Page 168 of Gamebreaker

I fell asleep exactly like that, tucked into the arms of the most infuriating, inconvenient, thoroughly worthwhile person I'd ever had the spectacular misfortune of falling in love with in the middle of an argument.

And I wouldn't change one second of it.

22

Timeout

Cam

The ceiling of Harper DuBose's bedroom was not a ceiling I had ever studied before.

I'd been studying it for two hours.

It wasn't because I couldn't sleep. I could sleep anywhere. Twelve years of red-eye flights and playoff hotel rooms had cured me of needing comfort or quiet. I was awake because I'd chosen to be. Sleeping meant losing some of this, and I wasn't ready to lose a single minute of it.

Harper was asleep against my side.

I was still on top of the covers in my jeans and henley, and she was under them, curled into me as if the blankets were a technicality. Her bonnet was pressed against my shoulder, the green satin cool against my neck, the little gold stars still sitting crooked. Her hand lay open on my chest. Her breathing was slow and even and completely unguarded. She'd fallen asleep mid-sentence, explaining her strategy for the caption she was going to write about me, her voice going slow and then slower and then gone. I'd lain there in the dark with my arm around her and memorized her ceiling. The string lights she'd left on in the living room sent a thin line of gold under the bedroom door. The smoke detector pulsed green every thirty seconds. In the corner, where the wall met the ceiling, there was a cobweb she had either never noticed or had decided was not her problem.

It was three forty-something in the morning.

The last time I'd lain awake watching her sleep, it had been in my own house, at five in the morning, in gray light, counting the bruises I'd left on her and knowing she'd be gone by sunrise. I'd watched her put herself back together piece by piece. I'd told myself the hollowness after was the cost of my choice, and that one day I'd stop feeling it.

I never stopped feeling it.

And now she was here, in her own bed, in her own apartment, her hand open and trusting on my chest. She wasn't going anywhere. I was awake because I was afraid that if I closed my eyes, I'd wake up alone in my house and find out I'd dreamed all of it.

I tightened my arm around her, not enough to wake her, just enough to feel that she was real.

On my wrist, the hair tie pressed into my skin. She'd given it back to me. Keep it. I'd been wearing it for three weeks as the only part of her I was allowed to have, and three hours ago, she'd slid it back over my knuckles herself.

I turned my face into the satin of her bonnet and breathed her in, and my eyes burned, and I let them.

She shifted.

It wasn't the loose movement of deep sleep. Her hand flattened on my chest with purpose. I felt her breathing change, slow to aware, and understood she'd been lying awake for some of this too.

She lifted her head off my shoulder.

In the gold light from under the door, I could see her face clearly. Her dark eyes were wide open. She didn't look confused or groggy. She looked direct and clear, the way she looked when she'd made a decision and intended to see it through.

We looked at each other.

I didn't speak. Nothing in me wanted to fill this silence.

She rose up onto her elbow, slowly, and the sheets slid down her shoulder. She looked at me the way she sometimes did when she thought I wasn't paying attention. The love in her eyes made my heart swell.

Her hand came up to my jaw. Her thumb traced the line of it, from the corner to the center, mapping it. I stayed still and let her.

"Cam," she said.

"Harper."

"You've been awake this whole time."

"Yeah."

"Me too, almost." There was a brief pause. "I kept waking up to check that you were still here."