“Don’t leave all night,” I mumble, and my heart skips a beat when I realize I said it out loud.
He runs his fingers up my neck, digging the strong joints into my cramped muscles there, and I have to bite my bottom lip to stop from groaning. “All night?” he asks me quietly.
“Yes,” I whisper, losing myself to his touch. It’s the closest thing to a non-sexual orgasm I’ve probably ever had.
“You sure you want me to stay?”
The hairs on my scalp seem to prickle as he massages me deeper.“Yes.”
He closes his hand around the front of my throat and I suck in a breath, but the gesture is just for a moment, then it’s gone, and he’s back to giving me the best back rub I’ve ever had in my life.
The butterflies in my stomach float lower, but I don’t give in.
“I won’t leave, honey,” he whispers in the dark.
“Do you call all the girls that?” I mumble, and I’m pretty sure I have drool on my arm.
“What? Honey?” He scoffs. “Absolutely not. I’d never get laid if I did.”
I keep talking, things I’d never say if I wasn’t in the twilight zone between sleep and waking. “And do you…” I clear my throat. “Get laid a lot?”
He keeps kneading my flesh, but he doesn’t speak for a second. I shouldn’t have asked. We aren’t anything. I’m free to fuck who I want and so is he. We’re barely even friends.
“Go to sleep, Sloane,” he finally says, and I assume the worst, but this feels like the best, so I don’t move and I don’t kick him and his stupid gun out.
CHAPTER
FIVE
LYDIA
“Stop locking your elbows,” my trainer, Eve, barks out.
I grimace and swing at the punching bag again, quick to pull in my arm and guard my face. Sweat drips down my spine and my black leopard print sports bra sticks to my skin. A few strands have tumbled free from my bun and I can feel them on my face but I don’t brush them back. Not with Eve Night watching. She’d have my ass on my back before I could blink.
It’s why we pay her the big bucks.
“Again,” she says, standing at my side.
The black bag lurches back.
“Move. You’re staying in one place. An easy target. You know better, Lydia.”
I strike again, then again, twisting as I do, getting an oblique workout in without meaning to. I glance at the window from the second story of Rector’s, the private gym me and Lele both head to when we want to get off Riddle Lane.
Thinking of my younger brother, my pulse thuds faster and my stomach turns to knots. It’s Monday night, three days since he had a seizure in my arms, and he’s not better.
He’s notawake.
He’s in one of the few private hospitals in the state, Astor Memorial II. There’s another closer to Alexandria, North Carolina, but this one is a short drive from Rector’s.
He has a private nurse and a doctor whose rotation of patients is extremely short.
They think he’ll wake up.
Theythinkhe’ll wake up.
I can’t keep pacing in his room though. I know the nervous energy isn’t good for him. So tonight, after staring at him throughout the entire day only to see the same sight I’ve seen for seventy-two hours—him hooked up to too many machines—I left.
