Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Nevan
Lemonade.
The soft sweetness that lingers in the air after she’s been in a room for a while.
I breathe in without thinking, as if my body already knows what it’s looking for. My arm tightens automatically around the warmth pressed against me, and I shift my face down into it. My brain supplies the rest of the picture from last night before my eyes even open.
Like it’s been replaying it on a loop without me.
Lennon curled against me, hair falling over my arm, that little sleepy noise she made when she fell asleep almost on top of me.
Something flutters low in my stomach. I press closer without really thinking about it, and my hips roll forward on pure instinct, pressing the ache between my legs right up against the warm curve I know is hers.
“Lemon.” I grind again, my cock is hard and hurts in the best way. I keep rocking, slow, sleepy thrusts, the sheets twisting under my knees. My breath comes out ragged against her neck, but she doesn’t stir. Doesn’t make that little whimper I know she does, she just… stays still.
My palm slides down, expecting the dip of her waist, the flare of her hip. Expecting her. Instead, my fingers sink into plush stuffing, and my eyes snap open.
A fucking muffin is staring back at me with an embroidered dead-eyed smile, smooshed against my chest where her face should be.
The warmth I’ve been grinding against is… a pillow and a very traumatized lemon-scented plushie.
I freeze, cock still throbbing against my jeans, a wet spot already forming where I’ve been leaking for who knows how long. The room is empty, the sunlight is obnoxious, and Lennon’s side of the bed is cool, the dent in the mattress the only proof she was ever here.
I let my forehead drop onto the muffin’s round, judgmental head. “You’re not her,” I rasp out at the plushie.
He does not disagree.
My dick twitches anyway, traitor that it is, still stupidly hopeful against the cotton. I groan and roll my hips one more useless time before turning onto my back. I’m alone, hard as iron, having humped a stuffed muffin in a girl’s bed while she wasn’t even in it.
“Cool,” I mutter to the ceiling. “Real cool.”
This is how people end up on lists.
I don’t move for a minute. Just breathe, letting the ache pulse, and the embarrassment do what it’s going to do.
Then the cold seeps in.
Because why am I thinking about her like that?
Not the half-asleep part. That’s just biology, her smell still in the sheets, and my body doing what bodies do when they’re warm and not quite conscious. Fine. That I can file away and never look at again.
It’s the other part. The part where my brain, completely unprompted, filled in the rest. The dip of her waist. The sound she’d make.
The detailed picture of her that my subconscious apparently had ready to go, filed somewhere I wasn’t aware of, waiting for me to stop being awake enough to keep it out.
Shit.
I stare at the ceiling.
Then, because my brain is apparently determined to make this worse, it serves up last night in full. Her weight against my side. How her crying finally slowed, her voice turning quieter as she talked herself empty, and how she felt against me when she finally went under.
The lemon cake with sprinkles. The shoebox. She’ll never know how any of it turns out.
That she’s thirty-five and nobody’s daughter anymore. I’ve been turning that phrase over since she said it. Not because it’s dramatic—Lennon isn’t dramatic, she says the big things like you’d state a fact about the weather—but because I know how much it’s hurting her.
She had a mother who showed up, and now she doesn’t.
I held her while she cried about it, which is the most natural thing I’ve done in years.
My heart does a slow, complicated thing that I’m not going to examine right now.
Which probably means I should.
Instead, I sit up.
That’s when I notice my feet. They’re dangling off the end of the bed.
I look at them, still processing, and then the full weight of it lands all at once.
My boots are where I kicked them off, exactly where I left them, beside the bed.
My sleeping bag is at home, just like my mittens.
I fell asleep next to her without any of it, without the zipper, the routine, and the exhausted calculation of how to make my body stay where I put it, and I’m still here.
Right where I fell asleep.
I keep staring at my feet.
I have not once, not in years, not since long before I figured out what was wrong with me and started building the routine around it, never woken up where I fell asleep without the sleeping bag. I always end up somewhere else.
Three years ago, I woke up in the logging yard, standing there in the dark at two in the morning, marker in hand, the word
USELESS
written across the side of a truck I’d seen every day of my adult life.
I had to scrub it off in the cold with the solvent I found in the equipment shed, alone, before anyone showed up for the morning shift.
I never told anyone. I just went home, climbed into the sleeping bag, and slipped on the mittens, then started setting the alarm for the breakfast service an hour later.
But I’m here. In her bed. Where she was.
In bed with her. That’s the thing. I was sleeping next to her, and I didn’t go anywhere.
Holy shit.
I sit up, and my phone is on the pillow beside me, which means she moved it there from my pocket. A folded piece of yellow paper sits on top of it, so I pick it up, and the handwriting is clear, round, and neat, exactly what I’d expect from her.
It still takes me four tries to get through the full sentence. The letters do what letters do to me, sliding and swapping, and I have to press my thumb under each word, holding it there before it’ll stay still long enough to mean something.
Wanted to let you sleep. Come find me at the inn when you’re awake. — L
P.S. Mr. Muffin is in charge until then.
I look at the plushie, still sitting exactly where I left him, embroidered smile unchanged and entirely without judgment, which is more than he deserves given what he witnessed a few minutes ago.
“Mr. Muffin.” I point at him. “We’re not talking about what just happened. Are we clear?”
He stares back at me.
“Good,” I say, and check my phone for the time.
It’s two in the afternoon.
I don’t ever sleep past five.
Shit, shit, shit.
I’m off the bed in one motion, feet shoved into boots without untying them, her key grabbed, dropped, grabbed again. I’m out the door before I’ve fully decided to move, taking the stairs two at a time, skateboard tucked under my arm.
The air hits me cold in the face as I push off hard down the path toward the inn, and somewhere between the second push and the third, the panic settles enough that the other thing surfaces underneath it.
I slept. Properly. Deeply. Right where I fell asleep.
Next to her.
I push harder, the wheels loud on the uneven path, and I don’t look at that thought directly because if I do, I’m going to have to figure out what it means, and the inn is three minutes away. I don’t have time for whatever that is right now.
Later.
I’ll think about it later.
I’m panting when I hit the reception, which is not a great look, and I’m already composing the apology to Simon in my head—sorry, won’t happen again, I know, I know—when I register that the two guests standing at the desk are not wearing the expression of people who want to complain.
They’re leaning forward. Interested. Body language that means they want something, not that something went wrong.
“Just wondering if it’s a regular thing,” the woman is saying. “The lunch service. Whether it’ll be on offer for the rest of the stay.”
Simon looks up when he hears me come in, and the quality of his expression tells me he’s been fielding variations of this question for a while. “I’m not sure, actually. Let me—” He clocks me. “Nevan. Do we know if lunch sandwiches are a regular offering going forward?”
I open my mouth, then immediately close it. “I’ll find out,” I say. “I’ll let you know.”
The woman smiles. “Wonderful. And please do pass on our compliments. Breakfast this morning was exceptional.”
“Best yet,” her husband agrees.
“Thank you.” I give them my best customer service smile. “I’ll let the chef know.”
I say it automatically, and then I go through the door to the restaurant before either of them can say anything else.
I stop just inside.
The space is more than clean. The tables are wiped down and reset, and the chairs are tucked in at the right angle, early afternoon light coming through the windows.
It doesn’t look like a room that ran a service this morning without its manager.
It looks like a room that was taken care of, but that’s not the thing that stops me.
The thing that stops me is the server station in the corner, which has been reorganized since yesterday.
The coffee machine from the back—the good one, the one I kept meaning to bring out properly and kept not getting around to—is sitting on the counter, clean and gleaming, with a small handwritten sign propped against it that reads
Please help yourself
in round, neat handwriting I recognize immediately but still take a couple minutes to read. Beside it, on a board with a small card listing the ingredients, is a tray of muffins. But I don’t need to read that to see what they are.
White Chocolate Blueberry muffins with lemon glaze.
She ran a full breakfast service, a lunch service, and then did this because she thought about the guests.
My guests. She thought about them the way I think about them, the way I’ve been thinking about them for years while holding this place together with whatever I have left after the end of a double shift.
That’s not just good cooking, that’s someone who cares about the same things I do.
The smell coming off the muffins hits the back of my throat and makes my stomach growl.