Chapter 29
Twenty-Nine
I wake up before she does.
First light is coming through the gap in the curtains. Piper is asleep on her stomach beside me, one arm under the pillow and one out. Her hair is a mess across her face. The sheet is pulled up to the small of her back.
I lie still for a moment and take a selfish second to drink her in.
Then I sit up. I move slowly, doing my best not to wake her. I’m not ready yet. Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, I sit there with my elbows on my knees and my hands pressed together.
Right.
She’s still asleep. Her breathing is even and slow, and her face is fully at rest.
I scrub a hand down my face before I head to the bathroom and close the door.
I stand in the shower for a long time, look at the tiles, and run the sequence of last night through my head, the way I do with things I need to understand. Structured, ordered, searching for the point of failure.
I kissed her.
I stopped.
She pulled me back.
Everything that followed was… I don’t have a structural term for it. I have other words, but I’m not using those right now. Those words come with weight I’m not ready to carry.
She’s ten days out of nearly getting married.
I said it, and she cut through it, and I let her. Some part of me was always going to let her, and that’s on me.
She’s just come out of a relationship that took pieces of her and has been rebuilding herself in a car, at county fairs, and in laundromats. She’s been doing it brilliantly, and she needed someone she could trust.
Fucking hell, Griffin.
When I turn the water off, I just stand in the steam.
I think about Noah. Noah, who trusted me enough to look after his sister. Who kept the phone call to three sentences because he trusted me. Who has never once, in all the years we’ve been friends, given me a reason not to deserve that trust.
When I come out of the bathroom, she’s sitting up against the headboard with the sheet tucked around her.
“Morning,” she says, her voice thick with sleep.
“Morning.” I find my phone on the nightstand. I check it. There’s nothing that needs checking, but I check it anyway.
“Sleep okay?” she asks.
“Fine.” I put the phone down, then pick it up again.
I can feel her watching me with the part of my brain that tracks her in a room. I’ve had that part of my brain for longer than I’m going to think about right now.
“Griffin?”
“I’m going to get breakfast,” I tell her. “There’s a diner across from the gas station. I’ll grab something.” I find my keys and wallet. Both are where I left them. Good. Things are where they’re supposed to be. “Coffee. Food. I’ll be—” I do a quick internal audit. “Twenty minutes.”
I don’t look at her. If I look at her, she’s sitting in my bed in a sheet, and I’ll have the same problem I had last night. But it’s the morning. The morning is when decisions get made with a clear head, and I need my head to be clear.
“Back soon.” I pick up my jacket and leave.
Shoving my hands in my pockets, I walk toward the diner and let the morning air do what it can. It isn’t much.
I shouldn’t have kissed her.
I should have maintained what I’d been maintaining for ten days. I was managing. It was working. Not comfortably but working.
Instead, I kissed her.
She kissed me back.
And I have no clue what the fuck to do now.