“Well, here’s to never letting anybody cheat on us again.” I lifted my little clear mini cup I’d taken from the bathroom sink. It was a quarter full with water and I extended it toward Pearl. She glanced at it, snorted a laugh, and tapped it with the edge of her paperback.

“Here’s to that. Now go to sleep. And if you try anything, I’ll make you regret it.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said, hoping I was lying. A dream about crossing the forbidden line between us and having a little fun for the first time in over six months? Yeah. I wouldn’t turn that dream away if it came knocking.

14

PEARL

I expected to wake up with Dean strutting around the room doing naked yoga or something. Or maybe that was just the dream I’d had confusing me. But instead, I didn’t see him anywhere. His side of the bed was a rumpled mess and his little cup of water was empty, but the big man himself was gone.

I carefully peered through the frosted glass of the bathroom, hoping I wasn’t going to see something that would haunt me. Nothing.

Where the hell was he? I glanced at my phone and saw it wasn’t even quite six in the morning. What kind of monster left their bed–let alone their room–that early?

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and decided to call Steph. She’d probably complain about being woken so early, but I could live with her annoyance. I’d been dying to unload everything that had happened on someone since about twenty minutes into entering the lobby yesterday. I still hadn’t told anybody else the truth about Dean, besides Steph. Even Marley had no clue.

To be fair, I only kept the secret from Marley because I didn’t want to get her in trouble. At some point, I realized I was playing with fire when I started using the lie to get out of work and brought Jonas into the web. If things ever went south, I wanted Marley to have plausible deniability so her job wouldn’t be in danger, too. If that meant having to lie to one of my only close work friends? So be it.

Steph answered, exaggerating the grogginess in her voice, probably to make sure I knew I’d woken her. “Who’s dead?” she asked.

“Nobody. But I have lots of gossip. Do you want to go back to sleep, or do you want to hear it?”

“Hold on. Let me pee first.” In typical ladylike fashion, Steph carried the phone with her to the toilet so I could hear her overly aggressive sigh of relief and the torrent of liquid hitting the water in the bowl. “Alright,” she said. “That’s much better. Hit me, sis.”

Hit her I did. From the kiss in the lobby to the naked shower through the glass to the game. For some reason, I found myself not wanting to include anything about the conversation we’d had in bed last night. Why was that? Was it because it was one of the only times Dean’s shroud of carefree humor had cracked to reveal the man underneath? I didn’t know, but I wound up just shrugging and telling her nothing interesting happened when it was time to sleep.