***
It was after midnight, and the movie credits were rolling now after the Marvel movie finished. Honey was worn out now, and all she could think about was going to sleep in her bed.
“It’s time to go to bed,” Honey announced as she stood from the couch.
“Mom—”
“I’m tired too,” Nikos announced, cutting off Kai’s whine. Kai looked disappointed and was pouting but didn’t make any more fuss about it.Nikos began to clear the furniture off to the side to make space in the middle of the floor. Once he was done, Honey helped him set up thick blankets and pillows for them to sleep on.
“Goodnight,” Honey said, heading for the light switch. Everything was settled now, and she would just have Kai take a shower in the morning before he went to school.
“Ma, I want you to sleep with us too,” Kai said as he got under the blanket.
Honey grimaced. “I don’t know about that.”
“Please,” Kai pleaded.
Honey looked at her son uncertainly. Not only had she not planned to have a sleepover, but she definitely didn’t plan tohave a sleepover with her son and the man she had been running away from. It would be better for her to go into her room, and she was nearly ready to walk away and do just that until she thought about it. If she slept out here, Nikos wouldn’t dare do anything to her while her son was out here too. Maybe a sleepover wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all.
“Okay.”
“Yay,” Kai cheered. “Mommy’s sleeping with us! Aren’t you excited, Nik?”
But surprisingly, Nikos didn’t look excited at all. If anything, he looked suspicious with his eyebrow raised, probably surprised that she had gone along with this so easily.
“You want to have a sleepover with me?” Nikos asked, pointing at himself.
“I want to have a sleepover with you and my son,” Honey said, smirking. Nikos’s befuddled expression was replaced with a smirk, but Honey would have the last laugh. The only thing they would do tonight was sleep, and she would make sure of that.
With the lights off, it was dark now with only the pale moonlight filtering between the blinds. They had all settled down under the blankets with Kai between herself and Nikos. Honey listened to the soft snores of her son, who had gone to sleep much faster than them, which wasn’t surprising. Kai had been a ball of joy all night. With all that spent energy, it had taken nothing but laying down for his eyes to close.
Honey wished she could easily doze off too, and if she were in her bedroom with her door locked, she probably would be able to. But her awareness of the man on the other side of the makeshift bed kept her alert in the way she shouldn’t be at thistime of night. She lay with her eyes open, looking up at the ceiling. When she heard Nikos sit up, she immediately closed her eyes, hoping that if she pretended to be asleep, she could avoid a conversation. She knew that Nikos wouldn’t do anything with her son here, but that didn’t mean that Nikos wouldn’t try to continue their conversation from earlier, which was the one conversation she did not want to have.
Her ears became her most used sense as she listened to Nikos stand. She could hear his footsteps, and her heart raced until she realized he had walked down the hall. Once she heard a door close, she quickly opened her eyes and looked over to see the bathroom light peeking out from under the door. She sighed before relaxing and flipping her back towards the door. She would get no sleep tonight if she kept this up, and if that were the case, she would have been better off sleeping in her room, though, at this point, she wondered if she would have even managed to get sleep there.
When she heard him come out of the bathroom, she pretended to sleep again, promising herself that once she heard him lay back down, she would keep her eyes closed and force herself to go to sleep. She was doing a good job of that until she heard Nikos’s footsteps stop close to her. Her heart sped up, anxious about what he was doing because he hadn’t laid down yet. She waited and waited, and when she took the chance to open her eyes, she didn’t see Nikos lying on the other side of her son. Eyes widening, she flipped on her other side to see Nikos bending down to lay next to her.
“What are you doing?” Honey whispered fiercely as he settled down next to her. And here she thought Nikos would play by the rules with her son around, but clearly, he was more sly than she thought.
“Nikos, I—”
“I just want to talk to you.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Honey said.
“There’s a lot to talk about, actually,” Nikos argued. “Like why you’re running from me.”
“I’m not running from you,” Honey denied, wishing she could move over more, but she didn’t want to squash her son.
“I know what running looks like,” Nikos said. “Running is the reason I’m here.”
Honey realized that he was referring to why he had come to New York in the first place. The vulnerability in his blue eyes was enough to make her quiet, but not enough to make her speak. She sighed before relaxing her body, which had been stiff since the moment she laid down here, and it wasn’t because of the hardwood floor that she still managed to feel even with a thick quilt underneath her.
“I’ve already told you that you’re different,” Nikos said, picking right back up from where they left off the last time they spoke in his office. “You’re special in my eyes, and I think you know that.”
He grabbed her hand and placed it against his heart, and she could feel the thrum beneath her palm and knew that if he were to put his hand against her chest, the beat of her heart would reveal her secret, a secret in her heart that she had been keeping from both herself and him.
As Honey looked into his eyes, she could finally admit what she had been denying for a while now. She liked him. She liked Nikos a lot.
