Page 68 of You, with a View

He stands and turns, hands on his lean hips. “Why absurd?”

I give him a look. His tiny smirk reveals he knows exactly why. I can’t give what shifted between us today a name, but now it’s as emotional as it is physical. I crave both things with him.

Maybe he craves it, too. He picks his pillow up and pads over, pausing at the bed’s edge. He looms there, chin dipped toward his chest as our eyes lock.

“Are you sure?”

I let out a breath, pulling down the covers on his side. “Rarely, but about this, yes.”

I’m wearing the shorts he mistook as underwear the other night, and his gaze goes dark taking them in, just before the room goes dark when he turns off the lamp.

Sight is replaced by sound: The brush of his skin against the sheet as he slips into bed. The rustle of the covers when he pulls them over both of us. The squeak of the mattress springs adjusting to his weight. The damp parting of his lips and his soft inhale.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had someone I cared about in my bed, three years since my last relationship. Having Theo next to me, feeling the heat and weight of his body is unbearably intimate. That it’sTheo, the boy who occupied so many of my thoughts a decade ago, the man who’s turning everything upside down now, makes the moment surreal. It’s so coincidental that I’m starting to think it can’t be anything but inevitable.

“Good night,” I whisper, lit up with awareness. I won’t sleep for hours.

He lets out a breath. “ ’Night.”

Even minutes later, my heart is beating too hard to close my eyes. It’s the same sensation I felt leaping into the water, that heady rush of adrenaline. But I have nowhere to expend it, so it just keeps pulsing through my veins in an endless cycle of anticipation.

I shift my head the barest inch to see if Theo’s asleep, only to find him looking at me, his eyes glittering in the darkness. The rush becomes a wave. I’m underwater again, but my scream’s caught in my throat. “What?”

“I don’t know,” he murmurs. “You.”

It’s the way he says it, stripped bare, that has me turning fully. I press my lips together, waiting for him to go on.

He does. “You said I didn’t have to sleep on the floor last night, but I stayed there because I wanted the alternative too much. Tonight, I told myself if you said it again, I’d ignore it like I did last night.”

“Why?”

“Because I want it too much,” he repeats. “And after Vegas, we modified the truce—”

“Yeah, well, I think the truce is broken.” We crossed a line earlier. Or maybe we stepped into a bubble where we aren’t who we were ten years ago. We aren’t even who we were two weeks ago. “I needed that earlier. The yelling with you, I mean. But I...”

“Tell me.”

“I’m nervous to say it,” I admit. Even that feels like too much.

“Tell me,” he repeats, softly this time. “You’re not doing it alone.”

“It made me need this, too.”

“What’s this?”

He’s pushing me, but the timbre of his voice is tight. It’s as if he already knows the answer, and it’s the same as his. “You, here in this bed. Us, letting whatever’s happening between us just... happen. We’re both in a place where we need that, don’t you think?”

His voice drops low, singing down my spine. “You know why I’d need it. Besides the physical attraction, why do you?”

“Too many reasons to count,” I say, and he breathes out alaugh. I close my eyes, pushing aside every responsibility and decision and conversation that’s waiting for me back home. We have nine days left. The thought of really sinking into it, of not overthinking or worrying, is the pressure release I desperately need. “We don’t have to name it. It can be whatever we need it to be while we’re here.”

“And my granddad?”

“If we don’t have concrete expectations, will he?”

“Maybe.” He pauses. “But possibly less so if we’re chill around him.”

“I wasn’t planning on dry humping you in the van, so...”

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