“You don’t have to be sarcastic.” He got up, wincing.
“I wasn’t. I mean it. These wood floors can’t be great for your knees.”
He shrugged. “You heading to bed?”
“Yeah. You need anything ’fore I do?”
He shook his head, but he looked like he had something more to say. And then he took a step closer to me.
“You sure about that?” I asked, and took another step closer to him.
“Last night…” he began, and put a hand over his mouth like he didn’t want the words to come out.
I closed the last few feet between us and took his hand gently in mine, pulling it away from his lips. They were red and shiny like he’d been chewing on them all day. “I thought we weren’t gonna talk about last night no more.” His face screwed up and he swayed toward me. Instinctively, I caught him in my arms. “What’s wrong?”
“What if…” he mumbled.
“What if what?” I tipped his face up so I could see him plain. “What is it?”
“What if I’mnotsupposed to be a priest?”
“Whoa—where’sthiscoming from?”
He pulled away from me and put his hands over his eyes, knocking his glasses up. “I don’t know,” he said, muffled. “Maybe it’s just last-minute jitters.”
I grinned. “Like a bride on her wedding day, huh?”
He let out a laugh that sounded more like a sob. “Yeah. Look, I’m fine. You can—you can go to bed.”
I went to him and touched his back carefully, like he might turn around and bite just out of plain fear. “I don’t wanna leave you alone like this.”
He gave a sniff. Shit. “I’m fine,” he insisted.
“I mean, you’re not fine. Some jackass threatened you, then your home got trashed, then we had that crash,thenwe all made you leave the city… You’re not fine, andthat’sfine.” He made no response. “You know what I think?”
“What?” He asked, still muffled into his hands.
“I think you just need to feel safe again.”
He turned to face me again at last, eyelashes suspiciously damp, but no tears. “I felt safe last night.”
I got all tongue-tied, so I reached up to touch his face. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you…maybe wanna sleep in my bed tonight?Justsleep,” I added hastily.
“Just sleep?” I had no idea what his tone meant, so I stayed quiet. He thought it over for a moment, and then gave a shy nod. “If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind at all.”
Chapter Twenty
Aidan
Teo put me into the bed and tucked me in like a child, making sure my glasses were safe on the nightstand and the sheets were snug around me, before he went to brush his teeth and use the bathroom before bed. I lay there staring at the canopy of the four-poster bed above me. Part of me wondered if this was me giving into temptation, or whether I was simply using him again or whether… The thoughts went round and round in my head. By the time Teo got back into the room, clad only in tight-fitting jockeys, I was even more exhausted than I had been before.
But not so exhausted that I didn’t notice how well he filled out those jockeys.
