A surprised laugh escapes me. “I wasn’tweirdabout your nose.”
“Please,” he says, the corners of his mouth rising. “You absolutely were. In fact, this all probably happened because you were just looking for an excuse to touch it.”
My face warms. “That is not—”
“It’s okay,” he says. “I get it.” That subtle lift of his mouth grows into a full-out smirk. “I’ve been told I have a very attractive nose.”
I blush even harder, but god, it’s true. He does. He has an attractiveeverything. Especially when he’s smiling like this, the dimple in his cheek winking in and out. I want to press my thumb to it. I want to say things that keep him smiling, just so I can feel it appear and disappear.
“But don’t worry,” he says, lying back down. “I always liked yours too.”
Without thinking, I lift my hand to touch my nose, and that smirk on his face softens into something smaller. Something tender.
I pull my hand away, only now noticing he’s fully encased in his sleeping bag. I stare at him for a moment, confused. “Are we…We’re not going downstairs?”
“We can,” he says, “but we’ll be better served by getting some sleep. These are going to keep going off all night. And this kind of alert means there’s potential for a tornado. Not that one’s necessarily been spotted.”
“Shouldn’t we just stay downstairs then? I mean, is it even safe to be here?” I hadn’t taken any of this seriously enough before. I’m not making that mistake again.
He rolls onto his side, facing me. His brown eyes appear almost golden in the dim light of the lantern. “We don’t have a lot of options downstairs. The pantry, maybe. Or the guest bathroom. But both are standing room only. And I wasn’t exaggerating, these tornado alarms are going to keep happening. We could run up and down each time they go off, but that’s not exactly safe either.”
“Then what do we do?”
The corners of his mouth tilt up again. Gentle and sweet. And my heart thuds dangerously. I can’t remember the last time we werelike this. Face-to-face, lying together in the middle of the night. It’s so familiar. A position we’ve been in hundreds of times before. But it feels new.
Now that he’s close, I can catalog even more changes. Like the tiny nick under his bottom lip where he must have cut himself shaving. And the grizzled grays growing in his stubble.
I’m struck again by the desire to feel it. To see how different the sensation would be now. His skin was always so smooth against mine. The curve of his jaw always so soft—gentle—when it traveled over my neck, my chest, my stomach, my thighs. My cheeks flush as I remember the first time. The way we’d fumbled with our clothes, with buttons and zippers, and then with each other. Somehow, what should have been a little awkward and unsure felt different with him. Learning each other, figuring out what drove the other wild, all of that felt like a joy and not a burden.Hemade it feel like a joy.
I can still picture his face, the way he’d looked up at me, his hand wrapped around my thigh. His eyes intense, and focused. Like he was studying me.
“Here?” he’d asked after some time, his mouth, his tongue tracing patterns that made it hard for me to think. I’d babbled something incoherent in response, and the way he’d laughed, all bright and sunny and sure. It had warmed me through and through.
“Now what?” I’d said afterward, completely wrung out and content in a way I’d never experienced before.
“We go back to sleep,” Nikhil says, and I blink, trying to make sense of his words from the past echoing in the present. He’s answering my earlier question, I realize. About what we should do in response to the alerts.
My cheeks burn hot, my heart gallops in my chest, and I hope he can’t tell what I was just thinking about. I hope he can’t see rightthrough me, that he can’t figure me out the way he once could so easily.
I nod, and a piece of hair falls over my face. The hair situation has been hopeless since I arrived, and it has only gotten worse with each exposure to the humidity and rain and wind. I usually wrangle my hair into submission with a combination of products and styling tools, but I’ve got none of them here, so my normally pristine lob is a giant mass, completely out of control.
I lift a hand to push it away, but Nikhil’s hand is outstretched too. He’s reaching for the piece, as if he intends to tuck it behind myear.
My heart thuds again, so loud I swear he can hear it. But the touch I’m anticipating never comes. Nikhil freezes, his hand suspended in the air. Then he snaps it back and turns away.
I take a deep breath, trying to make it as quiet as possible. Trying not to let him know how affected I am by all of this. By him.
I turn as well, my back toward his, and close my eyes. Soon, all of this will be over. Soon, I won’t have to think about any of it ever again.
—
Nikhil hadn’t been lying about the repeated tornado alerts. Over the next few hours our sleep is interrupted multiple times by that irritating blaring sound. I ask Nikhil to put his phone on do not disturb mode, but he’s hesitant. Worried that we’ll miss a real, true warning, and it’s hard to argue with that.
But the next time we’re wakened, it’s not by the robotic siren-like noise I’ve gotten used to. It’s a voice. Loud, but staticky and tinny. Like it’s traveling from a great distance away.
“Hello? Hello?” the voice says. “Is anyone there?”
Nikhil shoots up, grabbing the lantern. “This is Nikhil. I hear you. Everything okay?”
