Please, please, please go to sleep and I can pretend I’m not turned on to the moon and back just being near you.
“Good night, Remy. It was nice seeing you today.”
Ugh.
I can’t be this person. I blow out an apologetic breath. “I’m sorry I walked in on you.”
He doesn’t even have the courtesy to laugh. He just says, “Are you though? You didn’t seem sorry.”
How dare he!
I yank off the duvet from over my head and flip over. “I am,” I insist, the moonlight casting the room in a dim glow. “I couldn’t see. I thought it was raining. I didn’t have my glasses on. I’m sorry.”
He smirks again, but then it vanishes. “I’m not.”
And I burn everywhere. Flames lick my bones, my hair, my heart from his words.
I part my lips, but what do I even say? I’m the one who pumped the brakes on us. Everything feels so complicated, our lives entangled in ways that make a bedtime tryst a bad idea. My breakup is still so fresh.
But the pull toward him is so strong. It’s so much. There’s a drumbeat inside me and it’s pounding out a rhythm to his name. This longing to touch him is consuming me. It’s eating me up. It’s taking me apart.
Nerves are throttling me though. How do I make the next move? Do I even?
He lifts a hand, like he’s about to touch me, maybe to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. I hold my breath and hope.
But he just slides it through his hair, the consummate picture of a patient man. A man who’s willing to wait for it.
To wait for me to say something.
“Lake,” I begin, my resistance starting to melt away.
“Yes?”
“I’m not that sorry,” I say, and my lips twist into a naughty smile.
He shifts to his side, studying me. “You did want to join me, didn’t you.”
It’s not a question. It’s a statement. And the unspoken words,admit it, hang there at the end in the charged, dark air, the moonlight slicing across his lovely skin.
There’s no point pretending anymore. There’s just none.
“Maybe I did. A little bit,” I say.
His smile could light up the night sky. It’s a goddamn star twinkling. He leans closer, and I think—no, I hope—he’s going to pin me down and kiss me senseless.
But instead, he dusts a too-chaste kiss to my cheek.
All the air whooshes from my lungs. A pulse beats between my thighs.
Whispering, “Good night, Remy,” he breaks the kiss, pulls back, turns the other way, and pulls up the covers to his sturdy pecs.
No.
Just no.
That is not happening. Powered by lust and weeks of pent-up desire, I grab for his shoulder. “Don’t you dare go to sleep.”
He climbs over me, and kisses the breath out of me.
