Chapter 28
Twenty-Eight
It became clear to Eva that sleep was off the menu somewhere around two in the morning.
Hannah was snoring like a beast nearby. Someone should have told her by now that it might be time to investigate whether she needed a CPAP machine, but that was the responsibility of her husband.
Not some random wedding planner who’d been stuffed into a hotel room with her for a hen weekend.
If she suddenly stopped, Eva would check her breathing, but that was all she owed Hannah. Aside from possibly a slap.
This is your fault, you bloody control freak.
Only Eva was a control freak, too. And she’d lost control tonight.
She turned onto her side, closed her eyes, and opened them again almost immediately. It was ridiculous. She had slept through worse. Longer days, more stressful ones, entire weddings held together with practically nothing but her will. She was good at shutting things off when she needed to.
But her brain refused to cooperate. It kept circling back to that moment.
The way Maddy had looked at her under the table. The touch of her hand on Eva’s wrist.
And then the kiss.
Eva exhaled slowly and pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, as though she could physically stop the memory from replaying. It hadn’t even been much. Barely anything, objectively speaking.
But Eva’s body had not registered it as barely anything. Her lips still felt it, like a lingering imprint that refused to fade.
Her brain, on the other hand, was trying very hard to categorise it neatly: a lapse in judgement in a highly charged situation.
Maddy had felt the same. I’m getting married. To a man. I’m losing it.
Eva had agreed. There hadn’t been any other reasonable response. So that was that. End of story.
Except it didn’t feel like the end of anything.
Eva shifted under the covers, restless. If it had been just an attraction, it would have been easier to dismiss.
Eva could have dealt with it. Controlled herself.
But it was the way Maddy, who had great difficulty deciding anything, came for her so determinedly, for what she seemed to want so much in that moment.
And Eva—who prided herself on control, on boundaries—hadn’t stopped it.
It was like she didn’t know how to. Like her body only knew how to do what it wanted and nothing else.
And that wasn’t true. That had never been true.
She wasn’t like her parents, who never met a narcotic they could turn away from.
Not even at the cost of losing their only child.
Eva had a hold of herself. She’d always had a hold of herself. And lust was just another drug. Sex was a drug. Love was a drug.
She turned onto her other side, as if a change of position might help. It didn’t. Hannah kept snoring cacophonously, rolled slightly, and continued snoring without interruption.
Eva stared into the dim room and told herself, very firmly, that this was exactly why she didn’t blur lines. One moment of letting something slip, and suddenly her entire body was behaving chaotically.
But, for fuck’s sake, it had only been a brief touch of lips. That was all. So why did it feel like something had broken?
Eva’s gaze drifted to the door. The handle was just visible in the low light, and the thought came quietly. It would be very easy to get up, open it without a sound, and step out into the corridor.
It would be even easier to walk down the hall and stop outside Maddy’s room. To tap lightly. Just enough that Maddy would know it was her.
Eva closed her eyes, cutting the thought off. No. That was not happening. For several very good reasons.
First: Maddy was sharing a room with her mother, and if she turned out to be a light sleeper, Eva had no desire to explain her presence outside that door. Second—and more importantly—Maddy had made her position clear. The kiss had been a mistake for her.
Eva was not about to ignore that. She wasn’t going to be the person who complicated someone else’s life for the sake of this crazy pull. Even if Eva’s body was still electrified from contact, all these hours later. Even if she wanted…
She shifted again, muttering under her breath, ‘For god’s sake,’ before she realised she’d spoken aloud. But Hannah’s snoring continued, unbothered and unwavering.
The night stretched on. Eva checked the time more than once—3:17, then 4:02, then 5:11—each time hoping that exhaustion would finally win out. It didn’t. Sleep stayed out of reach, the bitch.
By the time the first light of morning crept around the curtains, Eva had given up.
She moved carefully, slipping out of bed without disturbing Hannah, who snored on. Eva dressed quickly and quietly, gathering her things carefully.
At the door, the thought returned. She could still knock. She could still choose to make this into something else, something harder to walk away from.
But she didn’t.
Maddy had a life already in motion. And Eva was an adult with a job and the ability to control her impulses.
She opened the door, stepped into the empty corridor, and closed it gently behind her.