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“Water, please.”
I want to lie next to her. I want to hold her in my arms and let her sleep on me. I want to take care of her. But I can’t do any of those things yet. So instead, I stand and tuck the blanket in around her. “I’ll be right back.”
“No.” Her green eyes fly open. “Have Chloe grab it. You can’t be in here.”
“Carys...”
“No,” she rasps, then closes her eyes. “We can’t get caught, and you can’t get sick. Go, Coop. We’ll be back in California soon.”
“Soon, baby.” I brush my lips over hers and force myself to step out of the room. I close the door and walk back to the kitchen in time for Katherine to pass me in the hall on her way to Carys’s room.
Chloe’s sitting at the counter, sketching something... not sure if it’s a bathing suit or lingerie. But it looks sexy on the curvy woman she’s placed it on. I sit down on the stool next to her and look to see if we’re alone.
“How did you figure it out?”
“Oh, please. She couldn’t stop looking at you last night with those puppy-dog eyes she’s always had for you. The difference was you. She was looking, and you liked it. You looked too, but you were sneakier.”
“Seriously?” I didn’t think we were that obvious. “Come on... we weren’t that bad or someone else would have picked up on it.”
Chloe taps her pencils to the paper. “Yeah well, no one else walked into Carys’s bedroom to find it smelling like sex this morning. She was lying in bed in panties and grabbed your Navy shirt from the floor to cover up.” She flips the cover of her sketch book closed with a flourish and smiles. “Be careful, Coop. Murphy’s gonna freak if you hide this from him.”
Murphy’s gonnatryto kick my ass when he finds this out is more like it.
Hopefully that will be the worst of it.
“We’re not even sure what this is yet, Chloe. We just want to take our time before we bring everyone else into it.” I regurgitate the words Carys made me swear to.
“Tell yourself that, if you want, but the look you had on your face earlier—when I brought her home instead of you—was not the look of a guy doing casual.” She cocks her head to the side and studies me.
“I never said anything about casual, Chloe.” I don’t even try to hide my annoyance at that inference.
I’m already over this conversation and wishing I was in a different room with a different girl.
“Good. Because she deserves more. And so do you, Coop. You’re one of the good ones. One of the best. And if any two people were ever worth dealing with the shitstorm you’re going to have to walk through to be together, it’s the two of you. Don’t fuck it up.”
She hops off the stool and kisses me on the cheek. “See you in a few months.”
I watch her leave and replay her words.
Carys does deserve more.
She deserves a man who can give her everything.
But she also deserves a man who can honor her wishes.
So for now, we keep the secret.
We take the risk. And damn the consequences.
“Okay,well, at least you don’t have mono.” My best friend, Daphne, sits across from me in a booth at the Busy Bee, our favorite bistro on Main Street in Kroydon Hills.
Her roommate, Maddie, sits quietly next to her with wide eyes, while Chloe hasn’t stopped laughing next to me.
I still felt awful as we packed up and drove home from the beach a few days after I had gotten sick, but at least my fever was gone, even if my headache lingered.
I spent most of the next week getting my work done for my online classes or sleeping. When I still wasn’t feeling back to normal the following week, Mom insisted I get checked for mono. But thankfully, the results were negative.
“Nope.” Chloe steals the cherry right out of the whipped cream that sat on top of my Belgian Waffles and pops it into her mouth. “No mono for our girl. Cooper gets to live another day.”
