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“Yeah.” I smile and the split in my lip protests immediately. “Ow.”
He winces in sympathy.
“Apart from being locked out of my room.”
“Oh, right.” He gives the keypad a thoughtful look. “Let me have a go.”
He gently guides me aside placing his hand at the small of my back, and another completely unnecessary amount of electricity dances across my skin. Crouching in front of the keypad, he tries the code a couple of times before shaking his head.
“So, bad news,” he murmurs. “That’s definitely not working.”
“Fantastic.”
“Enzo will know how to reset it, but he’s already left for the night.” He pulls out his phone and tries calling him, but after a minute he sighs. “No answer.”
I lean my forehead briefly against the door. “Honestly, this feels on brand for me.”
He chuckles softly before glancing around the courtyard. “You can stay in my room tonight. I’ll take the sofa.”
“What? No, absolutely not.”
“Bri,” he says patiently, already walking towards his room. “You’re not sleeping in the courtyard or the lounge.”
I follow him reluctantly, trying my best to protest while he takes my dead phone from my hand, plugging it in to a charger beside the sofa.
“I genuinely don’t mind. I’ve slept in worse places.”
“Where? Prison?” I giggle, trying to stem my nerves.
“Not quite, but… My brothers once convinced me camping in the garden during a thunderstorm was ‘character building.’”
I snort a laugh as he grabs a spare blanket from the wardrobe, making up a bed on the sofa.
Eventually we settle—me in the bed, him stretched across the sofa nearby—as moonlight spills faintly through the windows. And we keep talking, despite the late hour. We chat about childhood sleepovers and school disasters and how he used to camp outside with his brothers every summer pretending they were explorers. I tell him about building blanket forts and reading fantasy books with a torch long after bedtime.
“Can I tell you something I didn’t say properly earlier?” he asks, staring at the ceiling rather than at me.
“Always.”
“It’s not just relationships. Romantic ones, I mean.” He exhales slowly. “It’s all of it. I keep everyone at surface level. Have done for years. It’s easier that way—if nobody gets close enough to actually know me, then nobody gets close enough to hurt me.” He sighs, like the admission just cost him something. “Naithan, my co-star, my… Friend,” he says, like he’s trying the word on for the first time. “He’s probably the closest I’ve got to anyone, and even that took him refusing to let me push him away. He just… Wouldn’t accept the version of me everyone else got. He kept showing up, whether I wanted him to or not.” He huffs something that isn’t quite a laugh. “In a lot of ways, we’re the same. Both scared of what happens if someone actually sees the broken bits.”
I’m quiet for a moment, turning it over. “I understand that.”
“I know. I just wanted you to know that it’s not just you… That feels that way I mean. It’s the world, our own heads, whatever’s happened to us, wearing us down, until we started believing that we were the monsters in our own stories.”
A tear slips down my cheek at his words, and I swipe it away with the sleeve of my pyjama top before he can notice. Something about how he understands it and doesn’t judge me, lifts a deep-rooted pressure in my head and chest.
I don’t trust myself to say anything back that wouldn’t come out wrong, so instead, I whisper, “What time is it?”
“It’s one a.m. again,” he tells me. Amusement warm in his voice.
“We should get some sleep,” I say, smiling into the pillow. “Goodnight, Jax.”
“Goodnight, Bri, sweet dreams.”
As sleep finally pulls me under, one thought settles quietly in my chest above all others. I can’t remember the last time I felt this safe around a man. Or the last time I enjoyed talking to someone this much.
Chapter 25
