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All the uncertainty doesn’t matter. Not when he inhales my skin like he’s missed me just as badly as I’ve missed him. One day, and one day fucking soon, we need to have a talk. But tonight, I just wrap my arm around him, smile when he throws a leg over my thighs and close my eyes.

“You haven’t emailed me,” he says, barely able to lift his voice above a whisper.

I think of my draft folder and all the emails I typed out since the day I left. He would be running for the hills if he knew just how wrong he was.

“Do you want me to?”

“Well, you can’t now, or it will just be because I asked. And then I’ll feel like a pathetic—”

“I was just trying to follow your rules.” I curl into him more, aware of each part of him pressed against me.

His response is a soft exhale against my neck, and then his body relaxes into sleep.

Emery falls back on his bed with a heady sigh, like he just expended tremendous energy while standing on top of his toilet, screeching at me. To be fair, the centipede was massive, and it was a smarmy fucker. Every time I thought I got it, it would skitter away with its million creepy legs.

I lean against the doorway and cross my arms. Now that the threat is gone and flushed down the toilet, I’m fully aware of where I am, who I’m with, and what the fuck he’s got on.

Which is nothing but a pair of black lace-trimmed panties and an oversized t-shirt, sagging off one creamy, slender shoulder. The threshold of his bedroom is as far as I should ever go. It feels dangerous being this close.

He’s only twenty years old. Hands fucking off. Eyes off. Off. Off. Off.

“You look like shit,” Emery says, leaning up on his elbows to look me over with an arched eyebrow. “Sex hair? And I think your shirt is on inside out.”

“Gee, thanks. That’s the way you treat your savior? Maybe I should have left you to the… What did you call it? An alien legged dick worm?”

“Don’t joke like that. You would never.”

And isn’t that the fucking truth? I had been with someone when his call came through. All thoughts of sex went right out the window when his panicked voice hit my nervous system. I was here within ten minutes, and my night turned from getting off to getting blue balled by the pretty man I’m not allowed to have.

“I feel like my space has been violated now. My skin is crawling. Wanna stay for a movie?”

I tuck my hand in my pocket and jingle my keys.

I should leave.

But I never do.

Emery is like a small furnace wrapped around me. That’s the first thing that starts pulling away the layers of sleep. I’m already half-awake, baking alive when the scratching sound pulls me all the way. My head shoots up from the pillow, and I blink several times at the morning light coming in from the windows.

“What is that?” I say, trying to move out from under Emery.

He slaps at my chest like he’s trying to fluff a pillow. “’s jus Ellie,” he murmurs sleepily.

There is a beat of silence, and then he pops up with a wide-eyed look around the room.

“Ellie? Eleanor?”

He tries getting off the bed, but his legs tangle in the blankets, and I have to hold him against me to flip the covers off. As soon as I let go, he jumps from the bed. He spins in a circle, looking around with frantic eyes and a beautiful mess of hair sticking up around his head.

I sit up, listening for the noise again.

“Where the fuck is she?” he hisses, picking up clothes from the floor and looking in his destroyed closet.

I can feel his rising panic all over again. “Shhh.” He turns to glare at me, but I hold my finger over my lips, and for once in his life, he listens.

The scratching is coming from the room.

His mouth falls open, and then we both fall to the ground to look under his bed.