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I couldn’t meet his eyes. Without waiting for another word, I slipped into the bathroom and locked the door.

The mirror showed it all—dark stubble, eyes too bright with exhaustion—and I leaned against the sink, wondering how I’d gotten here.

I flicked on the shower, then stripped my clothes off and let the water pound my shoulders.

If life could have been more screwed up, I didn’t want to know how.

Back in the room, Max was sitting on the bed, his phone forgotten.

“No cot,” he said. “We share the bed. Proper rest.”

“Okay.”

I kept my voice low. We both knew this was about more than space. It was about staying in one piece.

We lay in silence, the weight of unspoken things pressing down. But at least we weren’t trying to convince ourselves a cot would do the job.

I closed my eyes, clutched the edge of the mattress, and thought that if it got any worse than this, I might actually break.

The team dinner was held in some private room off the main casino floor, all dark wood and leather chairs, the kind of space that cost money just to exist in.

I sat as far from Max as the table allowed, which wasn’t nearly far enough, and focused on my steak like it might hold the secret to getting through the next twelve hours without losing my mind.

Cole kept trying to catch my eye from across the table. Keegan was being aggressively cheerful about something, the kind of energy that usually meant he’d noticed the tension and decided to barrel through it with sheer force of personality.

Taz just watched, quiet as always, and I could feel his gray eyes cataloguing the distance between me and Max like he was reading a scoreboard.

Max didn’t look at me at all.

He talked to Baelor about the Vegas forecheck, discussed strategy with Kinkaid, laughed at something Sorin said that I deliberately didn’t listen to. He was very good at pretending I wasn’t sitting thirty feet away, and I was very good at pretending not to notice how good he was at it.

By the time we got back to the room, I was wound so tight I felt like I might snap if someone breathed on me wrong.

Max went straight into the bathroom without a word, and I sat on the edge of the bed in my street clothes, staring at nothing, trying to figure out how to get through eight hours of unconsciousness in the same bed as a man I’d spent the last twenty-four hours actively despising and desperately wanting in equal measure.

He came out in sweats and a T-shirt, his hair still damp, and didn’t say anything, just climbed into bed on the far side like we’d done this a thousand times before.

I waited until I heard his breathing even out into something that might have been sleep, then changed into my own sleep clothes and slipped under the covers as quietly as I could, keeping to my edge of the mattress like it might protect me.

The bed was enormous and somehow still too small.

I could feel the heat of him, could almost track the exact temperature gradient between us, and I lay there in the dark with my eyes open, counting the seconds until this was over.

Except I must have fallen asleep at some point, because the next thing I became aware of was the particular quality of Vegas darkness, the kind that never quite went black because of all the light bleeding in from the Strip, and Max’s arm across my chest.

Somewhere in the night, I’d rolled toward him.

Or he’d rolled toward me.

I wasn’t sure which, and it didn’t matter, because what mattered was that he was here, solid and warm, his arm settled across my ribs like it knew exactly where it belonged. His breath was warm against the back of my neck, and for the first time in what felt like weeks, I wasn’t shaking.

I should have moved. I should have put the distance back, should have shuffled back to my edge of the mattress and pretended this hadn’t happened.

Instead, I lay there in the dark with his arm around me and felt something in my chest finally, finally loosen enough to let me breathe.

Just for tonight, I thought.

Just this once, I could let myself have this.