Page 77 of Knot Your Sugar Rush
We don’t talk for a while. The quiet stretches, not awkward but weighted with that unspoken thing between us—the way they all hover just enough to make me feel protected without caging me. I realize that I like it. That I likethem. And that thought alone makes the heat purr a little deeper in my chest.
Finally, Theo breaks it. “We’re low on a few things. Dane and I’ll head to the boat and see what we can bring back.”
I blink, sitting up a little. “You’re leaving now?”
He nods. “It’s daylight. Safer than at night. Jamie’ll stay here with you.”
My gaze shifts to Jamie, who grins faintly despite the way he’s leaning on the frame. “Don’t worry, I’m great company. And I’ll keep watch while you rest.”
Dane finally looks at me again. “Door stays locked until we’re back. Don’t open it for anyone but us.”
Something in his voice—low and certain—sends a shiver down my spine, stirs my heat.
I nod. “Okay.”
Theo straightens, brushing a hand lightly against my shoulder as he passes, a warm, grounding touch. Dane lingers one second longer than necessary before following him out. The door clicks shut, and I’m left with Jamie and the sound of their boots moving away.
The air feels different already—quieter, but not lonely. The heat hums low in my belly, not clawing, not frantic. Manageable. I sit back against the headboard, listening to the sound of Jamie easing into the chair near the bed.
“Guess it’s just us for a bit,” he says, and the way he says it makes me almost smile.
“Yeah,” I answer, sinking into the moment. The sea breeze lifts the hair off my damp temples, the floor creaks under Jamie’s shifting weight, and for the first time in days, I think I might be okay.
Chapter fifty-six
Cam
The quiet after Theo and Dane leaves feels different—less like absence and more like a blanket. The window is open just enough to pull in the sea’s cool breath; it lifts the damp hair at my temples and carries the faintest salt. I can almost taste it.
Jamie settles deeper into the chair by my bed, his injured leg stretched out on the ottoman I dragged in, the blanket I tossed over him tucked in at one corner because he’s pretending it doesn’t help and I’m pretending not to notice that it does. He rotates his ankle once, winces, and then catches me studying him.
“Don’t give me that look,” he says, easy and warm. “I’m fine.”
“You always say that,” I murmur, sliding back against the pillows. “Even when you’re missing a roof and half your common sense.”
“Slender accusations,” he says, mock offense wrinkling his nose. “For your information, I still have at least three-quarters of my common sense. I’m saving the last quarter for emergencies.”
“This isn’t an emergency?”
He glances pointedly at me, then at the window, the door, his leg. “Not when we’ve got tea, a cross-breeze, and a very bossy omega telling me to keep the blanket on.”
I try to scowl. It comes out as a smile I can’t quite hold back. “I’m not bossy.”
“You are absolutely bossy,” he says, delighted. “But in a soothing way. Like a very gentle storm.”
“A gentle storm would be rain,” I say, deadpan. “Possibly a drizzle.”
“Then you’re a drizzle of authority.” He grins at his own sentence, as if that phrase alone might heal his leg and my frayed nerves at the same time. He sobers a little, eyes softening. “How’s your temperature?”
I swallow. There’s still that slow, persistent thrum low in my belly. Less sharp than last night but closer now, like a tide that keeps reaching farther up the shore each time. “Warming,” I admit. “But manageable.”
“Mm.” He pushes the mug I left on the nightstand table toward me with two fingers. “Sip. We hydrate, we breathe, we don’t do anything we don’t want to do.”
Thewelands gently. It shouldn’t—he isn’t the one whose body is run by moon-tides and scent and memory—but somehow it steadies me anyway. I take the mug, the porcelain a pleasant heat against my palm, and drink. The tea’s gone lukewarm, herb-sweet and a little bitter. It helps.
We drift. He tells me a ridiculous story about a high school shop class boat he and Theo tried to build out of plywood and hope, how it sank in the marina before they’d even untied the rope. He paints with his hands while he talks, the chair groaning as he shifts, the blanket slipping just enough to show a familiar scar near his knee. He taps it once, matter-of-fact. “Bike. Gravel road. Terrible decision. Ten out of ten, do not recommend.”
I laugh; the laugh shivers; the shiver rolls into heat. It’s not sudden. It’s not a wave crashing. It’s a tide rising and rising until I don’t notice my breaths getting slower, deeper, my fingers foreign on the mug because they’re too sensitive to be mine. The room sharpens at the edges—grain in the wood, the scratch in the chair’s arm, the way the breeze tastes like cold metal and salt. And underneath it all, Jamie’s scent: warm leather and smoke, a human campfire I could fall asleep beside.
