Page 153 of Vacancy

I exhaled and touched his cheek. “Don’t ever keep anything from me again.”

He shifted his face back and forth insistently. “I won’t. I swear.”

“Alright, then. I forgive you.”

“Thank you.” He lifted his face and looked up into my eyes. “And thank you for coming to me last night. You’re the air I breathe. I felt like I was suffocating without you. I love you that fucking much. But the idea of you going to class, of possibly getting hurt… Fuck, you wouldn’t just be putting yourself in danger today. You’d be risking what I value most. And I can’t… I just…”

When he squeezed his eyes shut, I cupped his face in my hands. “Hey...” I murmured before I traced his jaw with my fingers. “I love you too.”

His eyes flew open, and he drew in a harsh, dazed breath.

“And it scares me just as much as it scares you,” I added. “But we’ll be safe. We’ll do this any way you want to, we won’t take chances, and everything will be alright. Okay? I don’t plan on dying today.”

“I want to be able to track your phone at all times,” he insisted. “And if I can’t be with you, you’ll let one of the other guys hang out with you. You don’t go anywhere alone.”

“Deal.”

He still looked sick with worry, but at least he nodded, giving in. “Okay.

Grinning, I looked around his face, then plastered my mouth to his, kissing him hard.

* * *

After showering and dressing,Damien and I left his room, hand in hand.

In the kitchen, Foster and Parker were there with Hudson and Alec, and all four were gathered around the table, poring over an oversized piece of paper that had chicken scratch marks written on it.

Damien and I both jerked to a stop to blink at them in astonishment. “Do I even want to know what y’all are doing?” he asked.

“Strategizing our game plan,” Foster announced with a big grin as he straightened to lift his attention from the sheet. Using the marker in his hand, he started to point. “Here, we’ve put together all our class schedules, and it looks as if we can have someone keeping Oaklynn company for every minute of the day except during this ten to eleven o’clock block right here.”

As he tapped on an empty square on the sheet, I blinked, stumped. “But how did you get my schedule?”

Foster tipped his face in confusion. “Why did we need your schedule? We just needed someone available to be with you whether you were in class or not.”

Next to me, Damien scowled. “But what makes you think she’s evengoingto campus today?”

Hudson snorted. “Because she said she wanted to last night, and pushover that you are, there was no way in hell you were going to be able to talk her out of it.”

As Damien scoffed, I grinned and ran a finger teasingly up the center of his chest. “You have some very perceptive friends, Archer.”

He grumbled irritably under his breath, only to shut up when I cupped his face and drew his mouth down to mine for a kiss.

Just as he lassoed an arm around my waist and tugged me flush against him, Keene shuffled into the kitchen, still wearing his sleep shorts and looking half-awake as he carried an empty mug.

“Hey, hey,” he warned. “None of that. Not unless you got some lip action for me too.”

When he leaned in, fluttering his sleepy lashes and puckering his mouth, I grimaced and placed a hand on his forehead to push him back. “Dude. No… Ew.”

But his idea of getting something to drink did sound good, so I slipped out of Damien’s arms to dart to the Keurig machine in front of Keene. Opening the cabinets above it, I yanked down a cup and set it under the spout before digging through the drawer underneath to find one of the cappuccino brewing capsules that Damien had bought for me.

As I slotted it in, Keene finally seemed to realize what I was doing.

Scowling, he glanced at Damien. “Archer…” he whined. “She just cut in front of me.”

“Survival of the fittest, man,” Damien answered distractedly as he wandered to the table to get a look at the schedule. “I can skip my ten o’clock class,” he said, frowning down at everything. “And I’ll take this hour too.” Grabbing the marker from Foster, he marked through Parker’s name for the one-to-two o’clock block so he could write in his own.

“Hey,” Parker argued. “That was the only time I had to play bodyguard.”

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