I’d been spending more time here. With him. The reminder was less welcome than his touch. I rolled over on top of him, both hands on his chest. “I’ll stop talking.”

He caught his thumb under the strap of my swimsuit. “I didn’t ask you to.”

He never did. He just let me talk. At this point, I was fairly certain I could tell him that I’d discovered that several key members of high society were actually tigers wearing people suits, and he would have just muttered, “It figures.”

“What if Lily’s parents knew the Lady of the Lake?” I asked Nick. “What if they had something to do with her death?”

It was easier, somehow, to ask him than it would have been to think it myself.

Nick considered my questions, then came back with one of his own. “And if they did?”

I let out a long breath. “I don’t know.”

He stared at me, in that way that made me feel like he was memorizing something about my face.

I tried to focus on the conversation, not on the way he looked, looking at me. “Lily… it’s like she’s barely inhabiting her own body anymore. She just shut down. But I can’t shake the feeling that something’s going to happen, and she’s going to snap.”

“Okay,” Nick replied evenly. “Say Lily snaps. She loses it. She lashes out. What does that look like? Is it really the end of the world?”

I don’t know.

“I’m done talking now,” I told him.

Nick didn’t argue. He never did. Instead, he pulled me nine-tenths of the way into a kiss and waited for me to close the distance. I probably should have pulled back. I probably should have left.

Instead, I lost myself in the kiss and in him.

At some point, we fell asleep. We woke up to a girl standing over us.

“Is this what you meant when you said you had to work?” she asked Nick.

Who the hell is that? My brain was already supplying answers—horrible ones about why another girl might come looking for Nick—when I scrambled to my feet. I flashed back to the text he’d sent me the night of the Gutierrez party.

Something came up.

If it had just been physical, if I hadn’t just been talking to him, confiding in him, this wouldn’t have been a problem.

You knew better, Sawyer. You damn well knew better.

“What the hell?” Nick jumped to his feet.

I am so stupid, I thought, looking at the girl. It was just supposed to be me, repaying what I owed. It was just supposed to be for show.

It was just supposed to be physical.

It was just supposed to be talking.

It wasn’t supposed to hurt.