Page 37 of Deep In Love
A sharp cough breaks my trance, and the tips of my ears burn.
“Uh…what?”
A slow, knowing smile glides across his face, and the dimples in his cheeks hypnotize me.
“I was asking if we could watch more of the TikToks.”
“Sure.” I spin away, hoping to conceal my blush in the darkness, but Mateo removes the pillows dividing us, and I’m confident he could see the red of my cheeks all the way at the bottom of the ocean.
My breath hitches in the quiet room, and I conceal it with a cough.
While we scroll through videos, he leans his head on his bicep, his gaze fixed over my shoulder. Every soft chuckle causes goosebumps along my skin.
Eventually, my heartbeat finds a steady rhythm the longer we watch, but after a story time video, a heavy weight falls onto my shoulder. Affection lodges in my throat when I turn my head and find Mateo’s cheek resting on my arm.
A pang of longing strikes my chest, and it’s like a douse of frigid water, dragging me back to reality. This is not meant for me. I am not the found safety needed to fall asleep on someone’s shoulder. I am not soft or vulnerable in the way men desire.
My body is not a divine shrine, but a battlefield, full of emotional wounds and physical flaws.
These moments—the ones hidden in the fold of silence where people fall in love—they don’t belong to me, but perhaps for the first time in my life, I desperately want them to.
It terrifies me, the deep-rooted yearning that burrows in my chest.
I pack it away with every other emotion I’ve buried over the years, locking it into a cage. It’s easier to pretend those feelings don’t exist than allow them to consume what’s left of me.
“Mateo,” I murmur, and he rustles, his body inching closer. My heart sinks. “You need to put your mask on.”
His sleepy eyes crack open, and so, so slowly, he rolls to the other side of the bed and slides the mask over his face. The area where he touched me cools, and a small voice whispers for him to come back, but I throw it into the cage where it can’t grow and hurt me.
I plug our phones in and turn off the light, and as I fall asleep, I feel like a fool for missing how his body felt against mine.
Chapter 12
Charlie
“There you are!”
The sudden noise surprises me, and my ears meet my shoulders as I drop the pipette onto the bench. It bounces and slams against a microscope. Sofía bounds into the lab, searching the space before running to the back bay and falling into a rolling chair.
She plays with the preserved specimen on the benchtop in front of her, lining the jars of fish and invertebrates in a neat row.
“Uh…here I am?” I pause my music and rerack the pipette. “Did I miss a meeting or something?”
I’ve sequestered myself in the lab all morning, taking advantage of the quiet space to process samples and avoid Mateo.
So far, things have been goingspectacularly. I’m halfway done with my protocol to extract DNA from water samples, and I haven’t seen him since breakfast, where he offered me an iced coffee and I nearly melted into a puddle on the floor.
I need space to unravel what’s going on with my mind, body, and spirit, and why each has decided Mateo is the object of its desire.
Frankly, it’s concerning, and I haven’t been able to disentangle each thread to discover where the foreign emotions originate.
“I’m hiding from Jett,” Sofía says, spinning in the lab chair, her long brown hair flying around.
“Why?”
“He keeps asking me random questions, and when I asked why, he said, ‘I’m trying to understand you,’ which freaked me out. Then he said he thought I was pretty, and running felt like the best plan of action.”
Right on.
