Wells replaced the squat bar in its cradle with a clang and turned to face the empty twenty-four-hour resort fitness center. Country music filtered into the air-conditioned space from an invisible speaker, a halogen light buzzing overhead. It was four o’clock in the morning and he really needed to be sleeping, but after three hours of dozing in front of the television, he’d woken up wired and knew there was no way he’d go back to bed.
He’d had two options.
Burn off some energy at the gym. Or go knock on Josephine’s door and demand to know again if things were going to be weird between them now that they’d hooked up. Although “hooked up” sounded incredibly insufficient, considering he’d forgotten his room number, date of birth, and the current sitting president afterward. Waiting until a socially acceptable hour to make sure their relationship hadn’t been compromised was making him restless.
He wanted to get it straightened out before their round got underway in the morning and they wouldn’t have a chance to speak off camera until late afternoon.
Without some reassurance, his concentration would be fucked.
To be fair, it was going to be capital-F Fucked no matter what, because of Josephine raking her fingernails down his chest and challenging him to finish under par, so he could come inside her.
Wells groaned out loud, splintering the silence of the fitness center.
Yeah, safe to say their dynamic had changed a lot since yesterday—
And that scared the living shit out of him. If anything, he’d assumed he’d screw up on the golf course and send her packing. This? Was an entirely different ball game. He didn’t have, didn’t do, didn’t understand relationships.
At all.
Way to dive right into the deep end with your caddie, man.
For the first time in his entire life, Wells kind of wished he could run this whole situation by another dude. He could try and call Burgess, but as far as Wells could tell, the ill-tempered hockey player was more emotionally stunted than Wells. Also, Burgess would almost certainly hang up on him, so yeah. No calls would be made today.
Buck was out, in terms of fatherly advice.
His own parents were God only knew where. Somewhere in Florida, last he’d heard.
Surprisingly, Josephine’s father came to mind. If only Wells didn’t need advice about the man’s actual daughter, that might be an option.
Guess he’d have to figure this out as it came. Going it alone was nothing new for him.
He’d just never been in a romantic dilemma before.
And nothing had ever seemed to count this much.
This woman . . . she counted. Big-time. His gut wasn’t in fucking knots over nothing.
Wells paced across the hardwood floor in the direction of the water cooler, but he drew up short when something outside the glass double-doored entrance moved, out of the corner of his eye. The resort pool was right outside the gym, glowing like a green jewel in the darkness, and a silhouette he knew very well stood peering through the gate.
Josephine?
He walked straight into the glass door.
The smack of his knee and forehead colliding with the glass, followed by a loud reverberation, made Josephine whip around, startled, then finally deflate with relief when she saw him. “Did you just walk into the door?” came her muffled question from outside.
“No. I knocked on it.” Hastily, he exited, letting the door swing shut behind him, cutting off an elevator-music version of “Old Town Road.” “To get your attention.”
A twinkle danced in her eye. “Right . . .”
Just like he hadn’t put his hoodie on backward after they’d nearly gotten busy on the couch. His entire equilibrium was off, thanks to her. Even his depth perception felt skewed as he approached her in the early morning fog. “I really wish you wouldn’t go out alone at odd hours like this, belle.”
She gave him a once-over, taking in his gym shorts and sweaty T-shirt. “You’re out at odd hours.”
“Yes, but I’m big and mean. You’re short and sweet.” Ignoring her pursed lips, he eyed the emerald pool lying beyond her shoulder. “Were you planning on going for a swim?”
“I didn’t bring a bathing suit with me, so I was just going to stick my feet in.” She reached out and rattled the gate leading into the pool area. “It’s closed. I had a hunch it would be, but I figured I’d take the walk, anyway.”
“Mmmm.” Wells slipped the room key out of his pocket and approached the locked gate, taking a moment to study the mechanism. He lifted the handle slightly, then slid his card down between the slot and the metal tab, popping it open. “ ‘Closed’ is a subjective term.”
Josephine blinked. “Hotel security might feel differently.”
“At this time of the morning, it’s one guy in a golf cart and he’s probably sleeping.” He tucked his tongue into the inside of his cheek. “Do you want to get wet or not?”
“Wow.” She pushed his shoulder. “Real nice.”
“I was talking to your feet.”
Lips twitching with mirth, she walked past Wells through the gate he held open, circling to a shadowed section of the pool and sitting down on the concrete edge. Wells watched her as he approached, enjoying the way she pulled her knees up to her chest, slipping off her sandals and setting them side by side. So neatly. She rolled her pajama pants up to her knees and tested the water with her big toe, before dropping both of them beneath the surface, sighing and tipping her head back, eyes drifting shut.
“Are you going to join me?” she asked.
Was that a real question? He’d only gone to the fitness center in the first place to prevent himself from waking her up too early. Just so he could be around her. And find out how she felt about last night. Right now, she was giving away absolutely nothing.
Watching her closely for signs of regret, Wells toed off his sneakers and peeled off his socks, tossing them into a heap in the middle of the walkway. He joined her on the ledge and sank his feet into the cool water. Taking advantage of the fact that her eyes were still closed, her head tipped back, he ran his attention down the front of her throat and literally felt his pupils expand. Did he have the freedom to lean over and sample that skin with his tongue or were they still figuring out when, where, and how it was okay to touch?
“I was going to come knock on your door,” Wells found himself saying, with little to no prompting from his brain. Now she was looking at him and he had no choice but to qualify that with more words. “I wanted to make sure you didn’t feel weird about what happened. Wanted to get on the same page before our tee time.”
She leaned back on her hands, considering him. Outwardly, she was the picture of nonchalance, but even in the moonlight, he could see a slight flush on her neck. “Do I seem weird about it?”
“No,” he said slowly. “Then again, you’re out wandering the grounds before dawn.”
She wet her lips, rolled her left shoulder. “All right, I’ll admit I was a little caught off guard by the way you left so fast.”
That admission made his pulse scatter like a bag of dropped Skittles. “I left so fast because I was caught off guard.”
“By what?”
“How good it was.” When relief showed up in her green eyes, his sweat turned clammy on his skin. Had his leaving her room so quickly caused her to feel insecure? “I don’t know, my brain just kind of switched off when we started kissing. It’s never done that before.”
Were her cheeks rosier now or was that a trick of the moonlight? She looked almost . . . pleased by the fact that he’d lost his ability to think when her mouth touched his. At least one of them was cool with it. He might as well have ridden a roller coaster backward. “What do you usually think about during sex?” she asked, finally.
Red flags waved in front of his face. “Josephine, this conversation isn’t happening.”
“No, I really want to know.” She folded her hands in her lap. “I’ll go first—”
“Josephine, don’t even think of saying another word.” His blood pressure was now somewhere in the clouds. “Fine. I guess I concentrate on . . . not saying anything that might lead the woman on, while still making sure everyone has a good time.” He tried to read her reaction to that and couldn’t. “I’ve never been an asshole to women, Josephine. I just don’t want to get stuck with one of them.”
She put a hand on her chest. “I knew deep down you were a hopeless romantic.”
“Hey, they probably didn’t want to get stuck with me, either.” He rubbed an impatient hand on his thigh, wondering how the hell he’d gone from squats to baring his soul in a matter of minutes. “What I’m saying is, I wasn’t worrying about leading you on. Or getting stuck with you. I might have been surprised enough by that to leave a little abruptly. Believe me, it wasn’t you.”
Josephine was quiet for so long, her feet moving side to side in the water, that he almost begged her to say something, but she finally said, “You left out the part where your hoodie was on backward—”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Her laughter danced over the surface of the water. The silence was okay after that, but it lasted only until she tipped her head toward the gate he’d jimmied open. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but that wasn’t the first time you’ve picked a lock.”
“No. But it has been a while. Good to know I’ve still got it.”
“Where did you hone these skills?”
He started to explain, then stopped. “I’m saying a lot of things this morning that make me sound like bad news.”
“Don’t worry, I already knew you were bad news.” She smiled, letting him know she was kidding. Thank God. “I also . . . like you, anyway.” She lifted her blue toes out of the water, wiggling them in the moonlight. “Remember?”
Josephine liked him.
You already knew that. She let you come on her tits.
Right. Maybe every time she said it out loud—or gave him proof—it would make him feel like a hero? That was something to look forward to. Recently, he’d been looking forward to a lot of things. Reassured that he wasn’t making himself sound like a supervillain, Wells continued. “I didn’t just fall in with a bad crowd growing up, I started the bad crowd. Kids who had too much freedom. Most of us got attention only when we landed in trouble, so we made a lot of it.” He hesitated before telling her the next part. “On nights when my parents were using the house for a party, I used to break into my middle school to sleep in the gym. It was too loud at home. The party might end, but they’d fight after too much alcohol. I just . . . got really good at picking locks.”
Josephine slid a little closer, until their hips were touching. “I wish you didn’t have to do that. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He rubbed a circle into her lower back, sort of entranced by the way their feet looked together in the water. “When I moved in with my uncle, I didn’t have to sleep at school anymore. But later, I got caught with a stolen bike and the family court judge gave me an ultimatum. Spend time in juvie or get a job. I took the second option, but I wasn’t about to let some judge teach me a lesson, so I started stealing the odd watch out of lockers, purely out of spite. Or maybe peeling a few hundred-dollar bills off a wad of them. That all stopped once Buck got ahold of me, but yeah . . . the pool gate wasn’t even a challenge.”
For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of their feet sluicing slowly through the water. “But you never totally stopped getting into trouble, did you? That fight a few weeks ago . . . and all the ones before that.”
Wells sighed. “Yeah. I guess it’s not something that has ever fully left me. The inner battle. I find that kind of comforting sometimes. Is that bad? I don’t ever want to be a man who backs down from a fight.”
“I think that’s okay. As long as you’re fighting for something worthwhile.”
Mentally, he jogged back through the last few punches he’d thrown. “Let’s say I’m sitting in a bar, minding my business, and some drunk stranger in a DraftKings hat starts calling me every name in the book for ruining his fantasy golf lineup. Then, let’s say he throws a very saucy chicken wing at me. Would it be worthwhile to break his nose?”
“Obviously, yes.”
They shared a growing smile, then went back to looking at their feet in the water. “What about you, belle? There has to be some trouble in your past. A school suspension or a little trouble with the cops. Public indecency. Give me something.”
She squinted into the darkness. “Tallulah likes to party. More than me. She has this crazy high tolerance for alcohol and she’s a fun drunk, so it never mattered how often I drank Diet Coke at the bars, she’d still make it fun. More often than not, she went out with casual friends or a guy and I stayed home and waited for an entertaining report the next morning. But this one time, she convinced me to go to New Orleans for her birthday . . .”
“I like where this is going.”
“Do you? Because I smoked pot for the first time and went on a ghost tour, which, in case you’re wondering, is the number one thing you should not do after smoking weed, probably right behind sky diving and attending a live birth. Especially in an unfamiliar city.”
Wells’s ribs were starting to ache from holding in his laughter.
So he finally let it out on a shuddering gust of breath.
“We ended up in a graveyard, where I swore that bony fingers were poking up out of the ground.” She gave him a solemn look that sent him over the edge. “Spoiler: it was grass.”
“Ironic. Is that where the night ended?”
“No, as it happens. When the tour was over, I was so worried I might ruin everyone’s good time with my freak-out that I doubled down and did two shots of tequila, just to show everyone that I was having a good time. And that I wasn’t worried the ghosts had followed us from the graveyard—even though I really was. Literally, I was checking over my shoulder the whole night. But bottom line, the tequila kicked in and I ended up flashing a police horse. With a policeman on top.”
Wells shook his head slowly. “There are so many twists and turns in this story, my neck is going to be sore. Tell me you didn’t get arrested for that.”
“Not in New Orleans, no. I just got beads.”
“From the officer?”
“No, the horse. But that could have been the weed talking.”
Wells had to bury his face in the crook of his arm to keep his laugh from waking up the whole damn resort. “That might be the greatest story I’ve ever heard.”
“Thank you.”
It wasn’t until she glanced behind her, and down, that Wells realized he’d been rubbing her lower back in a circle the whole time she’d been speaking. Now, in the silence, she moved closer to him and he thought, Yes, more kissing, but she surprised him by laying the side of her face on his shoulder, instead. What was the feeling that swept through his chest like a storm wind? Some sort of combination of protectiveness and . . . gratitude that she felt relaxed and secure enough with him to use him as a pillow.
A series of beeps went off in his gym shorts—and her pajama pants.
Her blood sugar must be low.
Josephine lifted her head, her attention swinging from his pocket up to his eyes. “You downloaded the app and accepted my follow request? You didn’t have to, you know.” Worry clouded into the green of her eyes. “It beeps constantly. Like, it never ends—”
He kissed her.
It happened without any critical thought involved. Kissing her was like the words to a favorite song. He simply knew the lyrics.
“Of course I followed you in the app, belle. Soon as I got to my room last night and turned my hoodie the right way around.” Chest tight, he reached into the opposite pocket of his shorts and fished out the roll of glucose tabs he’d put there, handing them to her wordlessly.
She stared at them for a beat before taking them. “You’re carrying tabs?”
Wells rolled his neck, praying his behavior wasn’t overkill. It’s not like he’d even expected to see her this morning. He was just trying to get into the habit of carrying them, so he would never forget.
Josephine still seemed to be at a loss for words. “You just . . . did that? And you didn’t make a big deal out of it.” Uncapping the tube, she popped two purple disks into her mouth, chewing slowly. “Thank you, Wells. Really.”
Ask me to walk on broken glass next. Watch me not even hesitate. Those sentiments wanted to dive out of his mouth, but he followed his gut when it came to this woman and he sensed, he always sensed, that she didn’t like to dwell on the topic of diabetes too long. “Who makes you dance? Prince? Madonna. The Weeknd?”
A grin slowly shaped her mouth. “Nope. And stop trying to catch me off guard.”
“It’s only a matter of time before I figure it out.”
“Keep dreaming.”
As carefully as possible, so he wouldn’t dislodge her cheek or cause her to sit up straight again, Wells put his arm around Josephine’s shoulder. After a few minutes of silence, he looked down to find her eyes closed, her breathing deep and even. Was she sleeping?
Yeah. She was.
On him.
He allowed himself a moment of stunned pride before he gently lifted Josephine into his lap, turned, got onto his knees, and stood. He carried her to the row of white plastic lounge chairs arranged near the perimeter of the pool area and sat down, leaning back and closing his eyes with his caddie in his arms. Doing his best to memorize the feeling of her before his own eyelids grew heavy, as well. Just before he fell asleep, the most absurd thought occurred to him. What if the problem that morning hadn’t been their inability to sleep?
What if they’d been unable to sleep . . . apart?
