Page 48 of Night Shift

I’m already scrambling off the side of the bed, ducking down to pick up my jeans.

“Knight!” Jabari calls again, and he’s parroted by a few other voices before someone bangs on the door again. It makes me suddenly and inexplicably furious.

“Where the fuck is my underwear?” I hiss. “I don’t want your friends to see me like this!”

Vincent makes a face, then gives a pointed look down at his own crotch, where his unbuttoned jeans are stretched taut over a rapidly softening yet still impressive erection. Right. I’m sure he doesn’t exactly want to be seen by his friends right now either.

It seems like a bad time to point out that they’ve ruined our happy ending in more than one sense of the phrase.

While I duck into the bathroom, Vincent presses his cheek to his bedroom door. He clears his throat twice, but his voice is still incriminatingly low and rumbling when he speaks.

“Hey, Jabari?”

“What’s up?” Jabari’s response comes muffled through the wood.

Vincent’s mouth opens, and I’m about a hundred percent certain he wants to say fuck off, but what comes out is: “Can you give me, like, twenty minutes? I’ll meet you downstairs.”

“Don’t give me that shit. You’re ready. No more procrastinating.”

“Henderson,” Vincent croaks. “I swear to God. Ten minutes. Fuck, I’ll take five.”

“Nah, man. C’mon. We’re on a mission to—”

“Fuck. Off.”

Vincent turns to me, his expression one straight out of a Shakespearean tragedy. Without a single word exchanged, I know we both understand that his teammates aren’t going anywhere until they get what they want.

Vincent crosses the room in a few angry strides and snatches his wallet off his bedside table, hesitates, then comes toward me instead of heading right for his door. He presses a hand to the wall just outside the bathroom and leans in to look at me.

“I’ll take them down the hall and get them to do another round of shots or something,” he whispers. “You can sneak out when the coast is clear, and I’ll meet you downstairs. Or—or you can stay here, and I can come back?”

Even as he suggests this with a spark of hope in his eyes, I can tell he knows it’s going to be impossible to slip away from his friends again.

It’s not fair. I’m not ready for tonight to be over.

“I should go downstairs,” I say, moving to shut the door.

“Kendall.”

I freeze and meet his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“I might hate your friends,” I reply.

“That makes two of us.”

Vincent turns to go.

“Wait,” I say. He does. I wrap one hand around the back of his neck, my fingers tangling in his thoroughly rumpled hair, and pull myself up onto my toes to kiss him. Vincent returns the gesture with equal fervor, rocking against me so eagerly that I have to arch my back and shift my feet to accommodate him. Our lips separate with a wet smack.

“One for the road,” I whisper.

Vincent shakes his head. “This isn’t helping with the boner.”

He kisses me again—this time on the forehead—and then takes a step back and exhales hard. For a long moment, we stare at each other. I try to memorize this moment—to soak it all in—just in case it’s all I ever get.

It doesn’t feel like an ending, a hopeful part of me whispers.

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