Page 49 of Parallel

I feel my cheeks turning pink—even though we asked for two rooms, showing up here with no luggage has cheaters written all over it. “No bags,” Nick says casually. “We got out of a show and decided we’d rather not drive back to D.C. this late.”

We head toward the elevators. “You sound like you check into hotels with strangers all the time,” I mutter.

He raises a brow. “And you sound jealous.”

“You wish,” I reply, though he’s absolutely correct. I am painfully jealous of any woman who has ever checked into a hotel with Nick Reilly. I wasn’t the first and I won’t be the last, and that fact bothers me more than I care to admit.

The suite has two double beds with plush white duvets and a mountain of piIlows. I eye them longingly as I help him open the sofa bed, which is pretty much the opposite of plush. It also has loose Cheerios inside it, which makes my stomach turn a bit.

“We need to ask housekeeping for sheets,” I say. “Go to bed. I’ll call down there and wait out here for them.”

He laughs wearily. “Quinn, you’re not sleeping in this shitty bed.”

I pull my hair back into a ponytail with my hands and let it fall again. “You can’t sleep out here. This bed isn’t as long as you are, even if you sleep diagonally.”

His arms fold across his chest. “You are absolutely not sleeping on this thing. I spent many nights as a resident napping in a supply closet. This is luxurious by contrast.”

“And you came home afterward totally wiped out and miserable,” I counter, before I realize I don’t actually know this. I sigh heavily. “Look, this is stupid. There are two beds. You take one and I’ll take the other, unless this is some kind of ethics thing.”

He flinches. “I’m pretty sure I fucked that up the minute I agreed we could stay in the same suite.”

Shit. My life is a disaster but am I making his one too? He’ll probably need to lie to his girlfriend about this. And what are the consequences if it gets back to his boss? “Are you going to get in trouble for this?”

“It’s fine,” he says. “Don’t start feeling guilty. This was my idea, remember? Look, you were right. There are two beds. And I was a perfect gentleman the night I stayed in your room at the hospital, right?”

I have a sudden vision of him stretched out on a bed—naked from the waist up, only a sheet covering the rest—asking me to admit he’d been a gentleman the night before. I also remember how badly I wanted to suggest he stop being one. My breath comes in a single shallow burst. “Yes,” I whisper. “You were a perfect gentleman.”

“Do you want to take a shower?” he asks. My eyes widen and he bites down on a grin. “Alone, I mean. Do you want to go shower alone, behind a locked door?”

I laugh. “Yeah.”

I rinse off and emerge a few minutes later in a hotel robe. His eyes drift over me before he looks away. I guess what I’ll be sleeping in here once I remove the robe isn’t exactly lost on him, but it’s not like I can sleep in the dress I wore to work.

“You’re all done in there?” he asks.

I nod, hiding a yawn behind the back of my hand. “I’m so tired, I may be sound asleep by the time you’re out.”

His grin lifts high on one side. “Maybe you’re at fault for our unmemorable honeymoon.”

The truth is that I have no specific memory of sleeping with him. Just the build up to it, the heaviness of anticipation in the base of my stomach, a small beating heart between my legs. And it’s probably for the best that I can’t remember more than that—the last thing I need is one more way in which real life is unsatisfactory. “No, I feel certain it was you,” I reply, perching on the edge of the bed. “Maybe you were impotent.”

“If you remember that,” he says, with a look that makes my whole core clench tight, “you are definitely not remembering me.”

By the time he gets done in the bathroom, I’m in bed with the lights off. There’s just enough moonlight in the room to reveal that he is all muscle, and he’s filling out those boxer briefs in a way that would make Trevor salivate.

“I just saw your underwear.”

I see a flash of teeth. “They’re boxers. It’s like seeing me in shorts.”

“Hmmm. Interesting you think so. Expect my friend Trevor to be stopping by the hospital on casual Fridays from now on.”

He climbs into bed, the sheets pulled haphazardly to the bottom of his rib cage. I can make out the definition of his arms, even in the dim light. I’m torn equally between guilt and a desire to look some more.

He rolls toward me. “We have somehow avoided talking about the most glaringly obvious subject,” he says.

“The fact that we are currently sharing a hotel room?” I ask. “I thought we’d be better off pretending that wasn’t the case.”

“Since it could get me fired, you’re probably right. But I was referring to the fact that two different, unrelated people have told us over the past few days that you can time travel.”