Page 109 of One and Only

No reason to tempt fate beyond how we’d already tempted it.

When Beckett broke the gaze, I wondered if he felt relief. Or if the same edge of dissatisfaction knifed through him as it did me.

And for the first time since this whole thing started, I wasn’t sure that I’d come out of this without a broken heart.

Chapter24

Beckett

The steady dripping of the coffee maker was strangely hypnotic. Or maybe I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it because I’d hardly slept the night before.

There’d been no movement from the guest room, and I would’ve known if Greer had experienced the same restlessness that plagued me.

Lying in the middle of that big empty bed, I stared at the ceiling and tried desperately to banish the image of her from my racing thoughts.

Tried desperately to convince myself that I could make it through the year without blurring the lines between us any further.

We’d simply have to come up with a plausible reason for why she slept in the guest room.

Because if I had Greer in that bed with me—knowing what she sounded like, knowing what she looked like when she came—I’d give in.

The coffee stopped its brewing, and I carefully pulled down the mug she favored and set it down next to the machine.

Give in, I thought helplessly.

That was the wrong phrase.

It was passive. Hinted at submission, or a concession that needed to be made.

And when I allowed myself to think about what might happen if she was there with me, nothing was passive about it.

My body reacted immediately, standing in that quiet kitchen. I’d tear through clothes, and I’d use my teeth and tongue like weapons. My hands would take. They’d ravage and mark because I knew exactly how she’d react.

She’d devour me right back.

And when that first taste was done, when our lust had been temporarily satisfied, I knew that Greer would bend—pliable and warm and soft. She’d let me take. She’d submit.

I swallowed hard, moving away from the coffee maker while I pulled an apple and a protein shake from the fridge.

There was a text on my phone from Josie’s sister. Olive was awake and having breakfast with her cousins. She attached a picture that had me smiling.

“Good morning.”

I turned at the sound of Greer’s soft, sleepy voice. Her hair was a tangled mess around her shoulders, her mascara slightly smudged around her eyes, and the sleep pants low around her hips were worn so thin that they looked ready to disintegrate at the slightest hint of pressure.

“Morning,” I told her.

She yawned as she grabbed the bright blue coffee mug, and as she filled it, she gave me a grateful smile. “I had no idea how spoiled I’d feel with someone else making the coffee first. I’m not sure I can ever go back.”

It didn’t require much of an answer, so I didn’t give her one. But something about it, the one small, simple thing I’d done for her had my heart tumbling behind my ribs.

“What were you smiling at?” she asked.

Because the island was between us, I quietly slid my phone toward her. She angled the picture so she could see it better, and she grinned.

“Cute. How often does she get to see her cousins?”

“Not often,” I admitted. “They live in Upstate New York, so they don’t get out here very often. I think the only reason she was comfortable with the sleepover is because they came out over Christmas last year, so she saw them recently.”

---