Page 75 of Attached At Heart
“I didn’t realize you were still getting nightmares,” I said quietly when he never continued his thought.
“I hadn’t been.” He shrugged. “Not for a long time. When I moved to Boston, I had a couple. And here…” He glanced toward the window. “I think it’s just being so close to the sea.”
“We can relocate,” I offered without thinking. “We can find a hotel in Amsterdam. Further inland.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to do that.”
“Are you?—”
“I’m sure.”
“I’d like to sleep next to you tonight.” I tugged my towel tighter around me. “Wearing clothes, of course.”
I smiled, forced a laugh, tried to make this thing, whatever it was that had just happened, a joke.
But Blake didn’t laugh. And he didn’t smile. He closed his eyes at my words, swallowed hard, and then opened them again.
“Of course.”
eight years ago
BLAKE
“Can I have an appletini?”
The bartender at the bar right off campus raised a surprised brow at my order. “For your girl?”
His eyes shot over to Delaney, sitting at a table behind me. I followed his gaze and then ran his words over and over in my head.
Your girl, your girl, your girl.
But what I said aloud was, “She’s my best friend.”
And yeah, the drink was technically for her. The first time she tried to order an appletini here, a different bartender had given her shit about it, so now she always ordered something else. But I didn’t want her to know that I only ordered appletinis so she could “sneak” drinks of it while I “wasn’t looking.” So I didn’t confirm nor deny the rest of his question.
The bartender made a snort of disbelief.
“Could have fooled me.”
I nodded, accepting that as truth. Delaney and I could have fooled a lot of people into believing we were together. Pretty much everyone who knew us had asked at some point.
Everyone was fooled into believing we were more.
Everyone but us.
Or maybe everyone but Delaney.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
blake
IF WE HADN’T PLANNED to go see the tulips today—the main reason we’d traveled here to begin with—I absolutely would have come up with some kind of excuse to detach myself from Delaney. Fake a stomachache. Say that a new episode ofKnockout Newsjust dropped. Something.
But I couldn’t do that.
So here I was, watching the sinfully sweet sway of my wife’s hips in a life-altering sundress as she walked in front of me.
Life-altering.
