10. True
Well, at least he’d worn a shirt every day since that first time. If I had to torture myself by being in Greyson Wolfe’s presence every night, at least he was playing nice. Kinda. There was nothing nice about the way this man took up space. He was all consuming and infuriating. And so. Damn. Fine.
Did I feel like he was silently judging me every time we were in the same room? Yes. Was it enough for me to stop entering the damn rooms? No.
Something in me got high off the fact that he seemed just as flustered by my presence. And even though neither of us ever spoke on it, the knowledge of it sat in the corner of every space we occupied, looming and real.
And whether he knew it or not, Noah was the perfect buffer. He was so easy to read. So kind. And also, so. Damn. Fine.
Why had the universe cursed me with neighbors who looked as alike as night and day but elicited the same response from me?
It’d only been two weeks and the only productive thing I’d done was revise my book’s outline a dozen times.
No writing had been accomplished because I filled my free time with daydreams that could never be a reality. My laptop fell asleep no less than twenty times a day while my fingers hovered over the keyboard and my mind hovered over fantasies I’d never dare to put on paper.
Meanwhile, the words I needed to put on paper to meet my self-imposed deadline were coming to me as easy as squeezing blood from a turnip.
Maybe I should just go back to King’s Town. At least I had a desk there. My neck was killing me from being hunched over my lap all day while I sat on my sagging couch.
Every day it became clearer that I hadn’t planned this right. Nothing was going right and I?—
“You work on your book today?” Noah’s voice reached my ears, pulling me out of my jumbled thoughts. I heard his voice, but his question was a mystery.
“Sorry, what?” I picked up my glass of water and sipped, my eyes trained on him and not the man I could feel staring a hole in the side of my face.
Noah’s lips quirked. “You zone out a lot. Must be a writer thing. Because you’ll be looking right at me and not hear a word I said.”
He laughed softly and the sound made my stomach flutter. How did I tell him it had zero to do with me being a writer and everything to do with the lust burning my blood at this point?
On my other side, I heard Greyson clear his throat. And maybe I was overreacting, but I swear there was a smugness to the way he did it.
“I was asking if you worked on your book today?”
“A little,” I replied. Rearranging the bullet points on my outline definitely counted as working on my book. To be honest, any day I had to cross off my writing calendar with zero words written was a day I didn’t want to talk about.
“I looked up your stuff. I’m gonna listen to the two you have in audio while I work,” Noah said, cutting another piece of his salmon.
“W-what? You like romance books?”
He smirked. “I don’t read a lot but I told you rom-coms were my favorite movies. I figured contemporary romance gotta be close to that.”
He had told me that, and we’d watched Miss Congeniality, The Wedding Planner and Two Weeks Notice together so far. But I didn’t think it would make him look up my pen name and actually read my work.
All my indecent thoughts were replaced with a rush of tenderness for the man beside me.
He was too damn nice.
Every time I walked in the door, he had a bottle of the same wine I’d tried my first night here with him. The first time he poured me a glass, he told me he didn’t really drink but his sister had gifted him with the bottle.
I drank more than half the bottle that night, telling him how much I liked his sister’s taste in wine.
The next night, I walked in through the living room behind Greyson and saw a case of it against the wall.
When I looked to Noah for answers, he inclined his head toward his best friend.
Greyson had only glanced at me with the faintest beginnings of a smile.
“Just wanted you to have something you liked here.”
It was stuff like that that made it impossible for me to kick both of them out of my wildest daydreams.
Noah with his attentiveness and need for quality time. And Greyson with his broodiness and silent acts of service.
They were both a problem and I didn’t know what the next few months had in store for me if they’d wreaked this much havoc on my nervous system in two weeks.
As if on cue, Greyson quietly filled the empty wine glass beside my half-empty glass of water.
Needing to focus on something other than the warm feelings bum rushing me, I tried to change the subject. “I think I’m gonna go to the library or something tomorrow. I don’t have a desk and it’s starting to catch up with me.”
I rubbed my hand over one of the knots in my neck and picked up the wine with the other.
Noah hummed lowly, “The library is cool but there’s a new bookstore on Main Street. There’s a loft area above the store with couches and tables set up. You could write there. It’s down the street from my sister’s job.”
He talked about his sister a lot and part of me loved it while another part felt physical pain every time he mentioned her. It wasn’t his fault I would have to spend the rest of my life grieving my sibling. I was just happy he seemed to love her as deep as I loved mine.
I guess I could break my promise to Camryn in the name of productivity . “I remember my grandma mentioning it. What’s the name again?”
“Read the Room,” Greyson volunteered on my right.
Noah added more potatoes to my plate and offered, “I can drop you off before I go to work. Or if you sleep late, I can pick you up around lunch time and come get you when I leave the resort tomorrow.”
“That sounds like a lot of back and forth, you don’t have to do that.”
“I want to.” He shrugged. “Just send me a message in the group chat when you wake up.”
After dinner, I walked around their large living room after getting kicked out of the kitchen for trying to help with the dishes.
Noah had gently shoved me out of the space. “ Whether you eat with us or not, we still gotta do them. Go pick a movie for us to watch when we finish.”
I hadn’t picked a movie, but I had obsessed over the fact that Greyson had changed into a pair of grey sweats and a black T-shirt that outlined too much of his broad chest and exposed too much of his thick biceps. He’d walked out of his side of the house, cleaning his glasses on the hem of his shirt so the peek of his hard abs was branded in my mind.
I think I did a good job of distracting myself by taking inventory of everything around their living room. The couch that looked more like a cloud and felt like a hug when I sat down. The basket of blankets by the end table. The unopened puzzle box under the coffee table. The framed shots of Bliss Peak on their gallery wall adjacent to the mounted TV.
Now I was staring at pictures on their mantle when my attention snagged on a face that looked a lot like Greyson’s, minus the glasses.
The black and white picture was of a man smiling with a surfboard tucked under his arm.
“His name is Ocean,” a voice said beside me.
I coached myself not to jump at his sudden presence and turned to find Greyson standing there, looking at the photo.
“Who is he to you?”
“My younger brother.”
“Oh…” I didn’t know much about Greyson aside from the fact that he was fucking rich. He owned a resort even though we were the same age and I knew for a fact it wasn’t new money funding it.
“He runs Ocean Pointe on Emerald Isle. Well, he’s supposed to. He does more surfing than anything else.”
There was a fondness in his voice that made me smile.
“A beach resort? How did you get stuck in the cold mountains?”
“I wouldn’t call it stuck. I like the mountains and it was easier to move here from Charlotte than the other side of the state. But this is what my family does. If the first five years at Wolfe Summit go as planned, I’ll move on and leave it to the staff to run while I start another one from the ground up.”
I turned so my body was fully facing him instead of the mantle. “So you’re only here for three more years?”
Greyson raised a brow and licked his lips. “Don’t sound so devastated. Three years is a long time, Red. Besides I’m sure you’ll be gone long before then.”
Right .
That was the plan.
Bliss Peak wasn’t my forever home and I didn’t care if Greyson came or went.
Right?
The sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach said otherwise.
If I’d learned nothing else in the past year it was that there was no such thing as permanence. So this hypothetical future without either one of us in Bliss Peak shouldn’t be throwing me for a loop.
Where would Noah be in three years? Would all three of us be living completely different lives in that time?
My mouth ran dry and I tried to understand my reaction instead of pushing it aside.
But that got interrupted when Noah’s voice cut into the silence lapsing between us.
“What movie are we watching?”