She exhaled, wrapping herself in the towel he held out to her.
“Okay. I’ll change and come downstairs.”
The smell of coffee flooded the apartment as she hovered at the base of the steps. Milo sat at the dining room table with two mugs in front of him.
“Hey,” she said, hesitant to sit down.
“Hey.” He laughed darkly, rubbing his temples.
“I’m so sorry, Milo?—”
He held up his hand and the face of the clock tattoo stared at her, a declaration of truth she wasn't ready for.
Time's up.
"I've decided we're idiots," he announced.
“What?”
“I really care about you, Hanna. And I know you care about me. But we set boundaries around this for a reason, and it was unfair of me to push them.”
She tried to hold herself together. “Oh.”
“I knew what this was.”
“But—” But what? Things changed? Maybe they’d only changed for her.
He continued, “Logan is going home tomorrow. We have Vegas in a few weeks. I don’t want to push it further and then lose you as a friend, Hanna. I can’t—” There it was. The truth. It caught somewhere between his throat and his lips. “I can’t lose you, and I let shit get blurry. That’s on me.”
“Okay,” she sighed. “I hate that you’re right.”
His lips folded into a frown. “I was kind of hoping you’d tell me I wasn’t.”
She leaned back, running her hands through her hair. “I wish I could, Milo.”
He sipped his coffee. “I know.”
“So, what do we do now?”
Milo finished his coffee. She felt him sift through a thousand different thoughts before he spoke again.
“I’ll tell you what I want to do. I want to take you into that bedroom, and I want to finish what we started tonight. I didn’t know it was going to be the last time I heard you moan my name, and I didn’t get to appreciate it the way I should have.
Then tomorrow, we’re going to wake up—and probably fuck you one more time because I have zero self-control when it comes to you—and pack your shit, and walk you back across the hall, and try to forget what you taste like before I have to see you in that fucking dress again. How's that sound?
Hanna bit her lip. “Like a really bad idea.”
He sighed just as she stood from the table, walked directly to his room, and climbed into his bed. She was ready to let him claim any of the pieces left of her before morning—when their time really would be up.
SEVENTEEN
When her mom died, she could lose three weeks in a blink.
She’d wake up one day, check her calendar, and be absolutely floored to find that another month had slipped away.
The three weeks between walking out of Milo’s bedroom, and seeing him in her doorway as she tossed the last of her Vegas necessities into her bag had crawled by—and no amount of blinking had hurried the days.
“Oh Jesus,” she gasped, unprepared to see anyone watching her from the door, but especially him.
