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I wouldn’t mind resting my head on his chest, feeling the warmth of him, the strength of him. Then maybe moving down his chest, his stomach, going lower…
Oh, my God.
I was not having a fucking fantasy about giving the guy a blowjob.
Who did that?
I never really even enjoyed doing that.
It was, you know, just one of those things you did that you didn’t exactly hate, but never actually enjoyed either.
The strange weight on my lower stomach said that, somehow, though, some part of me would absolutely enjoy going down on him.
Whatever ease that had allowed me to drift off to sleep before was out of grasp. I stared at the TV, at the ceiling, trying to ignore the desire pulsing in my core.
Across from me, the girls were snoring, and Sway seemed to have finally passed out as well. With his arm cocked up, his hand behind his head.
Who the hell actually slept like that?
Eventually, desire like a live wire through my system or not, sleep won out.
But it wasn’t good sleep.
It was fraught with nightmares, with memories, things I rarely allowed my conscious mind to focus on anymore, but my subconscious often liked to run wild with. Tormenting me when I wasn’t alert enough to fight it.
“Hey, hey, hey,” a voice said, breaking through the fear clawing at my system. “Murphy, wake up!” the voice demanded, harder, louder, then punctuated it with a hard shake to my body, making me jerk awake, a gasp caught in my throat as my hand shot out automatically, reaching for the gun under my pillow.
Only to find my wrist pinned to the mattress at the last possible second.
“Hey, you’re alright,” the voice said, calm, reassuring.
But my mind was still not fully out of the nightmare yet. The place where even bad men could trick you with soft words.
“Baby, you’re alright,” he tried again, and I felt my gaze fully focus back on the present.
There was Sway.
Sitting at the edge of the mattress, one hand still pinning my wrist, the other softly resting on the shoulder he’d just shaken me awake with.
Sway.
The cabin, the road trip, the motel.
My mind checked off the little details as the panic pulled back little by little, leaving me feeling both antsy and more embarrassed than I had been in a long time.
“There you are,” he said, pulling my hand out from under the pillow, not letting go, but lacing his fingers into mine, giving my hand a squeeze. “You were having a bad dream,” he told me. “You sleep like the dead,” he added.
I did.
I always had.
It was something that proved problematic for me in the past.
But not now.
Because now, I was safe.
It was alright.
Men who wanted to rape or murder you didn’t carefully wake you up and look relieved when you finally recognized them.
“Yeah,” I agreed, sucking in a deep breath, hoping it would bring some calm to the chaos in my mind, in my body.
“You get nightmares a lot?” he asked.
“Yes.”
I had a feeling he was starting to understand that the one-word answers were, at times, all he was going to get, that it was useless to press for more.
“Sucks,” he said instead of pushing.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“You could try telling the bad dream guys that I’ll kick their asses if they don’t leave you alone,” he suggested as he released me. But then climbed over me to sit up against the headboard on my bed.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I think I’ve been kicked out of my bed,” he said, jerking his chin over.
And, sure enough, Miranda and Samantha had taken advantage of his absence, stretching out to cover the entire bed. Miranda was even resting her head on his pillow.
“I can wake them if you want me to move,” he offered.
“No.” Crap. That shot out of me way, way too fast. Too eager. “It’s fine,” I said, trying to seem completely unbothered by his presence even as my body became aware of every inch of him, so close in just a full-sized bed. If one of us moved, we’d have to brush the other. “They get cranky when you make them move,” I added, only partially lying.
“Works for me,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he was genuinely just so casual about it, or if he was working to sound casual about it. Like I clearly was. “So… are you going to share the blanket, or am I supposed to freeze over here?” he asked.
We’d both fiddled with the window air unit before bed, deciding that it had no happy medium, and that we’d rather sleep cold than hot, so the room had slowly turned chilly in the hours since I’d passed out again.
With that, I rolled off the side of the blanket, draping it over him, careful not to graze his skin in any way because I had this irrational idea that so much as touching the guy was going to make me jump his bones. Right there in the hotel bed. In front of my dogs. Who would probably be scarred for life, having to witness it.
