Page 42 of Stay with Me

“Calla?” His voice wasn’t loud, but it was still like a crack of thunder.

Should I pretend to be asleep? I squeezed my eyes shut, thinking that was stupid, but I was willing to give that a shot.

“I know you’re not asleep.”

Damnit.

I still didn’t say anything because I was pretty sure I was beyond speaking. A wave of tiny goose bumps spread across my skin as I slowly opened my eyes. Sad, but true, I’d never been in bed before with a guy in the same room. Well, not entirely true. Jacob, a classmate at college, had been in my dorm once, but that wasn’t the same thing as right now.

The floor didn’t creak again, but the bed suddenly dipped under his weight. Forget pretending to be asleep. My body wouldn’t allow it. I rose onto my elbow, twisting my neck back, my eyes peeling wide. In the silvery moonlight, I could see the tips of his high cheekbones and the form of his body. That was more than enough.

“What are you doing?” My voice was pitched embarrassingly high.

Jax was leaning on his hip, his hand planted into the bed near mine. “You weren’t sleeping.”

“Yes, I was.” I was a terrible liar.

“I think I’ve listened to you moving around in this bed for the last hour.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but my heart had turned into a steel drum.

“And I’ll admit, it’s pretty distracting.” In the shadowy room, he shifted closer, and I tensed.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted out.

His chuckle was deep and low. “You don’t need to apologize. It was distracting in a good way.”

After I mentally repeated that, I still had no idea what that meant.

“Do you normally have this much trouble sleeping?”

“Huh?”

“Sleeping,” he repeated, and I could hear the amusement in his voice. “Do you normally have a hard time at it?”

Did I normally have this much trouble handling a conversation? I bit down on the inside of my lip and shook my head. “Not until I came back here.”

Jax didn’t respond for a moment, and then he said, “I feel ya.”

“You do?” Surprise shuttled through me.

“Yeah, when I first came home—not here, but home, I had a hell of a time falling asleep and staying asleep through the night. Too much going on up here.” He raised a hand toward where his head was.

Common sense told me I needed to tell him to get the hell out of my bed, or I needed to hightail out of it and put some space between us, but curiosity got the best of me. “Home from where?”

There was another pause, and then he shifted again—rolled onto his back, his head on the pillows next to mine. Onto his back, beside me, in a bed that I was in! What in the holy hell? My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth as my heart bounced around, and then the flutter in my stomach got all kinds of excited.

“I was overseas,” he said, and it took me a moment to remember what he was talking about.

My brain sorted that out and I only came up with a one-word response. “Overseas?”

“Why don’t you lie down and I’ll tell you?”

Lie down? In bed? With him? No way. No way, Jose. I was frozen in this position. Nope. Nope. Nope.

“Come on,” he said in a soft voice, the kind of tone that did funny things to my brain cells, melting them together like putting butter in a microwave. “Lie down, Calla. Relax.”

I don’t know what it was about the way he said it, but my left arm caved under me, and the next thing I knew, my right cheek was plastered to the pillow.

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