Page 75 of Not in My Book

Shopping at bookstores and kissing in between the stacks.

But I didn’t know how to say it. So, I reached up and pressed a soft kiss against his mouth, wishing he could tell all that I meant by it.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Are you still there?” I asked quietly.

“I’m here.” He sounded breathless, his voice rough.

“That was …” I paused searching for the right word. “Good. That was good. We did a good job.”

He laughed softly. “We did.”

A silence blanketed over us. I was desperate to break the awkwardness of the call, but I was too scared. We had just crossed a million lines in less than an hour. I tried to calm my still beating heart, but the scene we had written was playing in technicolor in my mind. I shivered, wishing Aiden were here, next to me.

I picked my phone up from my bed carefully, lying back and placing it on my chest.

“Aiden?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want to fight with you anymore.” My eyes were squeezed shut, ready to block out the world in case this didn’t go as planned. “We don’t have to be friends if you don’t want, but I’m tired of fighting with you.”

“Me too,” he confessed. “Fighting with you isn’t as fun as it used to be.” He hesitated. “I miss you.”

“You miss me?” My heart leapt, hope blossoming.

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

I couldn’t help the smile that took over my face. “Truce?” I finally opened my eyes, willing him to answer quickly. But he took so long that I thought he would say no. He took so long I wondered if he’d walked away from the phone.

“Truce,” he said softly. “But I don’t know if I can go back to the way we were, Rosie.”

My head jerked back in surprise. “Why not?”

“It’s complicated. I think we’re better for each other at a distance.”

“Oh. Okay.” I tried not to let him hear the disappointment in my voice. I wanted more—I wanted everything we’d written, and I wanted it to be us. “I’ll work on the next chapter and send it to you.”

I tossed the phone on my bed and flopped back onto my pillow. Blindly, I reached for my other pillow and stuffed it over my head, screaming into it. All of this would’ve been avoided if I kept my hands to myself. If I’d let my romantic fantasies stay fantasies.

Aiden was right, though—I did live in a world inside my head. But it was because I liked it so much better. In my made-up world, I was everything my soulmate wanted, and my soulmate was real. He existed and he was waiting for me and he loved me—flaws and all.

I sat up and reached for my laptop, torturing myself by reading my short story another time.

“What if we don’t feel the same tomorrow?” I whispered. Hunter and I were lying face to face, the sheets bunched around our waists.

“I will.” He brushed a lock of hair behind my ear. His finger continued to trace my jaw, then my chin, then back up to my lips. His thumb brushed over my bottom one, pulling it apart from the top.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because.” He shifted onto his elbow smiling down at me. “I’ve always felt this way, Max. There hasn’t been a second where I wasn’t wondering what you were thinking and if it was of me. I’ll feel this way tomorrow, the day after, and all the days after that.”

—Excerpt fromUntitledby Rosie Maxwell and Aiden Huntington

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It was Christmas Eve and I was alone. I tried to not let it get to me. I put on a Christmas movie as I brushed my teeth and made breakfast, trying to get into the spirt, but it just made me feel more pitiful.

---