Page 65 of Leave

“Don’t mention it.” He kissed under my jaw and settled on my shoulder.

For the longest time, we lay like that, tangled up naked on the bed we’d rumpled. I had a flicker of desire to stay this way all night, but I ignored it. As much as I wanted to spend the whole night just like this, it wasn’t a good idea. Especially not when thedemons of my past had already managed to sink in some of their claws.

I reluctantly sat up, gently freeing myself from his arms. “We, um, we should get some sleep. There’s a bunch of family stuff tomorrow.” Just thinking about that made my insides constrict. There were things I was looking forward to on this visit, but others I definitely wasn’t.

Riley trailed his fingers down my chest, and when our eyes locked, I could see the unspoken offer.

Stay here tonight. Sleep with me.

As much as I wanted to, though, I couldn’t.

“I’ll, um…” I rolled to my feet. “Text you in the morning? When I’m ready to go?”

I had to give him credit—he tried to hide the disappointment. Still, it was impossible not to see. His smile was genuine but halfhearted, and his eyes were a dead giveaway.

“Yeah,” he said flatly. “Text me.”

I leaned down for a light kiss, then got up and collected my clothes. I threw on my jeans but carried everything else, and I slipped out of his room and into mine.

Our rooms were mirror images of each other—identical right down to the bland prints on the wall, just flipped. The beds in my room were on the left, his were on the right. It was almost like stepping into a parallel universe where everything was the same, but… not.

Especially the part where Riley wasn’t here.

He was just on the other side of the wall, but he felt miles away. As if he had never left Okinawa, and we’d just FaceTimed for a little while instead of getting each other off after a hockey game.

Should’ve stayed with him.

Yeah. Maybe. But I’d never been able to sleep with someone else in the room. Not since my late teens, anyway. Sleeping atboot camp, in barracks, and in those stuffy, cramped shipping containers in warzones had been miserable for everyone, but for me there’d been the added layer of not being alone. There was always someone else—often multiple people—in the same space. The first time I’d been able to get an off-base apartment of my own had been more liberating than getting the hell out of Redmond. I could finally sleep without worrying that someone else was in the room. That someone else wasawakewhile I was asleep.

But that didn’t mean it wasn’t lonely. It was a painful contradiction; I couldn’t cope with another human being in the same space where I was trying to sleep, but I also ached for the closeness of someone sleeping beside me. That had only intensified as things had become more intimate with Riley.

I want him here. I trust him.

But that fear was bone-deep. I was afraid sleeping together would play out the same way tonight had—that I’d be so sure I was ready for something, only to find out the hard way (so to speak) that I absolutely wasn’t. Riley had already had a front row seat to my inability to top him. What would he think if I said we could sleep together, but then I freaked out? If he touched me in the middle of the night and I panicked? Because that might happen. I didn’tknowif it would, but I didn’t trust myself to keep it together all damn night.

Leaning against the door of my hotel room, I closed my eyes and exhaled into the silence.

What am I going to do when you realize how much of a mess I really am?

Chapter 19

Riley

I hated this. Fucking hated it.

Lying alone in that hotel bed, every raw, painful emotion bubbled to the surface.

It hadn’t bothered me all that much before this trip, but now, every time we fooled around and then he took off to sleep elsewhere… it messed with my head. It left me cold and all too aware of how alone I was.

I knew that Nolan wasn’t rejectingmespecifically. There was something else going on in him—something that made him approach sex and intimacy like a minefield. Someone had done something to him that he didn’t want to talk about and apparently couldn’t escape. I understood that. I didn’t even think the problems he’d had tonight had to do with me; there was some other card, or maybe a whole hand of cards, that had been there since long before I entered the picture.

None of this had anything to do with me.

But it was still hard not to feel alone and rejected when he insisted on sleeping apart. Not just in different beds—in different rooms.

Jesus, Nolan. What did they do to you?

My own words drifted through my mind:““I mean, is this like, a sibling or something you don’t get along with? Or like, ‘creepy uncle who shouldn’t be alone with the kids’ kind of thing?”

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