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Chapter 24
MIKA
Chase is asleep on my couch for the third time this week. Three. I can’t let him spend the night again. It’ll be four. Four equals a habit. Habits form rapidly and become addictive.
How do I tell him that? He thinks I’m quirky. He doesn’t know I’m fucking crazy.
It’s late, almost two in the morning, and I move through the living room to the kitchen to grab a drink of water. We’ve spent two days getting to know each other like old friends who haven’t caught up in years. We’ve stopped talking about the past, and only talk about the good things.
I haven’t told him anything about my life other than what I do for a living. He knows nothing about me. Somehow, I’ve reconciled him sleeping on my couch instead of asking him to go home. But tomorrow he can’t stay. In fact, I don’t need to see him at all tomorrow, because that means I will have seen him four days in a row. Four is not allowed.
Stepping out onto the back deck, I stare out over the lake, watching as the moonlight dances on the water. The sound of the door creaking open has me jumping, and I turn to see Chase as he cocks an eyebrow at me.
“Am I interrupting your midnight rendezvous?” he jokes, coming to take the seat much too close to me.
“Um… No. Just thought you were sleeping.”
“I was. Then someone opened a door and I woke up.”
“Sorry,” I mumble.
“Don’t be. I’m a light sleeper. Happens after spending years being alert for a door opening.”
He’s not fishing for pity, so I don’t offer any. Chase has always been able to speak honestly with me, and not worry about it changing the way I treated him. Apparently he still thinks that’s okay to do, and I don’t want to say any differently.
It hurts a little deeper now to hear his pain though. I think that comes with age and experience with my own pain.
“Why can’t you sleep?” he asks, brushing my hair off my shoulder and leaving his fingertips lingering on my skin like he’s testing how close I’ll let him get.
Swallowing the instant knot in my throat, I shrug.
“Bad dreams.”
He frowns while leaning closer, and my breath freezes in my lungs when he runs his lips across my shoulder, watching me for my reaction.
“What kind of dreams? Maybe I can help you get rid of them,” he says softly as his breath whispers across my skin. “You used to help chase mine away,” he adds.
Warmth blooms across my skin, moving down to my core, and my thighs tighten as I squirm in my seat. Four… Three… How many years? Maybe I could be ready? I haven’t spoken to my therapist in too long, but she might consider me ready… I haven’t had an episode in at least seven years. At least not a bad one. I’ve had smaller episodes since then, but the major ones are behind me. Right?
And here I am willing to risk absolutely everything because it’s Chase James. Shit. I’m doing that internal rambling thing again.
“Just random dreams,” I lie, but the words are nothing more than a hoarse whisper when he continues to run his lips over my skin.
“I was thinking… Maybe tomorrow I could pick you up after I close the shop, and we could go to the bowling alley together. Have you even bowled at all since you bought the place?”
I shake my head, but my mind drifts back to the days when we used to drive for an hour just to bowl at the nearest spot. Dad would go out of his way to take us before I had my license. He loved seeing us have fun out there, and he’d let us stay until it closed. We’d go at least ten times a summer.
“I remember what we did that last summer in that bowling alley you’re thinking about right now,” he says, grinning against my shoulder.
How does he know I’m thinking about it?
As if he plucked the memory from my mind and put it in a video reel, it starts playing out in my head. It was the summer I finally got to drive, and I drove us out there in Dad’s BMW. We’d stayed until closing, and the o
wner was in the back, smoking pot like he did every weekend. It was just us, and Chase was more desperate to have me than usual that night.
From the second I took his virginity, we spent almost every waking moment that summer doing insanely stupid things like having sex on a bowling alley floor with no condom. It was a miracle I never got pregnant.
“I was crazy about you,” he tells me, kissing lower on my shoulder and making me regret this slinky shirt with straps instead of sleeves. “Wish I could say that wasn’t the case anymore, but you’re like a drug that won’t let me go, Mika. But tell me to go away, and I promise I’ll leave you alone.”
