Page 77 of Sunshine

“Yep,” he says.

I frown. “Is something wrong?”

He shakes his head. “Just trying to figure out if I should be concerned about my best friend slow dancing with my girl,” he says.

My frown deepens. “Concerned?” I repeat. “Jason, he just asked me to dance. I didn’t even say yes . . . but, it wasjusta dance.”

“You didn’t say yes?” he asks, eyes sliding to Wells with an unfamiliar heat. Is he . . .jealousof Wells?

I reach my hands out to press against his shoulders,grounding his attention back to me. “Jay,” I say firmly. “He’s my friend. He’s yourbestfriend. It’s Wells . . . there is nothing to worry about.”

It’s a truth I’m confident in—but it doesn’t explain the images that flash through my mind as I say it.

Wells’s midnight eyes, shadowed from the moonlight by the awning of my doorstep, watching me cry with a pained expression.

His hands on my waist as he carefully hoists me from Champ’s saddle, the pressure of his fingers buzzing through my shirt.

The steady look on his face as he watches me across a crowded room of some party, even when I can hardly get him to hold a conversation.

It’s a seed of doubt that takes root, even as I force the calculated indifference on my face now.

Jason sighs. “I don’t know,” he mutters, looking back at me. A deep line slices between his brows. “I’m gonna go get some air. I’ll be right back.”

For the second time tonight, Jason walks away from me. And this time it burns a hole through my stomach.

“Where’d he go?” Wells asks, surprising me. I startle, whipping around to face him.

“I told you dancing was a bad idea,” I say back, tears stinging my eyes. His eyes grow wide and worried as they flit back toward the door Jason just left through, and I rush to the bathroom.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

NOW

Hours later, just as the early morning light begins to bleed in through the bedroom window, I watch Wells sleep. My eyes trace the dips and curves of his body, memorizing every angle and soft expanse of skin. His squared jaw and the stubble that runs across his cheek. His unkempt hair, tousled from my fingers. His broad chest as it rises and falls with his deep breathing.

We were up for most of the night, lost in each other. After he made slow and delicate work of cleaning me up in the living room, he gave me a change of clothes so I could get out of my ruined dress. But his focus snared on seeing me in his T-shirt and sweatpants, and it wasn’t long before he was hurtling us both toward new waves of pleasure.

Every careful and tender touch tore me apart, limb by limb, until I was simply a bag of bones beneath him. And then he put me back together in the light of the moonlit window,warm traces of him everywhere inside of me, becoming all that I am and will ever want to be.

I loved every glorious second of it.

He finally fell asleep about an hour ago. Even in his unconsciousness, his need took hold: body tensing, flexing beneath warm skin, reaching. Wanting. He kept an arm and a leg wrapped firmly around me, tethering me to him. And I never felt more content.

Until the quiet corners of my mind began to wake, the groaning, yawning monsters of grief and destruction fighting to take hold.

I carefully shift my hips from beneath his wide thigh, turning onto my side and nuzzling deeper into the mattress as I try to shake off what I know is an impending emotional storm.Not here, I think, willing my mind to blank.Not now.

The last thing I want is for Wells to register a single ounce of panic in me, knowing damn well he’ll take it as a sign of regret or discomfort about this whole situation—and that’snothow I feel. He’s too good, too intent on doing the right thing when it comes to this and us, and I know seeing me falter would send him into a self-sabotaging spiral.

It’s just . . . trying to reconcile how much my life has changed in the last few weeks isn’t an easy feat. It’s an emotional clusterfuck, and in quiet moments like this, the ramifications of it all pierce into me.

I will myself to fall asleep, but thoughts of Jason flood my mind. I wonder if, wherever he might be, he somehow knows what’s happened between Wells and me. What’s been slowly blooming between us since I came home and found him at the bar that night. I wonder if Jason knows how deeply the entiretrajectory of my life has changed because of him—because of his accident. Because of Emma.

A soft wave of humiliation flares at the memory of my vomit on her shoes. Of the moment I learned the man I loved could hurt me like that.

I wonder if he’d be sorry. If it would be genuine.

And then I wonder if it would change anything.

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