Six days to Santa Monica
The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and there’s a soft, warm body pressed to mine. Every day should start this way, with a burst of exhilaration. It would cut down on the need for so much damn caffeine in the morning.
A sweet floral scent teases my senses, drawing me from the depths of sleep.
Lucy.
My eyelids fly open, revealing what I already know. Lucy is curled up next to me, her head resting in the crook of my arm, one arm splayed across my abdomen.
She must’ve gotten cold in the middle of the night.
I remain as still as possible, careful not to disturb her. She looks so damn peaceful. Her dark hair splayed across the pillow and her full lips parted, her chest rising and falling in a slow, melodic rhythm.
You shouldn’t be doing this.
Doing what? Waking up? Letting her use me as a pillow? Making sure she doesn’t freeze her ass off?
Despite the fact that my cock is as hard as steel, we didn’tdoanything.
Hell, we barely spoke last night. It was too weird.
Yeah, if by weird you mean too goddamn tempting.
Christ. Now I even sound like her.
There’s a quiet buzz north of my pillow, and I slowly reach up with my free hand to find the source before it wakes Lucy.
It’s her phone. It’s blowing up with notifications from her social media apps.
I’m about to silence it when curiosity gets the better of me.
I tap the Instagram notification, and her feed pops up.
Holy shit.
She’s got almost fifty thousand followers.
Why didn’t she tell me?
She’s probably saving it for when she wins the bet.
I switch from the feed to her profile and do a double take.
The fuck?
My own face stares back at me, prominently featured in every picture in the top row.
Every. Single. One.
There’s a picture of me last night—sans shirt—in the sleeping bag with forty thousand likes.
A new notification pops up.
Make that forty thousand and one.
I scroll to a picture of Meramec Caverns. It’s the one where Lucy had me pose before the rainbow-colored lights. It has nearly thirty thousand likes and more than a thousand comments.
Jesus. Even Triada doesn’t get this kind of engagement.
