Page 108 of Without You

Brody

“Is it bad that I just want to sleep?” Katie asks. She’s curled up next to me in bed after the longest day in history.

I kiss her on top of her head. “I’m exhausted.”

“Me, too. What if…”

I interrupt her with, “Don’t worry about what-ifs, babe. Tonight we sleep and trust that Chase’s team has this under control. Tomorrow we’ll wake up together, and if I’m lucky, that will become a more permanent thing, and we’ll cancel everything and stay in bed all day if we want. Nothing can bring me down right now, Katie. Even the fact that you and I having sex is on the internet. We weren’t doing anything wrong.”

“Some might think so.”

“They’d be wrong. Hey,” I squeeze her to get her attention so she looks at me, “you need to know this, too. It’s something I should have said earlier but it’s between us and not the rest of the guys. I meant it that without you, it doesn’t matter. With you, though, everything makes sense. I love you, Katie. It might seem soon and maybe you’re going to panic because I’m freaking you out, but I want you to know that I do love you. I’ll support you even if you decide to take the job with Chase, even if I’ll admittedly hate being away from you.”

Her lips part but nothing comes out. Instead, she leans up, pulls my head down, and kisses me, hard. Her tongue sliding inside and twirling around with mine. I groan and turn us so she’s under me. One of her legs wraps around the back of my thigh. Her fingers are on the back of my head.

“I love you, too, Brody.”

“Good words.”

“Very.”

“Might think about using those words with you for the next fifty or sixty years.” It’s a promise of what I hope is to come but is too early. Though, a big part of me feels like it isn’t. It’s not as if I just met Katie. We’ve known each other for sixteen years, even if we weren’t close for that amount of time.

“I’m suddenly not quite as tired as I was earlier,” she says quietly.

“Me either.” I wiggle my eyebrows and kiss her again, reaching down and threading my fingers with hers, bringing our linked hands up and pressing them into the mattress above our heads. We kiss until our lips are bruised and our bodies are on fire, burning from within.

Much later, when we’re physically exhausted and thoroughly satisfied, we fall asleep tangled in each other’s arms. The realization of what happened today isn’t lost on either of us, but its sting is lessened a bit knowing that we’re in love.

* * *

“It’s done.”

“Already?”

Chase is sitting on the couch in my living room, having showed up at my home before eight in the morning. Katie and I were barely awake when we heard banging on the door.

“Yeah. I told everyone they’d be fired if they didn’t make it go away.”

I feel Katie breathe out a sigh of relief next to me.

“And that worked?” I ask.

Chase shrugs. “Yeah. I made my statement already and luckily the paparazzi in Nashville is nowhere nearly as ruthless as it is in Hollywood. They want to keep a good relationship with us. And y’all were right. It was Hannah Mitchell. We’re bringing up charges on her because she’s the one who stood outside your office and recorded y’all. Crazy bitch.”

Crazy bitch is right.

“I knew she was capable of petty stuff but I had no idea she’d go that far. This came out of nowhere,” Katie says.

She’s not wrong. Though, I can’t help but feel at fault for some of this. “I shouldn’t have gone to the reception that night. I started it.”

“No, you didn’t. This is on her.”

“What about my mom? Was she involved?”

“Can’t be sure of that yet. Depends on what Hannah says once she’s brought in, I assume. There was nothing in the uploads or photos shared that point to her aside from the one in the parking lot of the salon where her car was visible. It doesn’t sound like she was in contact with the press, but it’s possible your theory of her feeding information to Hannah is right. Just not sure what her motivation would be for that. She’s your mom.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a term I would use very lightly when it comes to her.”

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