Making her come is the hottest thing I’ve ever experienced, but it’s not on the cards for tonight.
I’m giving her a false sense of security for the time being before I come back to her while wearing the mask.
“Thank you for walking me home,” Gracie says, and I give her a lopsided smile before pulling her into a friendly hug.
It’s nothing out of the usual, and I figure she won’t mind after the way she all but threw herself into my lap this morning. I’ll take all of the little scraps of her that I can get.
It doesn’t last long, but it’s enough to ease the itchiness in me and quieten the voice that is constantly screaming at me totake her, have her, keep her.
“I’ve got your back, always,” I murmur and force myself to take a step back without pressing a kiss to her forehead—or worse, her lips.
Somehow, I don’t think that would go over well.
I stay frozen to the spot until she’s inside the building where I know she’s safe before jogging back to the cottage. I pull my hood up over my head to ward myself from the chill, since nights are getting colder now and I really should have thought ahead and put on a thicker jacket.
Fuck, Gracie was only in a hoodie. Was she cold? That thought irks me more than it should and I want to punch myself for letting my girl feel even the slightest bit uncomfortable.
It’s okay. It’s fine. Next time, I’ll make sure she’s bundled the hell up so there’s no chance of her catching a cold.
It only takes me a few minutes to get home, and I’m thankful that the guys and I had the foresight to make sure Gracie was placed in the building that she was, because being even this far away from her is killing me, so fuck knows how out of my mind I would be right now if she was on the other side of campus.
To my surprise, the lights are on in the kitchen when I head inside, and I find Logan sitting at the island nursing a beer while scrolling through his phone.
I don’t know what the fuck he’s always looking at on it, but it must be important since he barely takes his eyes off the screen for longer than five minutes at a time.
But I don’t think any of us have ever asked.
Logan is private. More private than all of us put together, and he’s so full of secrets I honestly don’t know what he gets up to most of the time when he’s not here or on the ice.
You’d think being a hockey player would mean having team spirit, but he’s barely ever with his teammates, and he’s also rarely here, so fuck knows where he is.
He’s never bothered to tell us much, either.
“Hey man, you good?” I ask and he pulls his attention away from the phone long enough to give me a cursory glance and a quick nod.
Knowing he’s clearly not in the mood to talk tonight, I head towards my room, but I only make it a few steps before he calls my name. “Noah?”
“Yeah?”
“Gracie make it home okay?” he asks, but there’s something in his tone that has my hackles rising and the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end.
Fucking fuck fuckfuck.
“All good,” I say as casually as I can, though my voice breaks a little on the end.
I’m a good liar, I swear.
But even I’m man enough to admit that Logan sometimes intimidates the hell out of me.
Maybe it’s because I know what he’s capable of.
Or maybe it’s because I know that there’s a side of him that he does everything in his power not to show us.
“Good. It seems her security system’s been playing up lately. We might need to look into it if it carries on.”
His tone is indifferent, and he’s so damn hard to read that I can’t tell if he’s onto me or not. Even if he was, he probably wouldn’t say anything, he’d rather play games with me to try and make me lose my shit.
I clear my throat. “Yeah, we should definitely do that.”
