He motions to the top bunk. “Are you okay climbing up?”
I nod and give it a try, but my foot slips—twice—and I frown, pausing before a third attempt. Damn. That dive reallydidshort-circuit every part of me.
Holden steps in, gently prying my hand off the ladder. “Yeah, no. You’re not sleeping up there.”
“Just help me up,” I protest weakly. “I’ll be fine.”
“Uh uh.” He shakes his head. “What if you have to pee in the middle of the night? What if you get dizzy and fall? Coralie, you can’t even get up there now.”
I cross my arms, mostly to look less like a ragdoll and more like someone with agency, but he’s got a point. A small, infuriatingly logical one. And I’m too exhausted to argue.
He nods toward his bed instead.
I raise a brow. “Where areyougoing to sleep if I take your bed? The fifth cabin still isn’t fixed.” It was supposed to be done by now, but I’m pretty sure the staff noticed we weren’t complaining and decided not to rush.
“I’ll take your bunk.”
“Ah. Trying to finish the job, I see.” I glance up at the rickety wooden frame that already groaned under my weight. Add Holden’s? I’d be a pancake by morning.
He shakes his head, lifts the thin comforter, and holds it open—a silent command.
So I give in. To hell with it. I crawl into his bunk, still smelling faintly of him and saltwater, and sink into the mattress. He tucks the blanket around me—not rushed, not careless—and then moves to his bag.
When he returns, he’s holding a familiar protein bar, the same chocolatey kind he gave me that day in the lab. He sets it beside me on the mattress before sitting down on the floor and leaning his head back against the bedframe.
My fingers itch to run through his hair. I want to feel those soft black waves curling through my fingers. I think maybe,maybe, he’d let me.
But instead, I open my mouth and ruin the moment.
“Holden?”
“Mmm?” He opens one eye, looking up at me from where he sits, shadowed and silent.
“Why do you always have chocolate protein bars if you hate chocolate?”
He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t blink. But something shifts. Stillness, sharper than before. Like he’s holding very, very still on purpose.
“You never eat enough when you’re focused on your work,” he says.
The words hit harder than they should. Quieter than they ought to.
So what—is he saying he keeps chocolate bars in his bag, in his desk, in hislife, just in caseIneed them? That he picked the one flavor hecan’t standbecause it’s the only one I’ll actually eat?
Surely I heard him wrong.
But he doesn’t take it back. Doesn’t look away. Doesn’t soften the impact.
He just closes his eyes again, and leans back like he didn’t just level me with one sentence.
I stay quiet for a while, letting the weight of the last fifteen minutes settle in my chest. It’s hard to tell what was real and what might’ve been a hallucination conjured by exhaustion and the desperate things I’ve been wanting to believe for too long.
Maybe none of it was what I think it was. Maybe I’m just tired.
I turn toward him, shifting onto my side. “Thank you for saving me today. Again.Somany pickles.”
He exhales slowly and turns, too, until our faces are just inches apart in the dim cabin light. “I wish I didn’t have to,” he says.
His eyes flicker down to my mouth, then back to meet mine.
