Chapter 7
Chloe's POV
I didn't sleep well.
I blamed the storm, obviously. The wind had been throwing itself against the windows all night like it had a personal grudge, and every time I'd drift off something would crack against the side of the house — a branch, probably, or the patio umbrella Liam kept forgetting to take in — and I'd jolt awake with my heart doing something embarrassing in my chest. That was the reason. Definitely the storm.
Not the fact that Julian Vane was sleeping two doors down the hall.
Not that.
By the time the light behind my curtains shifted from gray to pale gold, the wind had stopped. Just like that — the way a tantrum ends, suddenly and without apology, like the storm had worn itself out and decided to move on. I lay there for a few minutes listening to the silence, which felt almost louder than the noise had. Birds, eventually. A car somewhere on the street. The ordinary sounds of a world that had reset overnight without asking anyone's permission.
I pulled my pillow over my face and tried to go back to sleep.
It didn't work.
I was tired in that specific, gritty way that comes from a night of almost-sleeping, where you'd been conscious just enough to be aware of every hour passing but not enough to actually rest. My eyes felt like sandpaper. My hair was doing something catastrophic. I was not, by any reasonable standard, fit for human interaction.
Which was fine, because I was going to go downstairs, eat whatever Liam had made — and Liam always made something, that was just a fact about him, the same way it was a fact that he left his lacrosse gear on the mudroom floor and never apologized for it — and then come back upstairs and sleep for approximately four more hours.
A normal morning. No drama. No thinking about anyone's jawline.
I found Liam in the kitchen, which smelled like butter and coffee and something with cinnamon in it. He was standing at the stove in a Blackwood lacrosse hoodie, spatula in hand, looking profoundly unbothered by the fact that it was barely past eight.
"You look terrible," he said, without turning around.
"Good morning to you too."
"Sit down. Pancakes are almost done." He flipped one with the ease of someone who'd been doing this since he was fourteen, which he had. Mom and Dad were good parents — genuinely, I knew that — but they were also both doctors with schedules that made schedule a generous word for what they had, and somewhere along the way Liam had just started making breakfast because someone had to. I'd never thanked him for it. I probably should.
I poured myself coffee and sat at the counter and looked around the kitchen. It was quiet in a way that felt different from the storm-quiet of last night — emptier, somehow. The pullout in the den was visible through the doorway, already folded back up.
"Where is everyone?" I asked.
Liam slid a stack of pancakes onto a plate and set it in front of me. "Storm cleared. Hailey and Jess headed out early — Jess had a thing in Cambridge she'd been texting about since midnight, apparently. Roads looked okay by seven."
"Oh." I poured syrup. Took a bite. The pancakes were good, which was annoying because it meant I couldn't be grumpy about being awake. "Makes sense."
I ate. Liam poured his own coffee and leaned against the counter across from me, scrolling through his phone with the focused vacancy of someone checking sports scores. The kitchen was warm. Outside the window, the backyard looked wrecked — branches down, the bird feeder knocked sideways, leaves plastered to the grass in a wet, dark layer — but the sky above it was the specific washed-out blue that only shows up after a storm has taken everything with it.
So, I thought, staring at my pancakes. Where's Julian?
I didn't ask.
I absolutely, deliberately did not ask, because there was no version of that question that sounded casual. Hey, so, your insanely attractive college friend, the one I've been trying not to stare at since yesterday afternoon, where is he exactly? No. I had some dignity left. Not much, but some.
Liam didn't volunteer the information. He just kept scrolling, and I kept eating, and the kitchen stayed warm and quiet.
I could ask about the tutoring, I thought. That would be normal. That would be completely, legitimately normal — hey, isn't Julian supposed to go over calc stuff with me today? It was a reasonable question. It had an academic justification. It had nothing to do with wanting to know which house he was currently on.
I ran through it twice in my head. Practiced the tone. Casual. Slightly distracted, like I'd just remembered. Like it had nothing to do with anything.
Then I ate the last bite of my pancakes and said nothing.
I finished the pancakes, rinsed my plate, and went back upstairs.
Sleep came faster, the way it always does when you've stopped fighting it. I pulled the duvet up to my chin and closed my eyes and let the post-storm quiet do its work, and somewhere between thinking I should check my AP Calc homework and thinking absolutely nothing at all, I was out.
Somewhere in the middle of it, someone knocked. I opened the door.
Julian was standing there.
He didn't say anything at first. He just looked at me, the way he'd looked at me in the living room yesterday when I'd said something stupid about the textbook — not mocking, not distant, just present in this way that made my skin feel too warm. He was wearing the same dark T-shirt from yesterday. The sleeves were pushed up. I could see the line of his forearm, the casual way he leaned against the doorframe like he had all the time in the world.
You should go, I thought, or maybe said. Liam will—
He crossed the room in three steps and kissed me.
Not gently. Not tentative. The kind of kiss that starts somewhere around your mouth and ends up rearranging your entire understanding of the last seventeen years of your life. His hand was at my jaw, tilting my face up, and I could feel the warmth of him everywhere, and I was — I was responding, my whole body lighting up like someone had finally found the right switch, and I thought oh, so this is what—
Knock. Knock. Knock.
I sat up so fast I nearly hit my head on the headboard.
The room was exactly as it should be. Normal dimensions. No one in the doorway. Midday light coming through the curtains in pale stripes. My heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat, and my face — I pressed both hands to my cheeks and they were burning, genuinely hot, like I'd been standing too close to a fire.
A dream. I'd been asleep. It had been a dream.
The knock came again.
"One second," I managed. My voice came out rougher than I expected. I cleared my throat, pushed my hair back, took approximately two and a half seconds to compose myself into something resembling a functional human person, and crossed to the door.
I opened it.
Julian was standing in the hallway.
