It remembered the way his eyes had gone dark when he watched my mouth. The way his voice had dipped when he’d said,I don’t hate having you here. I just haven’t figured out what to do with you yet.
Heat surged again, hot enough that I kicked one leg out of the covers just to cool off, then immediately dragged it back under because the air felt too cold without something holding me together.
Embarrassment crawled up the back of my neck as the reality of it settled in.
I wanted him to kiss me.
Not in some vague, flattering way. Not in a wouldn’t-that-be-nice-if-I-lived-a-different-life way. In a very real, very here, verynowkind of way.
He’s your brother’s best friend.
The thought snapped across my mind like a rubber band.
Hayes, with his protective big-brother glare and his tendency to treat me like a slightly defective egg. Hayes, who already carried more than his share of guilt when it came to Wes.
My stomach flipped.
I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling, chest rising and falling too fast, the sheets twisted around my legs like I’d been wrestling myself all night.
“Get it together,” I told the cracks in the paint. “He didn’t even kiss you.”
The protest felt flimsy, even to me.
The not-kiss had felt like more than most actual kisses I’d had. All that tension, all that almost, stretched tight and humming between us. It had lived in the fraction of space separating his mouth from mine, in the way he’d apologized like it hurt to pull back. In the way his name had left my lips without permission—Wes—as if my body already knew the shape of him in that context.
A tiny, stubborn thrill flickered to life under the embarrassment.
He wanted to kiss me.
It wasn’t just me inventing a moment and pinning it to the wall. He’d leaned in. He’d reached for me. His thumb had brushed my cheek like he’d needed to touch me more than he needed to do the smart thing.
My gaze slid sideways to the closed bedroom door, to the stretch of quiet hallway beyond it, and the memory of last night shifted in my mind, making room for something new.
The soft creak of floorboards. The low thud of weight moving around. The almost-impossible realization that Wes had climbed the stairs.
My heart tripped over itself as I pushed the covers back and swung my legs over the side of the bed, palms braced on the mattress while my head sorted through want and worry and whatever this new feeling was.
Somewhere in all that messy, charged space between what we’d nearly done and what we hadn’t, something had shifted.
I pressed my lips together, my pulse still a frantic flutter beneath my skin, and stood.
I walked to the door and cracked it open, cold air licking at my bare legs as I stepped into the hallway.
I just stood there, listening.
Wes’s bedroom door was open a few inches, just enough that I could see inside as I passed. The bed was made, but not in that untouched, catalog way I’d first seen it. The comforter had the faintest line down the middle where a body had been. One pillow sat a little flatter than the other, like someone had slept there and then tried to smooth the evidence away.
Something in my chest pulled tight.
He’d come upstairs. He’d slept in his own bed. Not on the couch. Not in arm’s reach of the front door. Up here, where the man he used to be had lived.
I shouldn’t have felt proud. It wasn’t my victory. I hadn’t done anything but almost kiss him and then run away like a coward.
Still, a quiet, stupid swell of warmth rose under my ribs.
He was trying, not just surviving.
“Okay,” I whispered to no one, fingers brushing the doorframe as I moved past. “Progress.”