Page 44 of The Beautiful Collision
I need distance. I need to get my head straight before we sleep through the night together. So, moving carefully, I ease out from under her, my body mourning the loss of her warmth thesecond we separate. She makes a sound of protest but doesn’t wake, just burrows deeper into the spot I vacated.
I grab a pair of sweats from the floor and pull them on, my movements deliberately quiet. Then I notice it. “Jesus,” I mutter.
My room looks like a crime scene, with evidence of our encounter everywhere I look. The bedsheets twisted and pulled half off the mattress. Scratches on my back that sting when the fabric of my sweats brushes them. The lingering scent of sex so thick I could choke on it.
I should open a window. Air the place out. Clean up. Take a shower.
Distance myself.
Instead, I stand there like an idiot, watching her sleep.
She’s stolen my entire pillow now, hugging it to her chest. The sheet has slipped down to her waist, revealing the breasts I couldn’t get enough of but wasn’t allowed to touch, and the constellation of faint marks I left on her shoulder with my teeth.
Get it together, Hamilton,my mind blares.Stop being such a fucking pussy.
But even as I think it, I know I’m lying to myself. This stopped being simple the moment she sat beside me on the floor yesterday. The moment she saw me at my lowest and didn’t run. Didn’t judge. Just… stayed. And then gave me a cure for the emptiness that was eating me alive.
I force myself to turn away, to lean against the doorframe, and to practice my mask in the reflection of the mirror on the back of my door. Easy grin. Relaxed shoulders. Lazy posture that says, ‘I’m too cool to care about anything, especially feelings.’
It’s the same mask I’ve worn for years, but today it feels wrong.
Like a costume that shrunk in the wash.
Behind me, the bed creaks. She’s waking up. This is it. The moment to reestablish boundaries. To remind us both what thisis and, more importantly, what it isn’t. I turn back, the mask in place like armor, and watch as she stretches with a grace that makes me ache for her all over again.
Her eyes find mine, dark and perceptive even through the haze of sleep and probably a hangover of her own. She doesn’t look embarrassed or awkward. Doesn’t scramble for clothes or make excuses. She just watches me with that same intensity that undid me last night.
“Well,” I drawl, forcing my voice into that low, teasing register that usually comes so naturally, “looks like I survived my first night with the wild stallion.”
The words are perfect. The delivery is flawless. The exact right mix of cocky charm and casual distance. It’s a line designed to set the tone, to remind us both that this is an arrangement, not a relationship. That last night was fun but ultimately meaningless. That I’m Maine, who treats sex like a recreational sport.
But the words feel like a betrayal of something I can’t even name, even as she props herself up on one elbow, the sheet sliding lower, and I have to look away because the sight of her—rumpled and satisfied and wearing my marks—is doing things to my brain that I can’t afford.
“Survived?” Her voice is husky with sleep, amused. “From what I remember, you were begging by the end.”
Heat floods my face because she’s right. I did beg. Shamelessly. Desperately. And I’d do it again in a heartbeat. If things weren’t so fucked up, and if I wasn’t feeling so fucking caged by the bet that I made because I couldn’t admit to the guys for one damn second I might be feeling vulnerable.
“I don’t beg,” I lie. “I strategically negotiate.”
She laughs. “Is that what we’re calling it now?”
The banter is safe territory. Familiar ground where we can pretend last night was just another round in our ongoing warinstead of… whatever it actually was. But even as we trade barbs, I can’t shake the feeling that everything has shifted. That the game we’ve been playing has new rules I don’t understand.
“Want to sleep in here tonight?” I say, in a tone that makes clear I don’t want that.
She sits up fully, not bothering with the sheet, and I’m treated to a view that scrambles what’s left of my higher brain function. But it’s not just her body that gets to me, though fuck knows that’s devastating enough. It’s the confidence. The complete lack of awkwardness.
The way she owns her space in my bed like she belongs there.
Like she belongs with me.
No. Fuck no. That’s not what this is.
“I should go,” she says. “Unless you’re going to make me breakfast once we wake up for real.”
“I have cereal,” I manage. “The kind with marshmallows.”
“My hero,” she says dryly, finally moving to collect her scattered clothes. “But I graduated from Cap’n Crunch a few decades ago…”
