CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It’s a little before six when the room around me drifts back into focus.
Rain has painted the window into a gray-blue watercolor landscape, and I watch it in a fuzzy half consciousness while nestled into the most heavenly tuft of bedding ever invented.
My body knows only softness and the warm, solid weight at my back.
I turn over, my limbs and eyelids heavy, then go very still as I take in my surroundings.
Any semblance of the Great Wall of Pillows has been forgotten—redistributed as Drunk Pillow Fight ammunition last night, as I (barely) recall.
And if this bed were still split into halves, Grant is decidedly on mine.
He’s still asleep, his breath deep and quiet, his arm curled over my midsection.
I’m vaguely aware that I shouldn’t allow this, but I’m too groggy and comfortable to move away.
I let myself smile in the privacy of the moment.
This is by far the smoothest I have ever seen his face.
Only the faint hint of a line between his eyebrows stands as proof that scrunched is his facial default.
I reach up to trace it lightly with my finger.
I like his face, I think somewhere in my unguarded mind. I like it so much.
My fingertip makes contact with his skin and he stirs, his hand briefly tightening against my back by reflex.
I yank my hand away as if it’s been shocked, alertness surging in on far too much of a delay.
He blinks the sleep from his eyes until his gaze falls like a warm blanket on me. I can’t move or breathe.
“Hey.” His voice is hoarse in that barely awake way.
“Hi.”
That little groove folds back into a proper furrow as he looks at me.
“Were you touching my face?”
“No,” I lie abruptly. Something like panic is building in me, recharging all the alarm centers in my brain. His arm is still draped over me. His body heat is warming me all over. And his face, once again, is too close to mine.
Memories of last night are flooding in now—dancing around the room together, collapsing on the floor, our knees touching as we sat side by side. Me. I’d go out with you.
Oh, God. It’s like I’ve been plunged into a dunk tank of regret. I scramble away from him, disentangling myself from the duvet not a moment too soon, and spring from the bed.
Springing, it turns out, is a great way to get bitch-slapped by every hangover symptom at once. My head is both swirling and pounding. Nausea is setting in. My legs are cold. Is that a hangover thing?
Somewhere from the confusion soup of my brain comes another flash from last night, set to the distant, haunting strains of “Love Is a Battlefield”—dancing on the bed, a scarf tossed around my neck.
I didn’t bring a scarf.
I look down as the horror dawns. Just a T-shirt and underwear.
I whirl back in time to see Grant confusedly pulling my flannel pajama bottoms out from under him, then looking far too amused as he glances up at me.
I can’t believe this. I fought the one-bed trope, and the one-bed trope won. And it happened pantslessly.
“Don’t look at me!” I snap, tugging my shirt down to cover my ass as I power walk toward the bathroom, where I intend to live for the rest of my life.
But as I lock myself in to curse every choice I’ve ever made, it’s not the pantsless dancing that burns me up with shame but the memory of what came after. Confessing my stupid wish. Lamenting my love life. I’m a coward.
Whoever invents an ibuprofen that can treat vulnerability hangovers in addition to the regular kind will make a fortune off me.
· · ·
I AM A WOMAN on a mission when we return to London, and that mission is to rip Lissa’s head off.
I storm through the house with my sunglasses on, still gripping the bottle of Gatorade—or its weird British cousin—that I grudgingly let Grant buy me at a gas station. (He seemed to think it would make me stop groaning I’M NEVER DRINKING AGAIN. He was wrong.)
I barge into the kitchen to find Lissa perched at the island with a plate of cookies, flipping through a magazine like the picture of innocence.
“You,” I snarl at her.
“Roxie!” she chirps. “Pleasant weekend?”
“Pleasant weekend?” I mimic in a voice that any second grader would call immature. “Don’t you dare. I’m onto you, Lissa. You can drop the doe-eyed act.”
She smiles, but her face pales a little. “No idea what you’re on about,” she says.
“There is no Sweetheart Slayer. There never was. All of it—Lovers’ Weekend, the one bed, the stupid dreamy starlit countryside—you’re still just trying to play matchmaker!”
Her cherubic smile melts into a decidedly more impish grin and she defensively raises her hands.
“Believe it or not, babes, the cosmos are not my jurisdiction. If the stars made you go all swoony, well, that’s on your own conscience.
” Sparking with scandalized delight, she leans in like we’re two gossiping gal pals. “Why, did something happen?”
“Stop it. Stop it.” I can feel my cheeks heating. “No, nothing happened. Because there is nothing to happen. We’re here to take down serial killers, not cater to your will they, won’t they fantasies. I am not your fucking puppet! I’m a real person!”
I realize I’m yelling at the ceiling and redirect my glare to Lissa, who deflates instantly.
“Whyyyyy?” she whines. “Look, I’m sorry I tricked you, but I’m only nudging the inevitable, aren’t I? You can’t tell me you don’t feel something for each other!”
“That doesn’t matter,” I say, immediately wishing I’d denied it instead.
“Yes it does,” she says, slamming her hands on the countertop.
I’m taken aback to realize she’s welling up.
“Don’t you understand how rare it is to feel the same way about each other?
To have the stars align that way? For Christ’s sake, Roxie.
The last man I loved took me to a party, forgot he’d driven me there, and left with someone else.
That’s how invisible I was to him.” She dashes the back of her hand over her eyes, hurt etched plainly in her face.
“I’d kill to have someone care for me the way Grant cares about you. ”
“Well, I’m not you,” I snap, determined not to feel sorry for her. “And there are no stars aligning here. We’re perfect strangers who just got thrown together under insane circumstances. That’s it. So stop meddling.”
With the sound of Grant’s footsteps down the hall, we go conspicuously silent, still glaring at each other.
He walks in and halts en route to the refrigerator with the signature awkwardness of someone realizing they’re interrupting.
He detours to the cooling rack by the oven instead, grabs a cookie, and hurries for the door.
I see the moment he realizes his mistake, but then he freezes mid-chew, staring at the half cookie in his hand.
“These are … actually good, Lissa.”
She looks genuinely startled by the compliment, and as her gaze flies to him, her eyes fill up again. She jumps to her feet and throws her arms around him.
“Thank you,” she says, muffled against his shirt. He darts a puzzled look at me with half a cookie still in his mouth, then pats her stiffly on the back. She glares at me as she pulls away. “See, Roxie? He’s a good man.”
With an uncomfortable smile, Grant grabs another cookie and books it out of the room.
Lissa shakes her head as she returns to her magazine. “Perfect strangers thrown together in insane circumstances,” she muses, then shoots me a wry look. “As if that’s not the exact recipe for every great love story ever.”
I don’t have time to rebut before the front door bangs open. Lesley races in in an uncharacteristic frenzy, propping himself up with one hand on the counter as he tries to catch his breath.
“New … Money … Mangler,” he wheezes. “This is not a drill.”