Like I’m actually going to sleep.
20
COLTON
The smellof citrus and sunshine fills my nose as I come out of the fog of sleep. I shift, moving to stretch my stiff muscles, when I realize I’m not alone. A warm, lush body is wrapped around me.
Quinn and I are facing each other. My arms encircle her, and she’s buried her face in my chest with our legs twined together. I sigh and shift closer, brushing a soft kiss to her shoulder, savoring the feel of her body against mine.
Everything about it is perfect.
Except a few seconds later, my brain wakes up enough to process that itisn’tright. She was worried about exactly this. She made it perfectly clear that she doesn’t want anything with me, even if she is attracted to me. I know my best friend, and I know she’s struggling to readjust after what we did together. I need to extricate myself from this situation before she wakes up and starts spiraling.
I inch my leg out from between hers, but she buries her face more deeply in my chest, pulling in a deep breath while I hold my own.
She moans, grinding her pussy against my leg, and I bite backmy groan. She’s dreaming, letting out little whimpers and sighs that take me from hard to a fucking rock.
I try to pull back again, and her fingers wrap in my shirt.
“Colton.”
I freeze. The way she says my name, breathy and desperate, short-circuits my brain. Maybe she isn’t asleep. Maybe she woke up in my arms and wants this as badly as me. “Quinn, are you awake?”
She blinks her eyes open, recognition slowly filling her gaze.
A heartbeat later, she pushes herself away, scurrying to the other side of the bed like a crab. In her rush to get away, she forgets the bed is barely wide enough to fit our bodies, and she falls off, landing flat on her ass.
I sit up and look over the edge, losing the fight against the laugh bubbling in my throat.
“Okay there, Chaos?”
“Oh, yeah,” she stammers, rubbing her sore rear end as she stands. “Of course. Obviously. I’m totally fine. This is no big deal.”
My heart plummets when she doesn’t laugh. I’ve never seen her this flustered. Her nervous eyes shoot around the room, landing on everything except me. She’s uncomfortable.Imade her uncomfortable.
Logically, I know I haven’t done anything wrong. I was asleep, and she snuggled up to me as much as I did to her. But she wouldn’t be this uncomfortable if she didn’t know the way I’d felt about her. This was why I kept my feelings to myself for so long. She’s too kind, too concerned with my discomfort. And there’s definite discomfort.
“I’m sorry.”
Her frantic eyes shoot over to me. “You’re sorry?”
I clear my throat. “Yeah. For the cuddling and the arms and, you know.”
Her eyes flick down to where I’ve positioned the blanket tohide my very obvious erection. She can’t see anything, but knowing she’s looking makes my dick strain harder against my shorts.
She turns on her heel and rushes off to the bathroom, slamming the door shut without a word.
Maybe Ishouldhave offered to sleep on the floor.
Clearly I’m a masochist,because I spend the day at the beach with Quinn. She gave the students some suggestions on where to explore, but beyond that, we don’t have to see them until the festival starts this evening. Our day is completely our own.
All my plans to spend a nice, platonic day proving to Quinn that she doesn’t need to be uncomfortable around me disappear in a burst of adrenaline when she whips that cover-up over her head. Her breathtaking curves are wrapped in red nylon, and my wildly unhelpful brain supplies endless images of me burying my face between her round thighs, licking over the slick suit. I spend hours trying to distract myself with baseball and my grandfather, determined not to look at her. I’ve been fighting like hell to keep my eyes off her for weeks, ever since she rewired my brain chemistry in our bathroom, and I can’t break now. Not when she’s already feeling weird.
“You coming in the water?” she asks as she pushes off her blanket, brushing some sand from the back of her thighs and drawing my eyes back to her ass.
I yank my gaze back to her face, terrified she caught me checking her out, but she’s looking out over the water with a giant smile on her face. I pull my knees up, leaning my elbows on them to hide anything that might make this day even more awkward.
“No way. It’s the festival of San Giovanni. There are swords and knives out there.”
