Chapter Eighteen – Abby
I can’t sleep. I don’t know if I can’t sleep because today was one hell of a day or if it’s due to the other thought I had that rocked my world. The soulmates thing. Never thought that would be something I’d think, but here I am.
Here I am.
I lay in bed for a good long while that night, tossing and turning. I even made some sleepy tea Ezra swears by, but it didn’t help. I’m exhausted after reliving my past, but at the same time, I’m wide awake and way too alert.
I bet Royal would welcome me into his bed, if I went to him. Ezra, on the other hand, might not. Hawthorne? I’m not sure whether he would or not.
These men. I might not have known them for long, but we aren’t strangers. It’s like I was subconsciously waiting to be found, and now that they found me, everything is clicking into place. I feel at home here, with them, even if I started out here as a captive of circumstance.
It’s crazy. Crazy but true. Ridiculous in every way, but still true.
I spend some time, as I lay there in bed, thinking about what Royal and Ezra told me.
They probably only shared their stories to get me to open up, but their plan worked.
Now I know the truth about all three of them, and they know the truth about me.
It brings us together in a way nothing else could.
How messed up is that? We are four peas in a fucked-up pod.
Now I get why my earlier suggestions of physical stress relief bothered Ezra so much. He probably closed himself off right when it happened, and the thing is, you can’t blame the guy.
I sigh to myself as I roll over yet again. It’s strange; I felt better before I crawled into this bed in the dark, but now that I’m alone with my thoughts, with nothing to stare at but the shadows, a heaviness has settled upon me, just as it always does.
Eventually I decide I might as well get up. Since I can’t sleep, I might as well do something. Maybe a late-night workout or I’ll camp out on the couch downstairs and marathon Soulmate Island. There’s an episode every day, and with everything that’s been going on, I am so far behind.
Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.
I roll out of bed and shuffle through the darkness, to the door.
I don’t turn on any lights as I head down the hall, but a light shining beneath Hawthorne’s office door stops me.
Hmm. Maybe I should poke my head in there and tell him he can take the bed for the night since I can’t sleep.
One of us might as well make use of it, right?
After gently knocking on said door, I poke my head in the room. I’m seconds from offering him the bed that is technically his when I find him hunched over his desk, asleep.
Jeez. That really doesn’t look comfortable.
I step inside the room, slowly making my way toward his desk, not once taking my eyes off him. I stop when I stand before his desk.
Hawthorne is sleeping on his arms, his glasses resting a few inches away.
His laptop sits beneath his arms, his makeshift pillow, apparently.
His back rises and falls with steady, even breaths.
One look at him, and he appears as if he’s used to doing this, like this is how he always sleeps.
The only light in the room is a lamp in the far corner, its bulbs much dimmer than the ceiling light.
“Hawthorne,” I say his name, but he doesn’t stir. I try his name again, but still, he doesn’t move a muscle. He is out.
My gaze moves to his glasses, and since I’m curious, I pick them up and try them on. Instantly, my head pounds and my vision blurs. Shit. His vision really is terrible, isn’t it?
I close my eyes as I turn away from his desk and try to shake that feeling away. When I open my eyes again, it’s not so bad, but I can tell the muscles in my eyes have to work hard to focus through the frames of the glasses.
Is that a thing? Do eyeballs have muscles? Huh, the weird things you wonder about in the middle of the night.
I move over to his bookshelf near the floor lamp and study the spines. I run my hands through my hair, messing it up a bit. Wonder if I look like a sexy librarian or something. That’s a thing, isn’t it?
I pick up a book about psychology and open it to a page in the middle. There’s a whole lot of words on said page, a lot of mumbo-jumbo, and I quickly close the book, not wanting to strain my brain too much trying to read it. This sexy librarian doesn’t read her books.
But I must close the book louder than I intend to, because seconds after I do, I hear Hawthorne’s groggy voice say, “Abby? What are you doing here? Where… where are my glasses?” After I return the book to its shelf, I turn and find him feeling around his desk for the glasses that are currently residing on my nose.
“I thought you wouldn’t mind if I borrowed them for a little bit,” I say with a shrug, and then I realize he might not be able to see that shrug. Oh, well.
He rubs his eyes and then stands, moving around his desk—and knocking his foot into its one leg in the process. After stifling a grunt from the sudden impact, he moves closer to me and says, “May I have them back?”
“Why? It isn’t like you were doing any work, anyway. I think they make me look like a sexy librarian.” I fluff up my hair and give him a pose: puckered lips with my thumb and pointer finger touching the side of the glasses. “Don’t you think so?”
Hawthorne stands two feet away from me, his gaze squinted as he tries to study me without his glasses. He probably doesn’t see much of anything, and his next words back up that assumption: “You’re mostly a blur. May I please have them?”
“Sure,” I say, although I am sluggish in slipping them off my face. I think about offering them to him, but instead of doing that, I decide to stand on my tiptoes and place the glasses on his face, something he clearly doesn’t expect, given how rod-straight his posture becomes the moment I do it.
When his gaze focuses on me through the lens of the glasses, I can’t help but say, “Why don’t you get contacts? Your eyes are really bad.”
He doesn’t answer the question. Instead he remarks on the fact I’m here, in his office, in the middle of the night. “What exactly are you doing here? Surely you didn’t come to make fun of my terrible vision.”
I shrug, and this shrug I know he can see.
Stepping around him, my feet draw me towards his desk, and I run my fingers along the edge of his desk as I walk around it.
I plop myself into his leather chair and lean back.
“I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d come offer you the bed.
Your spine’s gonna have a permanent hunch with how you sleep at your desk all the time. ”
His chair is actually pretty comfy. It’s warm from where he was sitting in it before.
Honestly, if he sleeps in here, I don’t know why he hunches forward over his desk instead of kicking his feet up and leaning back in this high-backed leather chair.
I don’t know about sleeping, but I could take a nap in this thing, no problem.
Hawthorne follows me, though he stops when he stands on the side of the desk.
For someone who was fast asleep moments ago, the man is wide awake now.
“To be fair, I slept more often than not in here long before you came along,” he remarks.
“Why can’t you sleep? Is it because of…” He coughs and averts his gaze, not saying it.
He doesn’t need to. The way he’s acting tells me enough. Royal and Ezra must’ve told him my story, and he thinks that’s why I can’t sleep.
I mean, it could be true. Maybe sharing that, reliving it, was enough to mess me up a little. After all this time, you’d think I’d be past it, but apparently if you thought that, you’d be wrong.
Quietly, Hawthorne says, “They shouldn’t have jumped you like that.”
I run my hands along his laptop. The metal top is warm from him, you know, being passed out on it moments ago. “It’s okay. It is. I wouldn’t have shared if I really didn’t want to.” Leaning my head back on his chair, I look up at him and study the way he stands.
He’s close, but not too close. He’s trying to show interest, but at the same time, trying to act nonchalant and cool about it, like he doesn’t care too much either way.
But he does care. I can see it in his eyes, their intensity, how solid that eye contact is.
He cares and he doesn’t want it to be obvious.
I scoot the chair back and lift up my feet, placing them on the corner of his desk, near where he stands. “So, what do you do in here all night, every night? You can’t really be working the entire time. You have to have some games installed on your computer or something, right?”
The corner of his mouth quirks upward. He doesn’t answer my question though; he only gestures for me to get up. “Come on, go back to bed. Try to get some sleep, Abby. Things will feel better in the morning.”
“I told you, I can’t sleep. I’m awake. I’ve been trying to sleep for hours. I just thought I’d stop by and offer you the bed so someone can use it tonight. Tell you what, you go take the bed, and I can be you for the night. I’ll pretend to work—”
He acts offended. “I don’t pretend to work. Believe it or not, I do actually get more work done when I don’t hear you three stomping around the house like elephants.”
Lifting my eyebrows, I say, “If they really stomped around like elephants, I don’t think they’d be good at what they do. And if I stomped around like an elephant, I wouldn’t be here, either. So try again.”
He sighs. “Please, just go to bed.”
My mischievous side peeks through, and I move my feet off his desk and stand, and in the process, I probably stand a little too close to him. To my surprise, though, he doesn’t immediately take a step back, nor does he immediately look away when I meet his gaze.
“You know, I can think of a few things we could do that would tire us both out and make use of the bed.” I smirk. I can’t help it.
To my surprise, all Hawthorne does is sigh again, and he sets his fingers on the corner of his desk, tapping them there with no rhythm whatsoever. “Abby,” he speaks my name softly, with a gentle shake of his head. “What am I going to do with you?”
“I can think of a few things.”
That gets him to blush and look away, finally. There’s the Hawthorne I know. And yet… yet he’s not moving away. Weird.
“You should really go,” he whispers, visibly trying to act calm and collected as he turns his head back to me.
Less than a foot, less than twelve whole inches between us; we might’ve been close before, but for some reason, right then and there it feels different.
The air is thicker. His expression is more intense.
Almost like his willpower is breaking, finally giving way.
I take a teeny step toward him. Now just six inches. “Yeah,” I whisper back. “I probably should. You are a rule follower, after all. You’d never break the rules.” I might sound teasing, tempting—and that’s because I mean to be.
How far can I push him until he breaks? And when he breaks… what’ll it be like? Will he be just as awkward, full of blushing, while getting down and nasty, or will he be like a whole different person once his clothes are off? Honestly, I have no idea, but I’m dying to find out.
And, more than that, it’d be nice to be close to him. Even if it’s just temporarily, it’d be good to forget the reason why I can’t sleep tonight.
After waiting a moment, I add, “Would you?”
Would he break the rules? He was so unhappy when Ezra tattled on me and Royal and what we did at the last kill, and yet it suddenly doesn’t feel so far-fetched to think he might forget those rules and want a taste of little old me.
His gaze falls to the corner of the desk, where his fingers are. He stopped tapping them on the wooden surface, but they remain rooted on the wood, like they’ve become a permanent fixture there. Still, I swear he leans a bit closer to me, even though he doesn’t say a word right away.
Seconds pass, but it feels like minutes. I can’t take the heavy silence or the pensive expression on his face, so I ask, “What’s on your mind? Cat got your tongue or something?” He doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’s ever speechless.
I’m dying to hear his thoughts. I wish I could peel open his skull and hear them firsthand, because I know I might not be able to trust whatever he tells me. So far, he definitely seems like the kind of man who keeps things close to his chest.
The tension in the room is so thick it’s almost hard to breathe.
Or maybe that’s due to how close we stand to each other.
With the way he’s angled toward me, the fingers on his left hand still leaning on the corner of his desk, he could easily grab me with his right hand and pull me in, pin me against that same desk and… well, you know.
But would he do something like that? I don’t know. I have my doubts. He is a man of mystery. Less mysterious now that I know what fuels him to this bloody cause, but still mysterious.
Does he want me like I want him? Only one way to find out.