Chapter Eleven #2
The TV kept playing, but I couldn’t have told you what was happening on it anymore. The whole room felt smaller all of a sudden. Quieter. Like the air between us had changed shape.
“You know,” I said lightly, because light was safer, “for a guy who sleeps on couches with guns nearby and smokes out of windows, you’re surprisingly good at talking me down.”
A slow smile touched his mouth. “Is that a compliment?”
“Don’t get used to it.”
His eyes dropped to my lips, just for a second, but I saw it. And my pulse reacted immediately, kicking harder against my ribs like it had suddenly remembered I was very much alive.
Oh.
Oh no.
I knew that look.
Not because men had looked at me like that all the time. They hadn’t. But because I’d looked back at him enough in the past week to know what it meant. This wasn’t just protection anymore. Not for him and not for me either, if I was being honest.
The thought should have scared me more than it did.
Instead, it just made everything feel sharper.
I licked my lips without thinking. His eyes tracked the movement. And then neither of us said anything for what felt like a hundred years.
He shifted first. Not back and not away. Just enough to face me more fully.
My breath caught, and the room seemed very aware of itself all of a sudden. The faint hum of the fridge from the kitchen. Urkel talking too loud on the TV. The brush of blanket fabric against my bare legs.
Swift lifted one hand slowly, like he was giving me all the time in the world to stop this if I wanted to.
His fingers touched my jaw, warm and rough. He tilted my face up just a little, and my heart was now trying to murder me from the inside out.
“Swift,” I whispered.
He looked wrecked in the quietest possible way. Like he was still holding himself back, but just barely. “If we kiss,” he said, his voice low and rough enough to curl around every nerve in my body, “it’s going to change everything.”
I forgot how to breathe for half a second, then maybe a whole second because he was right.
And we both knew it.
A kiss with Swift wasn’t going to be some casual little thing we laughed off after.
It wasn’t going to be light or meaningless.
Or easy to step back from.
It would change the whole shape of whatever this was between us.
How he touched me.
How I looked at him.
How either of us pretended this was just a temporary arrangement while someone tried to kill us.
It would make everything real in a way I wasn’t sure I was ready for yet. Which was frustrating as hell because every part of me was already leaning into him.
I let out a shaky breath. “Maybe,” I said softly, “I’m not ready for things to change.”
His thumb brushed once against my cheek. Not disappointed or pushing.
Just there.
“Yet,” I added.
That made his mouth twitch. There it was again, that little bit of heat underneath all the seriousness. “Yet,” he repeated.
I smiled, a little breathless. “Don’t look so smug about it.”
He let out the lowest laugh. “Not smug, sugar.”
“Very smug.”
“Little hopeful, maybe.”
God.
That man was going to be the death of me in a completely different way than The Ledger was planning for all of us.
We were one almost-kiss away from changing everything, and instead of feeling embarrassed or weird, the whole thing just settled between us like a promise we hadn’t cashed in yet.
He dropped his hand from my face, slowly, like he knew exactly how much harder he was making it for me to sit there and not climb into his lap.
I stood up before I could do something unhinged. “Okay,” I said, my voice just a little too bright. “I should probably go to bed before I make another life-altering decision in my pajamas.”
Swift leaned back into the couch, looking entirely too good with his hair messy, his T-shirt stretched across his chest, and his expression somewhere between amused and hungry. “Probably a smart move.”
I pointed at him. “You stay right there.”
He raised a brow. “Where else am I gonna go?”
My bed?
No! I was not going to go back on what I had decided not even a minute ago. Things were already complicated, and me kissing Swift was just going to confuse things even more. “Try not to stay up all night staring out the window,” I said. I turned on my heel and headed toward my bedroom.
“Night, sugar,” Swift said behind me.
I paused and glanced back over my shoulder.
He was still watching me.
“Night,” I said.
Then I made myself keep walking into my bedroom.
I lay on my bed and climbed under my covers.
I turned onto my back carefully, wincing at my shoulder before finding a position that didn’t make it scream.
Then I stared at the ceiling.
And stared.
And stared some more.
Did I make the right choice? That was the question, wasn’t it?
Had I done the smart thing by stopping it before it started?
Or had I just blown my chance with Swift because I got scared that one kiss would mean too much?
I groaned softly and covered my face with both hands. “Fantastic,” I muttered into the dark.
Because now, in addition to being shot, stalked, overprotected, exhausted, and maybe accidentally involved in biker club war bullshit… I was lying in bed, wondering if I had just talked myself out of kissing the hottest man I’d ever met.
Life was so annoying sometimes.