I’d woken up in his arms, his nose pressed against my neck. Once he began to stir, I half expected our night together to end in this awkward walk of shame, not sweet kisses and cuddles while he schooled me on doing a load of laundry. He’d loved removing his shirt from my body to drop it in the machine. He’d taken a lot longer to do that than he had chucking in his pants, underwear, and socks.

We’d barely gotten through the first cycle before he lifted me on top of the machine and settled between my legs, reminding me why I’d woken up so wonderfully sore.

In spring fresh clothes, he’d held my hand out to the truck and opened the door for me at Winona’s. Now he was looking down at his nearly empty plate, grinning like a fool.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

He looked up at me, trying to subdue the smirk on his face and failing. “I wasn’t laughing.”

“You’re smiling. Like, a lot.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“No. I was just wondering what you were think—”

“You,” he said immediately. “The same thing I’ve been thinking about since the night we met.”

I pressed my lips together, trying to keep them from curving upward. His good mood was contagious, making it easy to forget what Sterling had said on my front steps the night before, and the worry that he was right.

Finley hadn’t called or texted in twenty-four hours. Maybe Sterling was right. Maybe she did know.

Tyler’s phone chirped, and he held it to his ear. “Hey, dickhead,” he said. His expression changed as he listened, at first concentrating on whatever was being said. Then his eyebrows bounced once. He glanced up at me for half a second, and then looked down, blinking.

“But he’s okay,” Tyler said, listening again. “He … he what? No they didn’t. Are you fucking serious? Wow … Yeah, no. I won’t. Who might come here? What kind of questions? About Trav? What do you mean? Oh. Oh, fuck. Do you think it’ll work? All right. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll tell Taylor. I said I’ll tell him. I get it. We’ll circle the wagons. Love you, too, Trent.”

He put down the phone and shook his head.

“Did you say Trav?”

“Travis,” he said, deflated. “My baby brother.”

“Everything all right?” I asked.

“Uh … yeah. I think so,” he said, lost in thought. “He just got married.”

“Really? That’s great, right?”

“Yeah … Abby is … she’s amazing. He’s crazy in love with her. I’m just surprised. They’ve been split up.”

“Oh. That’s um … that’s kind of weird.”

“They’re like that. I guess there was a fire at the college where I graduated. It’s in my hometown.”

“Anyone hurt?”