Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Savannah
The hotel we’re staying at in Chicago is a five-star, a rising glass-paned building that gleams in the fading city light. The team has a process for everything—deplaning, loading onto a bus that transports us from the tarmac into the city, checking everyone into the hotel.
“Got ours.” Brayden holds up two room keys, then ducks to kiss me on the cheek.
He did that on the plane, once, and on the bus ride from the plane to the hotel, twice.
That’s the point of this trip: faking it for his teammates.
Only nothing seems fake about the way he’s grinning at me, a smile he schools into a scowl as Asher walks past.
We take our luggage and ride the elevator to an upper floor reserved for the team. Players pile off, call to one another like they didn’t just get off the same bus that unloaded the same plane. We find our room, and I wait as Brayden scans his key to let us in.
Asher is doing the same at the room next door, a thing I won’t think about.
How we’ll only be a wall away from each other, like Brayden and I are at home.
I drag my suitcase into the room and listen so intently—if I can’t hear Asher, he probably can’t hear us—that I almost don’t notice our room’s bed situation.
Emphasis on bed.
“Did you—” I turn to Brayden. Was this whole thing—asking me to go on the trip, snuggling with me on the plane, kissing my cheek at seemingly random intervals—some kind of set up? But he’s eyeing the bed warily.
“I can ask them for a different room,” he says.
I shake my head. “The team’ll know something’s up.”
“I can sleep on the floor.”
“You cannot play a literal professional sport after sleeping on the floor.” I scan the room for another place to rest. There’s an armchair in the corner, one that looks entirely too stiff-backed to be comfortable. “I can sleep there.”
“Absolutely not. Lack of sleep is a migraine trigger.” Brayden says that, then turns a faint pink under his tan, as if he’s embarrassed to be caught caring about another person. “I mean, it is, right?”
Something right below my breastbone aches, dangerously close to my heart. That he researched migraine triggers; that he committed them to memory. For me. Because of me. Something that can’t be fake unlike…the rest of this. “Yes, lack of sleep can be a problem.”
“So we’ll share the bed. It’s king-sized. It’s not a big deal.” Though the slightly tense set of his shoulders says otherwise.
I glance at the clock. It’s evening, though we gained an hour because of the time difference. I thought I’d spend this trip counting the minutes until I was back in Atlanta. Now, I want as much time as possible before we get to bed—together. “You want to go out to dinner? Or just out-out?”
For a moment, Brayden’s forehead scrunches. He might tell me no. He’s been going on late-night runs, the location on his phone making circuits around the neighborhood but going no farther. When he says good night to me, the only smell on his breath is Gatorade. “I’d like that.”
And he says it quietly enough that I can just make out the sound of Asher in the next room, rattling around like a secret.