Chapter 16 #2
“You need a stylist.”
He exhales a laugh, but he doesn’t look away. “No one will know,” he says again. “Not until we decide otherwise.”
Until. Not if or unless.
I should correct him. I absolutely should.
Instead, I say, “Your bunk is tiny.”
His smile turns almost boyish, and he fucking winks. “I’ll make room.”
And God help me, I follow him.
Inside, the RV is warm and dim and full of sleeping sounds: A soft snore from somewhere near the back. The faint electrical hum of charging equipment. A water bottle rolling slightly as the floor shifts under our careful steps.
Miles moves through the narrow aisle like he has every inch memorized, and I’m sure he does.
He probably has a labeled schematic in a folder somewhere.
We get ready for bed in silence, brushing our teeth side by side in the tiny bathroom I’ve come to loathe.
Folding yourself in half to shower within a few square feet is not my favorite pastime.
After rinsing his toothbrush, Miles looks at me, then turns and leaves the bathroom without a single word. Am I really about to climb into this man’s bunk? I lean back to catch a glimpse of his shirtless body. His athletic shorts hang low on his hips, showing off his unnecessarily ripped back.
Yeah. I’m climbing into his bunk.
I finish up, giving myself a quick onceover in the mirror, tugging at my tank. As I head to the bedroom, he’s pulling back his bunk curtain. I stare at it, then at him.
“Miles,” I whisper.
“I know.”
“This is such a bad idea.”
“It is. But I want you close,” he says without apology.
“I get it. You don’t want to sleep alone after…” I stop.
His eyebrows lift.
Heat crawls up my neck. “After hiking.”
“Right,” he says, lips pressed together. “The hike.”
I point at him. “Don’t be smug.”
“I have never been smug in my life.”
I have to bite back another laugh as he climbs in first, awkward and long-limbed, trying to fold himself against the wall to make space. He knocks his elbow, mutters something under his breath, then looks at me with such earnest determination that I almost can’t stand it.
“Okay,” he whispers. “I think this can work.”
“It absolutely cannot.”
“It can if we commit.”
“That sounds like something said by a man moments before an avoidable wilderness death.”
“Daisy.”
But I’m already climbing in.
It is, as predicted, a logistical disaster.
My knee hits the wall. His arm gets trapped under my shoulder. My hair catches on something that may be a hook or possibly part of the RV’s emergency evacuation system. Miles tries to help and somehow makes it worse.
“Ow,” he whispers.
“Sorry.”
“That was my rib.”
“Why is your rib there?”
“Where else would it be?”
“I don’t know, Miles, but there are too many of your body parts in this bunk, and you’re, like, seven feet tall.”
“I’m 6'1".”
“That was a choice.”
“By whom?”
“God. Your parents. Oprah. I don’t know.”
A laugh breaks out of him, and he clamps one hand over his mouth, eyes crinkling behind his glasses as his shoulders shake under me. It sets me off too, both of us silently laughing in the dark like teenagers sneaking around after curfew.
Finally, after what feels like a full survival exercise, we settle. Or something close to settle.
I’m half on top of him, one leg wedged between his, my cheek against his chest. His arm comes around me carefully at first, like he’s waiting for me to change my mind.
I don’t.
The second I relax, he does too.
His palm spreads across my back.
Warm. Steady. Quiet.
The laughter fades.
And suddenly I am very aware of him again.
Not in the hungry, desperate way from the woods. Not that wild spark that took over before either of us could stop it.
This is intimate.
This is his breathing under my ear. The clean smell of his bed.
Pine and sweat and soap and something that is just Miles, warm and sleep-soft and unfairly addictive.
This is the way his thumb moves once along my spine and then stops when it brushes the scratches that now decorate my back from our… hike.
I should say something sharp. Something funny. Something that gives me distance.
Instead, I touch the side of his face.
His expression changes so fast it steals the breath out of me.
Like no one touches him tenderly very often.
Like he was prepared for teasing, for banter, for heat. Not this. Definitely not this.
I trace my thumb along the hinge of his jaw, feeling the faint rasp of stubble there. “You’re going to make this complicated, aren’t you?”
His hand tightens slightly on my back.
“I think,” he says carefully, “it might already be complicated.”
My heart presses hard against my ribs.
Outside, the forest shifts around us.
Inside, the RV hums.
I lower my head back to his chest before he can see too much on my face.
“Go to sleep, Adler.”
His lips touch the top of my hair.
So lightly I could pretend it didn’t happen.
“Goodnight, Bennett.”
I sleep like shit. Not because of the bunk, although these bunks are an actual crime against adult spinal health. But because every time I drift off, I remember where I am.
Who I’m with. What we did. What we said.
What we are absolutely not allowed to become. At least not any time soon.
By five-thirty, gray light is leaking around the edges of the curtain, and Miles is already awake beneath me.
I know because his hand has stopped moving in those tiny unconscious patterns along my back.
Also because he is holding his breath like a man trying very hard not to wake a bear.
“I’m awake,” I whisper.
He exhales. “Thank God. My left arm has ceased all communication with the central command.”
I lift my head. His glasses are off, his hair crushed on one side, pillow lines pressed into his cheek.
It is truly rude.
“You look terrible,” I whisper, lying.
His smile is sleepy and crooked. “You look like someone who spent the night in a coffin.”
“I did.”
“You chose that.”
“Under duress.”
“Sexual duress?”
“Don’t push it,” I pause, but my hand runs along his chest. “But yes.”
We untangle with the silent teamwork of two people dismantling a bomb. By the time I slip out of his bunk, my hair is a disaster, my shorts are twisted, and my entire body feels like it was folded into origami by a cryptid researcher.
Miles catches my wrist before I can step away and pulls me back to him.
Just once. Just lightly.
I look back.
His face is still soft from sleep, but his eyes are awake.
“Are we good?” he asks. And there it is. That thing he does. The question under the question. Did I regret it? Did he hurt me? Did the daylight change the answer?
I swallow and smile. “We’re good.”
Relief moves through him before he can hide it.
Then he lets me go.
I make it to the bathroom before anyone else wakes up, still feeling totally out of my element in this tiny space.
I brush my teeth, bump my elbows into the walls while I fix my hair into something that says “field journalist” rather than “woman who boned her source,” and change into clean clothes to face the day.
The morning is a blur of chaos masquerading as order.
Taylor spreads maps across the table, pinning corners down with a flashlight, a protein bar, and someone’s suspiciously large knife.
Jax works through footage from the drones, scrubbing frame by frame while muttering to himself.
Maya catalogs the casts and samples with the seriousness of a museum curator handling dinosaur bones.
Miles is everywhere.
At the monitors.
Over Taylor’s shoulder.
Outside checking batteries.
Back inside adjusting map overlays.
Calm, focused, and brilliant in a way that makes me want to walk over and kiss the back of his neck.
I hate that I can’t. I hate that I want to.
I hate that I know what his hand felt like on my hip last night, and now I have to listen to him say things like, “The thermal signature moved northwest between 02:00 and 02:30,” while pretending that sentence doesn’t turn me on.
This is a problem.
“Daisy,” he says, glancing over at me. “Can you pull up the audio you got on your end so we can cross-check it with ours?”
“Sure.”
My voice is normal. Miraculously.
I slide into the seat near the monitors and open the file. A waveform stretches across the screen, spiking in uneven intervals. I put on headphones and listen.
Static. Wind. A branch crack. Then that knocking sound.
The hair on my arms lifts.
Across the Machine, Miles watches me. Not obviously. But I feel it anyway.
“What?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Nothing.”
“This file is perfect. ”
His eyes warm.
Jax groans from his station. “Can we not flirt with audio files today? Some of us are trying to enhance nightmare fuel.”
My spine stiffens.
Miles freezes.
Maya looks up.
Taylor does not, which is worse.
“I flirt with all media equally,” I say, because survival instincts are real and my go-to is sarcasm.
Once the team is all heads down on work, I decide this is my moment and relegate myself in the kitchen area of the Machine to record my first episode. I’m huddled at the small table with a microphone, wrapped in a blanket.
I thought it would feel ridiculous, recording in the middle of nowhere.
Instead, it feels… electric. Like stepping onto a bridge while it’s still being built.
I talk about the team. Getting settled in the Machine. About the search. About the sound we captured. About the strange, contagious energy of being around people who aren’t foolish at all, but are willing to look foolish in pursuit of something extraordinary.
I do not talk about Miles directly, but he’s in every sentence anyway. In the shape and the pulse of the story. In the question I keep circling without saying out loud.
What if some impossible things are only impossible because we’ve been taught to look away?
When I finish, my hands are shaking.
I listen back to the first thirty seconds, cringe hard enough to nearly fold in half, then force myself to send the file to Marissa before I can spiral.
The second it goes through, my phone feels radioactive.
I stare at the screen.
Sent.
That’s it.
My first episode.