Chapter 11
ELEVEN
PHOENIX
The phone’s ringtone shatters through my skull like an ice pick.
I jerk awake, disoriented, mouth tasting like something crawled in and died. My arm flails toward the nightstand, knocking over what sounds like a water glass before my fingers finally close around the vibrating rectangle of doom.
The screen’s brightness is pure assault. I squint against it, trying to make out the caller ID through sleep-crusted eyes.
Victoria Riviera.
Of course. Of fucking course.
My thumb hovers over the decline button. It’s—I check the time—6:47 a.m. In a time zone I didn’t ask to be in. After a day that included a near-death experience and the world’s most awkward bathroom encounter. My mother can wait.
I silence the call and let the phone drop onto the mattress beside me.
The room is still dark, heavy curtains blocking out whatever gray Maine morning lurks outside.
Somewhere to my left, Atticus is breathing with the slow, even rhythm of the deeply unconscious.
The bed is warm, and my body feels like it’s filled with sand, and if I just close my eyes for five more minutes…
The phone buzzes again.
I don’t even look at it this time. Just reach over and reject the call with my eyes still closed.
Go away, Victoria. Some of us almost died yesterday.
Atticus makes a sound—something between a groan and a mumble that might be words in some language I don’t speak. The mattress shifts as he rolls over.
“Tell whoever that is to fuck off,” he mutters into his pillow.
“Working on it.”
Silence descends again. Blessed, beautiful silence.
Then the distinct ping of Find My iPhone echoes through the room.
My eyes snap open.
She wouldn’t.
Another ping. Then another. The sound that means someone is actively tracking your location, watching the little dot that represents your phone move across their screen in real time.
Victoria absolutely would. Victoria has done this before, when I was nineteen and tried to take a weekend in Vegas without telling her, when I was twenty-two and she thought I was at a yoga retreat but I was actually at an Airbnb with a beta model I’d met at a party.
Victoria treats my location data like her personal reality show.
I grab the phone and answer her video call before she can ping me again.
“What.”
“Phoenix Renata Riviera.” My mother’s voice could cut diamonds. “Do you want to explain to me how my daughter could almost die in a plane crash and I don’t even receive a phone call?”
Sleep evaporates from my brain like morning dew. “Mom—”
“I had to find out from Twitter. Twitter, Phoenix! Some teenager in Portland posted about emergency vehicles at a private airfield, and by the time I connected the dots, you were already checked into some—” her voice drips with disdain “—bed and breakfast in a town I’ve never heard of.”
“It wasn’t a crash—“
“The engine failed. At thirty thousand feet. Over the ocean.” Her voice climbs with each word. “Do you have any idea what could have happened? Do you have any concept of—”
“Mom, I’m fine—“
“You’re fine? You’re fine?” A sound that might be a laugh or might be a sob. “I’ve been calling for hours. Hours, Phoenix. Your phone was off. I thought—I didn’t know what to think—“
The genuine fear in her voice catches me off guard. Victoria Riviera is many things—manipulative, calculating, relentlessly focused on her own agenda—but right now she sounds like an actual mother who thought she might have lost her child.
It doesn’t last.
“And then I couldn’t reach Stephanie either, and I had to call the airline directly, and now I find out she’s in the hospital!”
“She just has a concussion—”
“Just a concussion. My God, Phoenix. What if that had been you? What if something had happened to your face?”
And there it is. The real fear. Not that her daughter might have died, but that her daughter’s moneymaking face might have been damaged.
“My face is fine, Mom.”
“You should have called me the second you landed. The second, Phoenix. Instead I’m up all night, sick with worry, imagining the worst—“
Except now, I’m thinking about that flight and the moment the pilot commanded us to put on the oxygen masks. The moment in which I became fully convinced I was about to die.
The air in the room thins. Victoria’s voice keeps climbing, each word stacking on the last like bricks on my chest, and suddenly I’m not in a bed-and-breakfast in Maine anymore.
I’m six years old, buckled into a middle seat, my mother’s nails cutting half-moons into my forearm while she lists every way a plane can fall out of the sky.
Engine failure. Pilot error. Birds in the engines.
My lungs seize.
The breath I try to take catches somewhere between my throat and my chest and just stops, like someone reached inside me and pinched the airway shut. I suck in again—nothing. My vision blurs at the edges, dark spots blooming like ink dropped in water.
“—and do you have any idea what this looks like for the press tour? Montreal was supposed to be—”
I can’t hear her anymore. All I hear is the high whine of a failing engine, the screech of metal, the captain’s voice saying oxygen masks in that too-calm tone that meant everything was very much not okay. My hands shake so violently the phone nearly slips from my grip.
Breathe. Just breathe.
I can’t. I can’t breathe. The room is too small, the walls pressing inward, and my heartbeat pounds in my ears like a drum being beaten underwater—
The mattress dips. Warmth at my side, solid and immediate. A hand—large, steady—settles between my shoulder blades.
“Hey.” Atticus’s voice, rough with sleep but anchored in a way that cuts through the static in my head. “Easy. You’re on the ground.”
His palm presses flat against my spine, the pressure firm enough to feel real. I focus on that point of contact, the heat of his skin bleeding through the thin cotton of my shirt.
Victoria’s voice comes sharp. “Is that—Atticus? Is he in bed with you?”
Her entire demeanor transforms. The frantic mother act evaporates, replaced by something slick and calculating, like watching a snake shed its skin in real time.
“Well, well. Have you two been in bed together all night?”
The question drips with implication. Not accusation—opportunity. I can practically see the gears turning behind her eyes, the mental calculations of exactly how much tabloid currency this is worth.
I jerk sideways, putting distance between myself and Atticus so fast the phone tilts wildly, giving Victoria a dizzying view of the ceiling.
“It’s not like that.” My voice comes out wrecked, still breathless from the almost-panic-attack. “There was only one room, Mom. One room in the entire inn. We didn’t—nothing happened.”
“Darling, it doesn’t matter what it is.” Victoria’s smile is a knife wrapped in silk. “It matters what people think it is. Hold still, both of you. I want to get a screenshot.”
Her finger moves toward her screen.
Atticus plucks the phone from my hand in one fluid motion.
“Victoria! So lovely to catch up.” He angles the screen toward his own face, all bleary charm and bedhead. “Unfortunately we seem to be losing you—must be the rural cell coverage out here—”
“The picture is perfectly clear, Atticus—”
“What’s that? You’re breaking up.” He taps the screen with his thumb. “Can’t hear a thing. Terrible connection. Real shame.”
“Don’t you dare hang up on—“
The screen goes black. Atticus holds the power button until the phone dies completely, then drops it onto the nightstand with a soft click.
“I can’t believe you just did that,” I say incredulously. The idea of just hanging up on my mother has always been there, obviously, it’s just not something I would ever consider actually doing. “She is going to be so pissed.”
“Good thing she isn’t here,” he says, already flopping back on the bed and covering his eyes with his forearm. “If you actually do want a photo for your feed, ask me when it’s an appropriate time to be awake. Preferably in about four hours.”
He pulls the sheet up until it gathers around his waist. Within thirty seconds, his breathing evens out again, slow and deep and utterly unbothered.
I sit there in the dark, heart still hammering, staring at the dead phone on the nightstand.
From the loveseat, I hear Mason shift. A quiet rustle of fabric that tells me he’s awake, that he heard everything.
Neither of us speaks.
The silence stretches between us like a wire pulled taut.
“I don’t think I’ll be going back to sleep after that.” Mason’s voice is quiet, measured. The loveseat creaks as he sits up. “Breakfast is served until nine so I’m going to head down.”
Food sounds about as appealing as another phone call from Victoria and I’m dying for a few more hours of sleep.
I roll onto my side, intending to swing my legs off the bed, and my gaze catches on Atticus.
He’s on his back, one arm flung above his head, sheet pooled low across his hips. The early gray light seeping through the curtain gap traces the planes of his chest, the slow rise and fall of his breathing. And below the bunched fabric of the sheet, there is a very obvious, very prominent—
Oh.
My brain stalls. Just completely locks up, like a computer screen frozen on a loading wheel. I should look away. I know I should look away. Any decent, self-respecting person would look away.
I don’t look away.
The sheet does nothing to disguise the shape.
It’s just there, tenting the cotton in a way that leaves absolutely zero room for interpretation.
My mouth goes dry. A flush creeps up my neck, spreading across my collarbones, my cheeks, the tips of my ears.
Still I don’t move. Don’t blink. Just stare at it like I’ve never encountered the concept of male anatomy before, which—given last night’s bathroom incident with Mason—is demonstrably untrue.
How long do I sit there? Five seconds? Ten? Long enough that the rational part of my brain starts screaming at the rest of me to stop gawking at the man’s erection while he sleeps, you absolute gremlin.
“I’m happy to pull the sheet down,” Atticus mumbles, voice thick with sleep, arm still draped across his eyes, “if you see something you like and want a better look.”
Ice floods my veins.
I’m off the bed so fast my feet tangle in the quilt and I nearly faceplant onto the carpet. My hip clips the nightstand. The dead phone skitters across the wood. I don’t care. Distance. I need distance between me and that bed and whatever the hell just happened to my brain.
“I’m going to breakfast!” The words come out at a pitch only dogs should hear. “Mason, breakfast. Now. Let’s go. Immediately.”
Mason is already on his feet, shoes in hand, expression carefully blank in a way that tells me he saw exactly how long I was staring.
“After you,” he says, holding the door open.
I don’t look back at the bed. I refuse to look back at the bed.
Behind me, Atticus’s low chuckle follows us into the hallway like smoke.