8. Maren #2
“Wildly inconsistent. Sometimes impressively good. Sometimes someone has clearly never been within fifty feet of a locker room.” I nodded at the Kindle. “This one’s contemporary though. No sports.”
“Friends to lovers?”
“Enemies to lovers,” I said, with all the satisfaction that deserved.
His expression morphed into a smirk. “Better payoff.”
“Right?” I turned toward him and the Kindle ended up forgotten in my lap.
“Like, friends to lovers is objectively superior in real life. The slow build, the foundation, knowing each other. But enemies to lovers has that moment. The fuck it moment. Where they’ve been fighting it so long that when they finally stop fighting it—”
“It’s inevitable,” Ryan said.
“Exactly.” I held his gaze. He was turning back to me and the cabin was dim and he was close.
I was acutely aware that Griffin was asleep twelve inches to my left and that Ryan had just said inevitable in a voice that wasn’t entirely about the book.
It reminded me of college again, when Ryan and I secretly held hands on the way home from a long day of pond hockey and a bonfire, where Griffin was against the window dead asleep. “What?”
“Nothing.” He picked up his paperback. “You’re not wrong.”
I turned back to my Kindle. My face was warm. Probably the cabin was warm, that was all.
We read. Griffin snored once, and we both caught it at the same moment—Ryan’s shoulders moved before I heard it, and I had to press my lips together to keep the laugh contained.
His eyes creased and I thought, this. This was the part that was going to be the real problem.
Not the hair tuck or the treatment table or the moment in my mother’s kitchen where I’d stood close enough it was a choice.
This. The laugh we were sharing over my sleeping brother at thirty thousand feet.
This was the thing that was going to undo me.
I could handle wanting him. Wanting was manageable. You redirected it, handled it with discipline and a firm internal voice.
Liking him was another problem entirely.
I scrolled my library and tilted it toward him without entirely deciding to, and he leaned in to look and I was abruptly aware of how close that put him.
Close enough to smell his soap from the postgame shower, clean and unperformed.
Close enough to see the scar through his eyebrow and think about what it would feel like to touch, just barely with my thumb, which was a thought I was filing under not helpful, do not revisit.
“You have the whole Ashby Letters series,” he said.
“Obviously.”
The dry amusement he kept on a short leash slipped through. “Obviously.”
“Don’t look at me like that. Everyone who started it is waiting on book three.”
“Fourteen months,” he said, not embarrassed that he’d counted.
“Thirteen months and twenty-two days. Not that I’m counting.”
He laughed. Quiet enough not to wake Griffin, real enough that I had to look back at my Kindle for a second for distraction.
“I have a theory about Sable,” he said.
“Sable is not who you think she is.”
“Sable is absolutely who I think she is.”
“That’s what they want you to think.”
“That’s what you want to think because you don’t want it to be true.”
I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it. He wasn’t wrong. “Fine. Maybe.”
He had a satisfied grin and nodded.
We read in comfortable silence after that for a while. I was on my second chapter and not retaining a word of it when I said, without any preamble, “There’s a bookstore in Tempe. And one in central Phoenix that does late-night events, author talks, wine. Griffin thinks it’s insufferable.”
“Has he gone?”
“Once. I made him come with me to meet an author.” I paused. “There’s one in Scottsdale too. Closer to me. I know all the staff.”
He was watching me with that full attention, filing it away the way he filed everything.
“I could show you,” I said. “You’ve been here three months and I don’t think you’ve seen anything that isn’t the facility or my parents’ backyard.” Or Cole’s kitchen. But I kept that one to myself.
He was quiet for a moment. “I haven’t.”
“Well,” I said, keeping my voice easy, “if you ever want to get out and look at books with me, I’ll take you.”
“You promise?” he asked, quietly.
Two words. Completely unguarded, and they found a soft place in my heart and stayed there.
“Yeah,” I said. “I promise.”
“It’s a date,” he said. Quiet.
He held my gaze for a beat, then turned back to his paperback. I turned back to my Kindle. Outside the window, the lights of Phoenix were coming up through the dark below, scattered amber and white across the desert floor, growing closer.
I didn’t read another word. I stared at the screen and thought about a date.
A real one. What it would look like to walk into a bookstore with him on a Saturday afternoon with nowhere else we had to be, his hand maybe at the small of my back, finding him in the stacks with his head tilted and that expression he wore when something had his real attention.
Pulling a book off a shelf and handing it to him. Him handing one back.
Simple. Ordinary. Completely impossible.
I wanted it so much I had to look out the window again, the opposite direction of him.
Phoenix spread out below us, relentless and glittering, growing slowly closer.
I was in so much trouble.