Chapter 20 #2
“Look, I just—” The words tangled, my tongue tripping over all the versions I couldn’t say. I kissed you because I wanted to. I kissed you because you laughed and it broke me open. I kissed you because I haven’t wanted anything this much in a long time and that scared the shit out of me.
His mouth twitched like he wanted to smile and didn’t trust himself with it. He shrugged out of his coat the rest of the way and hung it on a hook, shoulders tightening under the motion.
“I just mean,” he said, looking past me at the kitchen doorway, “we don’t have to overcomplicate it. It happened. Adrenaline. Snow. Whatever.”
There was that word again. Whatever. Like this wasn’t currently rearranging my internal organs.
I cleared my throat and tried again. “The last thing I want is to screw up your friendship with my brother.”
There it was. The safe excuse. The shield I could hold between us and pretend it wasn’t welded to my own fear.
Hayes’s face flashed across my mind—protective, tired, carrying his own stack of guilt about Wes that he never quite put down. The idea of being the reason things got weird between them made my stomach flip in a way that had nothing to do with the sled.
If I wrecked this, I didn’t just lose a kiss.
I risked Wes retreating right back into his house-ghost version. I risked Hayes looking at me like I’d broken something fragile he’d trusted me with. I risked this tiny, flickering version of progress we’d somehow stumbled into.
Wes’s jaw flexed, a muscle jumping near his ear. He finally glanced over, his gaze skimming my face quick, like a touch he didn’t trust himself to hold.
“You’re not going to screw up my friendship with Hayes,” he said. “I’ve done a decent job of that all on my own.”
The words landed heavier than he probably meant them to.
“If this blows up,” I said quietly, “I’m the one who lit the match. Again.” The last word slipped out before I could stuff it back down where it belonged, somewhere under bad memories and broken engagements.
Wes looked at me then.
Really looked.
His eyes were darker in the hallway’s weak light, the color deep behind the sweep of his lashes. I thought I saw something soften there, something almost tender.
“Hey,” he said, brow furrowing. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
I huffed out a brittle laugh. “We definitely did something.”
He exhaled, a humorless little breath. “Yeah. We did.”
His hand went to the back of his neck, fingers digging in like he needed the anchor. “I’m just saying . . . if anyone’s a bad idea here, it’s me.”
Something in my chest pinched.
“Don’t,” I said automatically. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” He leaned a shoulder against the doorframe, looking suddenly, unbearably tired. “Tell the truth?”
He flicked a glance toward the window, where the hill was just visible through the glass—our carved tracks already filling back in with white.
He exhaled through his nose, a white cloud dissipating. “Besides,” he added, tone shifting into something drier, something with an edge. “You just dragged a half-functional contractor down a hill. That is not anyone’s dream rebound.”
The word rebound hit like a tiny hammer—knocking into Greg’s ghost and that ugly, lingering belief that maybe that was all I’d ever be good for. The girl who looked good on someone’s arm until she didn’t. The girl who didn’t see the cracks of her misjudgment until she was standing in the rubble.
I snorted, because humor was easier than bleeding. “Wow. Okay. Rude to both of us.”
His mouth twitched, like he hadn’t expected that answer. A tiny flash of apology crossed his face. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant,” I said, sighing. “I just . . . for the record, I’m not looking for a rebound.”
His jaw worked, like there were words he wanted to say and didn’t trust. “Good,” he said finally. “You shouldn’t be.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face. When he dropped it, his expression had settled back into something wry and self-directed.
“I’m still figuring out how to walk down a hill without doing the splits,” he said quietly. “I don’t have any business figuring out you.”
The honesty in it hit me harder than the self-deprecation.
It wasn’t just that he thought he was a bad bet. He believed it. Deep down at the marrow level.
I wanted to argue and tell him he’d handled that hill just fine. To tell him I’d seen him laugh and felt something in me unclench like it had been waiting months for that exact sound.
I didn’t trust my voice not to crack open with too much.
So I nodded slowly instead, chewing the inside of my cheek.
“Okay,” I said finally. The word felt like walking barefoot over gravel. “So. We blame adrenaline. Snow. A temporary . . . brain malfunction.”
His mouth curved, just barely, like the phrase amused him in spite of everything. “Sure,” he said. “One-time post-sledding brain malfunction.”
“We’re adults,” I added, hearing the faint hysterical edge under my own voice and hating it. “We can be . . . roommates. Normal. Friends.”
Friends tasted complicated on my tongue. Too small for what my body wanted. Too big for what my fear would allow.
Wes’s throat bobbed. His gaze flicked to my mouth for a fraction of a second before he caught himself. “Yeah,” he said, voice low. “Friends.”
The word landed between us like a stone in fresh snow. Soft on the surface. Heavy underneath.
Silence stretched, thick and humming.
I needed to cut it before it swallowed me whole.
“New rule,” I said, dredging up a smile and pointing it at the counter like I was issuing a decree to the kitchen instead of the man who’d just kissed me senseless. “No making out in the snow.”
One corner of his mouth tugged higher. The House Rules list on the fridge flashed in my mind—his handwriting under mine. A weird, paper-thin truce.
“Probably for the best,” he said. “Snow’s cold as hell anyway.”
Heat flashed over my skin at the memory of his mouth. The way nothing about that kiss had felt cold.
“Total drawback,” I managed. “Very impractical.”
His eyes crinkled, the ghost of a real smile haunting the edges. For half a second, we were standing there in the hallway with a shared joke instead of a shared disaster, and it almost felt easy again.
Almost.
I took a step back, my heel brushing the first stair. “I’m gonna, um . . . change,” I said, gesturing vaguely upstairs. “Get warm.”
“Yeah,” he said, pushing off the doorframe. “I’ll make coffee.”
We moved at the same time and had to do that awkward little shuffle to get past each other in the narrow space. His shoulder brushed mine. The side of my hip clipped his thigh. The contact was quick and fully clothed and somehow still made my stomach swoop.
I didn’t look at him as I climbed, but I could feel his gaze on my back, hot and questioning and careful, like he was trying to memorize the distance we’d just agreed to put between us.
At the top of the stairs, I paused, fingers curving around the banister for a second longer than necessary.
My lips still felt swollen. My body still thrummed with the echo of his hands.
Friends, I reminded myself.
Right.
My heart rolled its eyes and continued doing cartwheels as I walked down the hall, careful like the floor might crack if I stepped wrong.
I shut my bedroom door with more force than necessary and pressed my back to it, like I needed the solid wood to keep me from sliding straight down to the floor.
The house was quiet again. No sleds. No shouting. No wild, reckless laughter ripped out of Wes Vaughn like the sun finally remembered how to rise. Just my heartbeat thudding in my ears and the echo of his mouth still humming under my skin.
I pushed off the door and crossed to the bed on autopilot, dropping face-first onto the covers.
The comforter smelled like laundry detergent and the faintest hint of hay from Elodie’s farm, familiar and safe in a way my body absolutely did not feel.
I flipped onto my back and stared up at the ceiling, trying very hard not to replay the last hour and failing almost immediately.
Snow spraying up around us. His laugh cracking open the cold. The weight of him beneath me, solid and unyielding. The way his hand had fisted in my coat and dragged me down without hesitation. The low, wrecked sound he’d made into my mouth like kissing me was both a relief and a problem.
Heat curled low in my belly. My thighs ached in a way that had very little to do with climbing the hill. I pressed the heels of my hands over my face and a soft, helpless noise escaped into my palms anyway.
“I told him it was a terrible idea while I was still tasting him,” I muttered, disgusted and a little impressed with myself.
Hayes’s face flickered in my mind—how he looked at Wes, the way he carried his guilt like it was welded to his bones.
The thought of being the reason something cracked there made my stomach flip.
I thought of Greg too—his quiet judgment, his colleagues’ mocking comments about my work, the way I’d ignored every red flag until they were the only color left.
One failed engagement under my belt and here I was, catching feelings for a man who was healing from the kind of trauma that rewrote a person.
Every time I tried to focus on the reasons this was a bad idea—Hayes, the accident, Wes’s recovery, the fact that I lived across the hall from him like some walking temptation—my brain cut back to the feeling of his tongue sliding against mine. His hand on my neck.
We’d made an agreement. We’d been very mature and rational in the mudroom. Adrenaline. One-off. Brain malfunction. Roommates. Friends.
I rolled onto my side, then onto my back again, the word friends rattling around in my chest like it had no idea where to land.
Friends, I told myself again.
Friends weren’t supposed to feel like that.