“No?” I asked. It had felt like too much even as I said it, but even so – I felt like he’d just poured cold water over all of my dreams.
“No,” he repeated. “Not yet. We can’t rush this.”
“Why not?”
Rowe pressed another kiss against the top of my head, wrapping his arms around me. “Because this is real,” he said. “I don’t want it to get messed up by us moving too far, too fast.”
“What are you going to do, then?” I asked.
“I’ll rent this room you found for me,” Rowe said. “Maybe I’ll have to share with a roommate, but that’s okay. I’m not home much, anyway. And now I’ll be earning enough to quit my evening shifts, I can spend some of my evenings with you instead.”
“I like the sound of that,” I said. I burrowed myself cozier against him. Even without the sheets over us, he was warm and comfortable and everything I needed. Everything he was talking about seemed easily doable. I didn’t know if it was because he was making sense, or because it was Rowe who was saying it, but it sounded like everything would be fixed before the week was up. “What about now?”
“Whataboutnow?”
“What should we do?”
Rowe made a humming noise low in his throat, a sound that enveloped me like an extra layer to his embrace. “I’m pretty tired. Maybe we could sleep?”
“I like the sound of that,” I told him again.
My eyes were almost drifting shut when a buzz sounded from the nightstand. Rowe reached with one hand, not taking the other away from where it wrapped around me, and picked up his phone. “Huh,” he said.
“Something with your sister?” I asked, drowsily, but still concerned.
“No,” Rowe said. “Deon just told me they’ve been quarantined inside the hotel.”
“What for?” I asked, the news blinking me awake a little.
“Apparently, some guest in the same wing as him got sick,” Rowe said thoughtfully. “Looks like they’re shutting it down as a precaution.”
“Do you think we’re at risk?” I asked, sitting up a little in alarm.
“No,” Rowe said, soothing me with a stroke of my arm. “He says it’s only guests who slept there overnight who have to stay – something about the plumbing system. Whoever it was, I don’t think they’re contagious enough to get us down in the restaurant, and Deon’s fine. Just stuck.”
“That’s bad luck,” I said. “Imagine if we’d left a little later. We might have been stuck there with him.”
“Just stuck in a hotel room together for days with nothing to do,” Rowe said thoughtfully.
We both considered it for a moment.
“Are you sure you don’t want to move in with me?” I asked.
Rowe laughed, settling us back down onto the pillows properly. “Let me take a six-month lease,” he said. “And if you still want to live together, then we’ll talk.”
I recorded the date in my head, keeping those words as a promise that I very much intended to hold him to.
Because if I could go to sleep and wake up every night and every morning just like this?
No one in the world could stop me from making it happen.
6 Months Later – Rowe
“Holy crap,” I said, turning in a circle and looking around.
Xavi’s cheeks were flushed red and he was looking at the floor in that way he had when he wasn’t sure how I would react. “Yeah, it’s, um…”
“It’shuge,” I said, staring at him. “How… how do you even afford this?”
