on my nightstand, there’s a soft knock. I eye the dark wood and reach for the handle.
It’s Rose, and she’s not smiling. “We need to talk. Can I come in?”
I recall Noah’s warning in the diner earlier.
Looks like you’ve successfully made a problem out of nothing.
I step aside without a word, anticipating the dreaded “I really like you, Win, but I think we’d be better off as friends” conversation I know all too well.
She walks in wearing her pink-striped pajamas, her curious gaze sweeping the room before settling on the small stack of books on my nightstand. She got ready for bed, even braiding her hair. I’m still in my jeans and t-shirt because I’ve spent the last few minutes pacing in my room, working myself up to a conversation I chickened out of.
“Oh. I didn’t know people read cookbooks before bed.”
I keep my fantasy novels in a small bookcase in the living room, ready to read on the back porch if I’m not too tired from work. Cookbooks are my preferred nighttime reading. Joel thinks it’s hilarious and warns me away from any cheese recipes in case they trigger weird dreams. I’ve never been able to explain to him why cookbooks relax me the way they do, but now, I have to find a way to explain it to Rose without kicking off that ‘let’s be friends’ conversation.
Shutting the door, I scratch the back of my hot neck and cross over to the bed, where she perches on the edge to flip through an Italian cookbook.
“Nico lets me create the weekly special, and they’re for inspiration.”
She scrunches her nose and returns the book to the nightstand. “Doesn’t it make you hungry? If I was looking at cookbooks before bed, my stomach would be growling all night, no matter how much food I ate at dinner. I’d probably wake up to find I’d been chewing on my pillow, thinking it was a steak.”
This is yet another reason I walked away from her door without saying a word. She makes me smile without any effort, and I like her too damn much for this relationship to go the way all my others have.
“Sometimes,” I admit. “But flipping through a cookbook is… relaxing as well. It lets my brain switch off from the day in a way nothing else does. Not sure why.”
She smiles. “That’s how my nest would feel. Like the rest of the world was far away, and I was in a bubble where no one could reach me and nothing could hurt me. Sometimes the world can be too loud and so overwhelming that I’d want to hide for a couple of hours.”
My shoulders sag in relief that she gets it. I’m not an omega who needs a nest, but hearing her talk about it is interesting. “Yeah?”
She nods. “Not that I spent much time in my nest after Simon died. Ben needed me. I did miss it.” She looks a touch wistful, then shakes her head. “Sorry, that isn’t what I came here to talk to you about. I started thinking I was doing something wrong when you ended our kiss so fast.”
My mouth opens, and she lifts her hand, a sign she isn’t finished yet. “Then I remembered what I was like when I first came to Rios—running from my feelings, denying they existed. Afraid. And I thought maybe you might be as scared as I was before, but you’re just better at hiding it than I was.”
She says it so quietly. So… simply.
But with those quiet words and her open, honest expression, she lifts the thousand-pound weight I’ve been carrying around these last few days.
“I’m used to being the friend,” I admit. “I’mgoodat being ‘Win Gabriel, the friend’.”
So damn good that any relationship I’ve had has soon switched from romantic to friendly in the blink of an eye. I gotused to handling disappointment and frustration so well that no one ever saw it. That doesn’t mean I didn’t feel it.
I look away. “You’re so beautiful, Rose, inside and out.”
Too beautiful for the likes of me.
She takes my hand and squeezes it. “I wish you could see yourself the way I do. Maybe you wouldn’t be thinking the thoughts you’re having. Can you look at me for a second?”
Hoping this relationship won’t end the way they always do, I look at her. She cups my jaw, her soft palm a warm caress I lean into.
