Page 37 of One Night with Number Nineteen

“Tell me, Pages.”

“How about you tell me why you keep calling me that?”

“Because every time I talk to you it’s like you’re revealing another page in the most interesting story I’ve ever read.”

I inhale sharply, every cell in my body freezing. “Wh-what?”

He didn’t just say that.

Didn’t just call me⁠—

“I don’t know what I’m doing. Why I’m here.” He shoves a hand through his hair, sending the long blond strands skittering around his face and shoulders, and it’s almost like now that he’s begun talking, he can’t stop. “I know I shouldn’t have slept out front. That’s fucking crazy. It’s just…I took care of some stuff, went back for your car, dropped it off, and went home…and then I thought about your face when you asked me to stay for a little while and how you were shaking after that guy—” He clamps his teeth together for a moment. “I thought of you here alone and fuck, I don’t know. I drove back over here and I just…stayed.”

He falls quiet, his chest rising and falling in rapid succession.

“You dropped off my car?”

Slowly, his gaze comes to mine. “You needed it.”

So he did it.

Something unlocks inside me—understanding, connection, affection.

Slowly, I reach forward, gently touch his jaw. “Thank you,” I whisper. “For last night. For all of it.”

For staying. For my car. For intervening.

He doesn’t move, doesn’t shrug this time. But it may as well be there in his words. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

“It is to me.”

“You were pissed I told the guys⁠—”

“Because I wanted to do it on my terms.”

He nods, guilt sliding through his face again.

“Which you get,” I say. “And you apologized.”

Owned up to it.

Didn’t try to make excuses.

“I owed you one.”

See?

“So, thank you,” I say again. “For that. For the rest of it.”

He covers my hand with his own. “You don’t have to⁠—”

“I do.”

And we stand there, far too close, far too many things swirling through my mind, my body. It’s a hurricane of confusing feelings, of needs, of the past and the present.

Except for one thing.

A want.