I grimaced. I don’t know why, but I’d always hated that word. Lover. It was like the word moist in my book.

I turned toward Noah and pushed back his hair from his face. He looked so boyishly handsome while he was sleeping, all the worries of the world wiped away. His lashes were thick and dark against his cheeks.

“We have to get up,” I told him as I kissed his forehead. “Shelby’s looking for me, and we’re supposed to head back to LA.”

His arms tightened around me and he mumbled, “I’m very happy where I am.”

“So am I, but we do have to go.”

He released me and turned onto his back. I propped myself up on one elbow to look at him. He yawned and then stretched, his shirt hiking up. I very much enjoyed that particular view.

“I was going to call room service this morning,” he said, “but I didn’t wake up when I expected to. You’re like a real-life Ambien.”

“Are you saying I’m boring?”

He cracked open his eyes to squint at me. “No, that you knocked me out. I haven’t slept that well in a long time.”

“Me neither,” I confessed. I leaned down and kissed his neck. “It’s going to be weird to go back to our real lives.”

“Things don’t have to change from how they are now.”

Things didn’t have to change? What things? Us sharing a bed from now on? Did that mean what I thought it meant? Should I be concerned here?

I hated that I was so inexperienced with relationships and didn’t know how to interpret the things he said.

Or was that a reference to our friendship? That despite what Shelby thought and what I was maybe sort of in some small way hoping for, this was never going beyond the parameters I’d set up in the beginning?

Shouldn’t that make me happy, that he only wanted to be friends? It didn’t.

Plus, there was still that small matter of telling him that I’d lied to him the first night we’d met. I’d been planning on telling him when Shelby was done with his house, but maybe this trip was proof that my hypothesis was mistaken. He must have cared about Shelby if he was willing to do all this for her. Maybe he wouldn’t fire her. Maybe he would even forgive me quickly and we’d move on.

Then I remembered how much he hated lying and realized a snowball in Arizona had a greater chance than I did of coming out of this unscathed.