“No, it was yours, because you’re being unreasonable,” I tell his pecs, warmth rolling off them in waves. He’s breathing a little fast, too. “Ow,” I add as an afterthought, even though it doesn’t hurt.
Gideon snorts and pushes me onto my side, and suddenly we’re face-to-face in this twin bed, one arm pinned behind my back. Our knees are touching, and if I struggle at all, the rest of us will be touching, too. Out of self-preservation, I quit struggling.
“Andi,” he says, and he sounds a little out of breath, a little gravelly, a little annoyed.
I wait for him to go on, but he doesn’t. We just… lie there, in the almost-dark, inches away from each other. My heart is thudding away, and I’m trying not to pant into his face, and I’m trying not to move at all because we’re so close that any movement at all will lead to touching and I really, really want to touch him. I want it way more than I should, to touch Gideon who doesn’t even want to sleep in the same room, and whose hair is falling across his face and who has the loveliest eyes and eyelashes, and who’s looking at me right now like—
My brain shuts off, overridden by a wave of terror and elation. I don’t move. I barely breathe, because if I breathe too much we might touch even more. His fingers around my wrist shift, his thumb stroking across the heel of my hand, still holding it behind my back.
“Gideon,” I whisper. My voice isn’t working. He swallows and it’s so quiet that I can hear it perfectly, see the hollow of his throat move in the dark. Oh, god, I’m such an asshole.
“You can’t win this,” he finally says, and lets my wrist go, the spell broken. “I’m sleeping on the couch.”
He gives me one final look and then throws a leg over me and shoves himself off the twin bed. I lie there, still breathing hard, blinking at the ceiling, feeling ten kinds of confused and twenty kinds of flustered.
Thank God I’m leaving tomorrow.
CHAPTER TWELVE
GIDEON
I sigh at the bacon in the cast iron skillet as my phone buzzes yet again on the countertop. I’m grateful for satellite technology in general—it’s why I managed to rescue Andi, after all, and that turned out to be good—but it also means that everyone in my life knows they can get a hold of me even now, and I hate that.
I also regret telling people that I’d be briefly coming into town today, because Reid wants me to stop by the house and check up on the rehab critters, and Silas is trying to cajole me into staying overnight so the four of us can have our gift exchange, and now Javi is swearing in the group chat because his presents for us aren’t finished yet, whatever they are. With Javi it’ll either be a poorly glued together popsicle stick coaster or a perfect, detailed carving of my cat Dolly that he spent months perfecting. He’s not big on middle ground.
“Okay, I’m packed,” Andi says, walking through the kitchen and into the bathroom. “Oooh, bacon?”
“Yup.”
“Thanks,” she says, and emerges from the bathroom holding her toothbrush and toothpaste, because she’s a liar who wasn’t packed yet. “Holy shit, is that blueberry pancakes?”
“Go finish packing,” I say as she comes up beside me, at least a foot away, craning her neck and getting nosy about breakfast, and it doesn’t matter that we’re nowhere near touching because goosebumps race up my right side anyway. I swear I can still feel her hand on my wrist, stronger than I was expecting, pulling me on top of her.
It kept me up half the night. It’s exactly why I didn’t want to room with her, because if she’d been a couple feet way, it would’ve been the whole night. Even if she’s not mad at me any more, it doesn’t mean she wants me thinking thoughts about her all night from four feet away. The least I can do as penance is go into the next room to stare wide-eyed at the ceiling while thinking about how she was stronger and more ruthless than I expected.
I know how she meant it: the same way as she meant the Monopoly game, as friends who grew up together. We used to invent rules to make board games more fun and we used to roughhouse every so often, back when we were kids. I was eight and didn’t really understand that attraction existed, much less feel it about Andi. Even when I was twelve and she moved away, attraction was kind of abstract, the understanding that I liked looking at women in movies and on posters.
But last night, for a few seconds, she was warm and breathing hard enough to push her ribcage into my arm and it was nothing like looking at a woman on a poster.
“I’m finished,” she says. “Where’d you get blueberries?”
“The blueberry store, and you’re not finished packing, your toothbrush is in your hand right now.”
Andi catches my eye and then rolls hers dramatically.
“Why do I ask you anything?” she says, but there’s that undercurrent of laughter in her voice that I’ve realized is usually there, and I don’t have a good response for her, so I don’t respond at all.
“Looks good,” she says, and before she leaves, she swipes her finger through the remaining pancake batter and sticks it in her mouth.
“Hey!” I shout, but she’s already gone, so I frown at the bowl instead.
Thank fuck she’s leaving today.
“Gideon,” Andi says, her mouth full. “These are amazing. I need the recipe.”
“They’re all right,” I say, and focus on putting a piece of bacon onto a bite of pancake, because I can feel myself blushing, which is ridiculous. It’s just a pancake. Andi said almost the exact same thing about the chicken soup I reheated for her the first night. She probably likes everything. I shouldn’t be this pleased that she likes my pancakes.
“If these are all right, I shudder to think what good pancakes taste like,” she says between bites. “Is it an out of body experience? Do you take a bite and instantly co—uh.”
And now we’re both bright red. Great.
“It’s a mix, I just added frozen blueberries,” I say, not making eye contact. I don’t think I can. “And couple other tweaks.”
“It’s especially good with the bacon,” she says, and we both fall silent for another moment. “The food up here is better than I’d have thought. Pancakes, bacon. That omelet yesterday was better than I can manage on, like, a regular stove.”
“I make do,” I shrug, and take another bite of pancake.
“I figured we’d be eating cereal and canned milk or something,” she goes on. “Granola bars and freeze-dried eggs, that kind of thing.”
“It’s a cabin, not prehistoric times,” I point out.
“Did they have a lot of granola bars in prehistory?”
I sigh again and don’t look at her, because I know she’s still doing that thing where she laughs at me with that look on her face that crinkles her eyes and that smile that means she’s expecting me to join in, and I can’t quite deal with it right now.
The thing is, she’s right. The two mornings before I rescued her from the tree, I had granola bars and instant oatmeal for breakfast, and I ate them standing over the kitchen counter and looking out the window. No real point in cooking when it’s just me, but her being here gives me an excuse to whip something up. Besides, the last time we took the truck out we ended up hiking a mile back to the cabin, and I’m not expecting that to happen again, obviously, but Andi may as well eat a real breakfast just in case.