Then it started again.
Milo tightened his grip on me when I went to back off again, but this time I hesitated. “What if it’s Dawn?” I asked.
He’d feel guilty later if he missed her, even if it wasn’t something important. As much as I wanted to keep kissing him forever, I didn’t want him to feel guilty about being with me. Not even once.
Milo pursed his lips, squinted, and then sighed, grabbing blindly for the phone and swiping to answer.
“Hello?” he said.
And then, after a second, “Dad?”
34
MILO
I didn’t even noticeXander come back into the bedroom until he kissed the top of my still-damp hair.
We’d showered separately after Dad called.
Well, I’d curled up under the blankets again and Xander had cuddled me for as long as he could before he had to get started downstairs, then I’d forced myself to get up and shower. I wasn’t sure when Xander had reappeared, just that he had, and that he smelled freshly showered now.
“She knows you’re upset,” he murmured, scratching behind Luna’s ear.
Luna had come to sit in my lap at some point, and that was better than dwelling on everything my dad had said, so I’d been focused on figuring out how to make her purr instead of thinking.
“Hmm?” I asked, not having really heard what Xander had said.
“She knows you’re upset,” he repeated, sitting down next to me in his towel.
It was pretty obvious I was upset if my reaction to Xander hanging around in just a towel was to barely register it.
“Dad wants me back,” I said. “For Mr. Nakamura’s new restaurant’s soft opening. He says if I’ve made him my pet client then I have to be the one who goes to it. His exact words were, uh, ‘if you’re not at that opening from beginning to end, you’re fired.’”
I wouldn’t have changed the way I dealt with that, and maybe Dad was right. Maybe that was my responsibility.
“I know,” Xander murmured, slipping his hand under my pajama shirt and rubbing soothing little circles with his thumb against my bare skin. “Overheard most of it.”
We’d known from the beginning that this wasn’t forever. That was the whole point. It’d been safe, because neither of us would have time to get hurt. Things couldn’t go bad. It was meant to be all fling and no strings and okay, that wasn’t exactly my style, and it obviously wasn’t Xander’s either, but people tried new things all the time and it worked out just fine.
Except itfeltlike forever, and I hadn’t managed to process that yet, and now I felt like Xander was being snatched away from me.
“Hey, hey,” he said, voice low and soft like he was soothing a baby. “Don’t look like that. It’s not the end of the world.”
It sure as hell felt like it. Okay, not the actual end of the world, maybe, but… the end of the little world I’d had for almost two weeks now, which was no time at all but had felt like a lifetime.
I washappyhere. I didn’t feel sick all the time anymore. I’d made friends, more friends than I’d ever had before, way more friends than I had in Seattle—the number of which was nowzero, since Zara had left.
Otter Bay had started to feel like my world, and my time here was ending.
I made an unhappy noise and dropped my head to Xander’s shoulder. If I had any brains I’d be taking the chance to extract myself gracefully, to stop indulging in the comfort of being around him so it wouldn’t hurt so much when I didn’t have it anymore.
I could hardly believe I’d ever thought I’d just be able to give this up. Now that I’d been within touching distance of Xander, I couldn’t imagine living without it.
“You should go back to work,” I tried, but even saying the words made me want to cling to Xander with both hands and beg him not to leave me.
I hadn’t planned for this. It’d justhappened.
“Not until I’ve made you breakfast,” Xander said. “And you’ve eaten it, and called Dawn to check in on her, and talked to your mom about what an asshole your dad is. I know she’s on my side here ‘cause she divorced him.”
