I waited it out for one more minute and ended her session with two to go. I made a mental note that I would add five extra minutes to her next session. I grabbed my phone from the shelf the moment my hands left her body.

No new messages, but I did have a missed call from my dad. Well, that could wait. I didn’t feel like talking to him. The only thing on my mind was how Kael’s mouth tasted like his coconut ChapStick and how hard he laughed when I tripped over a piece of tile in my bathroom that he promised to help me fix. Our scrambling bodies had moved from my bedroom to my bathroom, to the kitchen and back to bed, still not able to let go, to stop touching, to stop exploring each other. We had become masters at intimacy, without crossing the line into fully hooking up.

“Karina?” Stewart’s voice made me jump. Talk about the real world. My phone dropped to the floor, the picture of Kael and me open on the screen. Bright as hell in my dark room.

“Oh my god, sorry!” I hid my face under my hair as I bent down to grab it. “I’ll let you get dressed. See you in the lobby,” I told her, leaving her in privacy.

When I stepped into the hallway, I had to bite my lips to stop myself from laughing. Typically, I would freak out over something like that and die from embarrassment. Was Stewart uncomfortable or thinking that I had lost my mind? This time, my brain didn’t go there the way it normally did. It naturally thought about how obsessed I was becoming with Kael and how big his smile would be when I told him about my phone mishap with Stewart.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

“It’s so good to see you like this,” Stewart told me, squeezing my hand as I passed her a pen and her receipt.

I smiled and we both laughed. I felt that I had shared something very personal with her.

“See you next week,” she said.

I was pleased for Stewart and the change ahead, but I was going to miss her a lot. And business-wise (usually an afterthought for me), I could hear Mali lecturing that losing a client as reliable as Stewart was going to affect how much money I would be bringing in each month, and what was I going to do about that?

I cleaned up my treatment room as fast as I could while still being thorough. I threw towels in the laundry and checked the bathroom to make sure it was clean enough and that the caramel apple−scented wax burner didn’t need another cube. Oh, how I loved the fall.