Six uncertain steps later, I'm deposited on something soft.
His bed.
The glow of light—the nightstand lamp switched on—has me wincing until my eyes adjust.
Tyler’s staring down at me, a shirtless, scowling god. His toned chest floods my field of vision.
I swallow. The buzz from the alcohol has my gaze sliding down the muscles of his stomach, lingering on the indentations left by the shadows, the faint trail of hair that disappears into the top of his unbuttoned jeans.
“What did you take?” His voice is commanding, forcing my eyes up to his.
“Nothing. I had one—two drinks?” Tyler lifts a dark brow under the thick fall of hair. “Two and three-quarters drinks,” I decide.
He doesn’t smell like cologne and liquor. Tyler smells clean and warm, like a forest.
“And you’re here because…”
I think I prefer my trees quiet.
I slide onto my side, closing my eyes and sinking into the relief the new position brings. “Kellan wanted to wrestle in the roses. I didn’t.”
A string of impressive curses drifts through my head, almost as if I’d uttered them, but the voice isn’t mine.
Then he’s gone. I feel him vanish from the side of the bed only to reappear a moment later.
“Did he hurt you?” Tyler’s voice is so low it’s barely audible.
I shake my head, and the room spins. I force my eyes open to see him braced over me, close enough his knees brush the bed, holding a glass.
“It's water,” he says flatly. “You’re dehydrated.”
“You don’t have to sound like you care.”
The growl would have made me jump if I wasn’t so buzzed.
I’m not trying to be a brat. He doesn’t need to pretend when we’re alone. It’s not like with Dad and Haley, when civility is a must.
Okay, maybe I’m being a bit of a brat, but I’m protesting Kellan, the fuzziness in my head, my own stupidity in thinking I could win these people over…
Plus the shirtless Hottie McTraitor in my pool house.
The one who sinks onto the bed next to my head, making the mattress dip with his weight. My fingers brush his thigh.
“Annie. Drink the damn water.” There’s a note of worry in his impatience. “You can hate me again after.”
I sit up and drink, studying him over the rim of the cup as he studies me.
We’re closer than we’ve been in months, except for maybe the other day at my car when he moved down my body.
But now he’s searching my face—not for emotions, but for marks, for trauma, for signs of something that shouldn’t be there.
“You won’t find anything,” I murmur when I finish the water. His dark gaze comes back to mine. “Anything worth finding is underneath.”
But he takes my chin gently in his hands, turning my head and brushing back my hair.
His fingers graze my cheek, and I flinch at the sting.
“He scratched you.” Tyler utters the words as if they’re vile, and I twist out of his grasp.
“I fell into a rose bush. It bit harder than Kellan.”
I reach past him to set the cup on the nightstand, but he takes it from me before I can.
“It doesn’t feel as good as I thought it would,” I inform him.
“What doesn’t?”
I drop back onto the bed, my eyes closing before I hit the duvet. “Hating you.”
4
When I wake, my head’s on a pillow, and it smells like home.
No. Home is a fabric softener brand. This pillow smells like sunshine and cedar.
Like him.
Blinking my eyes open reveals I’m in a strange bed.
And I’m not alone.
Tyler Adams is stretched out across the sheets as if he owns them. He’s as beautiful asleep as he is awake. Maybe more so.
His firm mouth looks more forgiving with his lips parted in sleep. His eyelashes are black and so long I want to trace them with a finger. Thick, dark hair falls across his forehead, shielding him from the world.
I wonder what boys who have everything dream of.
The sheet is twisted around his legs, and his chest is bare. I drink in the cut lines of his body.
What the hell am I doing here? Did I crawl into bed with him? Did we...?
Please, God, tell me I didn’t sleep with him.
Not that I haven’t imagined having Tyler Adams pop my cherry—back before he revealed himself as an ass who cares more about popularity than me.
But, hello, that’s why we have dreams and the privacy of our own heads—so we can fantasize about stupid shit we’d never admit to ourselves in the light of day.
He groans, stirring. When his lashes flutter, my heart leaps into my throat.
Shit, shit, shit.
He stills once more, and I exhale slowly.
Pulling back the edge of the blackout curtain reveals the soft colors of the early-morning sun peeking over the hills and trees along the horizon.
I make a lap of the room I haven’t visited in months.
Tyler’s schoolbooks and bag sit on the desk my dad and Haley got when he moved in. His guitar rests against the wall by the door. He got it secondhand from my dad’s label, played it until his fingers bled.
A pile of street clothes is neatly folded on the dresser. Faded T-shirts, black and gray. A Henley. Two pair of jeans.
The same day my dad’s agent sent him a car for his final album hitting platinum, I got Tyler a Ramones T-shirt for his birthday.
He wore that shirt until the hem frayed.
I miss those days. We didn’t care about anything but having fun and being alive. Every second we spent together—messing around with music on my dad’s tour-bus-turned-studio, or questing to find the best cheese fries in Philly, or doing impressions behind the soundboard—felt like we were taking control of our lives. Making new memories.
Tyler didn’t value our friendship. He traded it for popularity at Oakwood.
I’d figured the pain would fade over time, but seeing him every day—even for a moment in the hallways or before or after school—means the ache in my gut never quite goes away.
He saved your ass last night.
He saved my ass because if something had happened, my dad might’ve thought he was involved in the party and come down on him. It’s the only explanation.
The boy I knew, the one I laughed with and dreamed about, is long gone.
I tug on the door of the pool house and step outside in my bare feet. The speakers have long since gone silent, and there’s no breeze, but I can still smell him as if he’s followed me.
I clean up the patio, collecting bottles and cans before putting the bags behind the pool house.
When the cleanup is done, I sneak upstairs to my room.
I don’t bother hitting the lights. The ominous, lumpy shapes are my king-sized bed, my dresser and desk, and the comfy armchair by the window I use to read and do homework. The dark spots along the wall across from my bed are music boxes, lined up on the shelf like guardians.
On impulse, I stop by the last one and lift the top.
“It’s a Small World” streams out until I shut the lid again.
It’s the same song every time, the same arrangement, played by gears instead of humans. The little dancing dog in a tutu has always been the best part.