Page 17 of Cloud Nine Love

I took another drink of my soda and told myself that this was just a blip. It was an anomaly. It was an aberration. This was not real. What I felt for this man was not real.

Tonight was just a night I would look back on and remember the time I fell in love with Kyle Chandler and spent a magical night with him talking at a Best Western hotel during a storm.

“Ana?”

Kyle’s voice snapped me out of my internal freakout. “What?”

He grinned. “Am I boring you?”

Fuck. Now, Kyle thought I thought he was boring.

“No. No, sorry, I’m just…tired. I haven’t slept a lot in the past couple of days.”

“Okay.” He stood and started clearing off the table. “I’ll clean this up, and you can go ahead and take the bed.”

“Take the bed?” I repeated.

“I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“You are not sleeping on the floor. We can share the bed,” I insisted and instantly blamed my frontal cortex, which was responsible for both impulse control and social appropriateness. Those were the suckers responsible for my offering to let him sleep with me.

“It’s fine. Honestly. With my job, I’ve slept on a lot worse.”

“What do you—” I stopped myself from finishing the question. As badly as I wanted to know the answer and basically know everything about this man, I’d made a rule, and I would be damned if I didn’t follow it.

Plus, it was probably best to keep this as impersonal as possible.

Good luck with that, my inner Kenna voice stated flatly.

Kyle grinned. It was a lopsided grin that I’d seen several times and was becoming my favorite of his many smiles. “You were going to ask me what I do, weren’t you?”

“Nope. Ana does not care about what Kyle does,” I lied, sort of. Taylor definitely wanted to know what Kyle did, but maybe Ana didn’t.

An amused grin curled on his perfect mouth. “She doesn’t?”

“Ana loves a mystery.” I figured if I was going to be another person for the night, I might as well be someone completely opposite of me. I hated mysteries almost as much as I hated surprises. I wanted to know things in advance. I wanted to have all the facts and information for any situation.

“Does Ana also love speaking in the third person?”

Okay, that one was totally me. It was a habit I’d had since I was a kid. A teacher noticed me speaking under my breath to myself in the third person whenever I had to do something that I was nervous about, like take a test, go out and play at recess, or read in front of the class. She sent me to the school psychologist who told me it was normal for me to do because I was an only child and going through a traumatic time, so I was basically being my own friend. It wasn’t something I’d done since I was in elementary school, which was also when I stopped being nervous about things.

“Ana does that sometimes when she gets…nervous,” I confessed.

“Do I make you nervous?” he asked.

Lie, Ana! My inner voice shouted.

“Um…” I inhaled through my nose and exhaled out of my mouth. “Yes, you do.”

“I thought you didn’t get nervous.”

“I don’t. It appears my nervous system has made an exception for you.”

A low, growly sound emanated from his chest. It wasn’t loud, but I felt the sound resonate through me, like my body was the surface of the lake, and Kyle had just skipped a rock across it. I needed an emergency exit and quick. If I didn’t remove myself from this room, I was going to pounce on him like a starving lioness on prey.

“I need to go to the bathroom. To the shower,” I quickly clarified. “I’m going to go take a shower.”

Without waiting for his response, I walked past him, grabbed the handle of my suitcase, and rolled it into the bathroom. Once I closed the door, I leaned back against the cold wooden surface.

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