He says nothing.
Good penguin.
Twenty-Five
Piper
We’re twenty minutes into the drive, and Griffin hasn’t looked at me once.
Not once.
Which would be completely fine if there was a functional reason for it. A podcast. Complicated merging. A particularly demanding stretch of asphalt that required his full attention. But no, we’re on an open highway with approximately one other car in the distance, and the road is a straight shot.
He’s also tapping the steering wheel.
I’ve known this man since I was five. I know his “normal,” and this is the opposite of it.
“Good morning,” I say, testing the air.
“Morning,” he says, eyes forward.
“Sleep well?”
“Great, actually.” A beat. “You?”
“Really well. Best I’ve had in a while.”
“Good. Great day for driving,” Griffin says. “Look at that sky.”
I look at the sky. The sky is doing nothing unusual.
I glance at him from the corner of my eye. “It’s a nice sky.”
“It is,” he agrees. “Classic sky.”
Classic sky?
Okay then.
I’m hyper-aware of my own body this morning. More than usual, which is saying something because the dream I half-remember from before dawn was—well, it wasn’t nothing. My skin feels sensitive in a way I’m desperately attributing to too much sun yesterday, not to the fact that I woke up in Griffin’s arms, his hand on my thigh, and a very specific hardness pressed against my leg.
He smells good. That’s just a fact about a person. It doesn’t have to mean anything.
Get a grip, Piper.
I shift in the seat, hoping the friction might help, but nothing works. I reach for my bag and start rooting around, needing a distraction.
“Fuck,” I mutter.
Griffin glances at me. His first direct look of the morning. Progress. “What’s wrong?”
“My notebook. I left it in the trunk again.” I drop my bag on the floor. “I need to get a separate one for the car. It’s been helping. Writing things down. Getting the noise out of my head.”
“Confessional?” he offers.
I shift again. The thing is, I have something in my head right now that would benefit from being said out loud to a non-judgmental party. Something I’ve been sitting with since yesterday, maybe longer, something that keeps surfacing and doesn’t have anywhere to go.
I swallow. “I can’t.”
