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“Do you guys need anything to eat? There’s a bunch of soup in the cabinets.” She nods in that direction. Is this happening? Are we ignoring the elephant in the room and discussing such unimportant things as soup?
“Maybe later,” Dallas decides in a firm voice. For once, he’s got the right idea. For once, I can appreciate his directness. “You realize we’re not here to stay, right? We’ll stick around for the night since the weather is shit, and it’s so late, anyway. But endgame? We’re taking you back to the hotel.”
She doesn’t look thrilled by this announcement, but she doesn’t look surprised, either. I wouldn’t dream of insulting her intelligence by imagining she hasn’t already gone through every possible scenario in her head from the moment we walked through the door. “And I get no say in this?”
“Do you have anything to say?” Dallas turns to her, running a hand over his head, shaking what’s left of the rain out of his hair. “I know I would love to hear it.”
“That makes two of us,” I mutter, leaning my back against the door. Not that I think she would make a run for it in these conditions, but she needs to be reminded it won’t be so easy to get away this time around.
She shoots me a glare and draws her lips together in a line so tight I can barely see them. “Maybe another time.”
“So you’re not going to bother telling us why you ran off?” Dallas looks about as unsurprised as I am. Nothing about this has been easy. Why start now?
“Now you’re getting the idea.”
When he draws a breath like he’s ready to press the subject, she only tightens her jaw. I wonder if she knows how much she and Mason have in common. How annoyingly similar they can be when they’re feeling stubborn.
“That’s fine,” I assure her with a faint grin. “We have all the time in the world to listen to anything you have to say. We can talk about it in the morning, on the way back to the hotel.”
“You are determined to do this, aren’t you?” she whispers.
“We didn’t come all this way to say hi and move along.” I make it a point to hold her gaze, silently pleading for more than this frigid attitude. Aren’t we better than this? Haven’t we been through enough together?
I sound like a lovesick kid, even to myself. And it’s fairly clear she doesn’t feel the same.
“I’m fucking exhausted,” I announce. “How about we get some sleep before morning?”
“That depends.” Dallas peers into the bedroom before sliding his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and giving Natalie a narrow-eyed look.
“Depends on what?” she asks suspiciously.
“On whether we can trust you to stick around. You’re not going to run off again, are you?”
She eyes the window. “Like you said, the weather is a disaster. I’d be a real idiot to go out on a night like this.”
Maybe I know her too well, or maybe she’s a little rusty when it comes to telling a believable lie. Either way, it’s clear she doesn’t mean a word of what she’s saying.
Dallas and I have a silent conversation over the top of her head. It’s clear what we have to do. I don’t much love the idea of sharing a king size bed with him, but it does look like a comfortable bed, and there seems to be plenty of room. I shrug. He shrugs.
“I’m not tired,” she announces.
“I don’t remember asking if you were.” I’m sick of the kid glove treatment. If she is going to be a hardass, refusing to give an inch, I am not going to baby her. She gives up the fight quickly, shaking her head as she turns toward the bedroom and marches to the bed.
Sharing a bed with Dallas. There’s something I never wanted to experience. Yet here we are, climbing in on either side of the woman we’ve practically moved heaven and earth to find. No matter how I tell myself to stay awake, that we should sleep in shifts to watch over her, there’s no fighting the overwhelming fatigue that soon closes my eyes and wraps darkness around me.
4
DALLAS
It isn’t Griffin’s snoring that wakes me. It’s not Natalie’s presence beside me, either. All night, I couldn’t manage anything beyond light, dreamless sleep. I was too aware of her presence at my side. Wondering whether she was sleeping, or if she was trying to sneak away. She weighed far too heavily on my mind to let me fall into a deep sleep.
Until recently, at least. I must eventually have sunk deeper since somewhere in the past hour or so between darkness and dawn, she crept out of bed without either of us noticing.
I’m not going to jump to conclusions. She could be in the bathroom for all I know. I roll out of bed as gently as possible—though the way Griffin is snoring, I could probably march a brass band through the room, and he wouldn’t stir. I want so much to find her brushing her teeth or washing her face, yet there’s no great surprise involved in finding the bathroom empty. Along with the rest of the cabin.
