“Ow!” I yelp, mostly for effect.
“Sorry,” he says, but doesn’t seem particularly sorry because he’s still got a forearm braced across my ribcage, and he uses it as leverage to push himself to sitting.
“I can’t breathe,” I say, and now he’s flipped himself over, still holding me down, and we’re face to face and it’s very close to dark, and I’m having nothing but bad ideas.
“You can breathe enough to complain,” he points out, which is rude, even if it’s true. “You gonna stay down this time, or—”
I wriggle enough to free one leg, hook it around his hips, and shove with my entire body so hard that he rolls and hits the wall, which makes it shake, which makes both of us freeze for a second, like we’re waiting for the whole cabin to fall down around us.
Thankfully, it doesn’t.
“Becareful,” I say, pushing myself up so I can use my weight to grab his shoulder and pin him, sort of.
“That was your fault,” he says, seamlessly grabbing my wrist and rotating it so it’s behind my back, which pushes me wildly off-balance enough that I very nearly face-plant into his chest. I’m breathing hard, and a lot of my body is touching a lot of Gideon’s body, and he’s definitely winning this dumb wrestling match, and oh my god what was Ithinking. Gideon’s the oldest of twelve. He can probably wrestle a smaller person into gentle, unharmed submission in his sleep.
“No, it was yours, because you’re being unreasonable,” I tell his pecs, warmth rolling off them in waves. He’s breathing a little fast, too. “Ow,” I add as an afterthought, even though it doesn’t hurt.
Gideon snorts and pushes me onto my side, and suddenly we’re face-to-face in this twin bed, one arm pinned behind my back. Our knees are touching, and if I struggle at all, the rest of us will be touching, too. Out of self-preservation, I quit struggling.
“Andi,” he says, and he sounds a little out of breath, a little gravelly, a little annoyed.
I wait for him to go on, but he doesn’t. We just… lie there, in the almost-dark, inches away from each other. My heart is thudding away, and I’m trying not to pant into his face, and I’m trying not to move at all because we’re so close that any movement at all will lead totouchingand I really, really want to touch him. I want it way more than I should, to touch Gideon who doesn’t even want to sleep in the same room, and whose hair is falling across his face and who has the loveliest eyes and eyelashes, and who’s looking at me right now like—
My brain shuts off, overridden by a wave of terror and elation. I don’t move. I barely breathe, because if I breathe too much we might touch even more. His fingers around my wrist shift, his thumb stroking across the heel of my hand, still holding it behind my back.
“Gideon,” I whisper. My voice isn’t working. He swallows and it’s so quiet that I can hear it perfectly, see the hollow of his throat move in the dark. Oh, god, I’m such an asshole.
“You can’t win this,” he finally says, and lets my wrist go, the spell broken. “I’m sleeping on the couch.”
He gives me one finallookand then throws a leg over me and shoves himself off the twin bed. I lie there, still breathing hard, blinking at the ceiling, feeling ten kinds of confused and twenty kinds of flustered.
Thank God I’m leaving tomorrow.
CHAPTERTWELVE
GIDEON
I sighat the bacon in the cast iron skillet as my phone buzzesyet againon the countertop. I’m grateful for satellite technology in general—it’s why I managed to rescue Andi, after all, and that turned out to be good—but it also means that everyone in my life knows they can get a hold of me even now, and I hate that.
I also regret telling people that I’d be briefly coming into town today, because Reid wants me to stop by the house and check up on the rehab critters, and Silas is trying to cajole me into staying overnight so the four of us can have our gift exchange, and now Javi is swearing in the group chat because his presents for us aren’t finished yet, whatever they are. With Javi it’ll either be a poorly glued together popsicle stick coaster or a perfect, detailed carving of my cat Dolly that he spent months perfecting. He’s not big on middle ground.
“Okay, I’m packed,” Andi says, walking through the kitchen and into the bathroom. “Oooh, bacon?”
“Yup.”
“Thanks,” she says, and emerges from the bathroom holding her toothbrush and toothpaste, because she’s a liar whowasn’tpacked yet. “Holy shit, is that blueberry pancakes?”
“Go finish packing,” I say as she comes up beside me, at least a foot away, craning her neck and getting nosy about breakfast, and it doesn’t matter that we’re nowhere near touching because goosebumps race up my right side anyway. I swear I can still feel her hand on my wrist, stronger than I was expecting, pulling me on top of her.
It kept me up half the night. It’s exactly why I didn’t want to room with her, because if she’d been a couple feet way, it would’ve been the whole night. Even if she’s not mad at me any more, it doesn’t mean she wants me thinkingthoughtsabout her all night from four feet away. The least I can do as penance is go into the next room to stare wide-eyed at the ceiling while thinking about how she was stronger and more ruthless than I expected.
I know how she meant it: the same way as she meant the Monopoly game, as friends who grew up together. We used to invent rules to make board games more fun and we used to roughhouse every so often, back when we were kids. I was eight and didn’t really understand that attraction existed, much less feel it about Andi. Even when I was twelve and she moved away, attraction was kind of abstract, the understanding that I liked looking at women in movies and on posters.
But last night, for a few seconds, she was warm and breathing hard enough to push her ribcage into my arm and it was nothing like looking at a woman on a poster.
“I’m finished,” she says. “Where’d you get blueberries?”
“The blueberry store, and you’re not finished packing, your toothbrush is in your handright now.”
