Chapter 7

Piper's POV

I woke up because I couldn't breathe.

My face was pressed into something soft and I was pulling air through fabric and not getting enough of it, and my first thought was I'm dying and my second thought was why is my pillow shaped like this.

I lifted my head.

Mr. Bond stared back at me with his little painted eyes under his tiny detective hat, expression unchanged, as it always was, because he was a stuffed penguin and stuffed penguins did not have opinions.

I looked down.

His legs were between my thighs. My sleep shorts were twisted halfway around. The blanket had been kicked to the foot of the bed at some point and I had no memory of doing that.

I lay there for a second and looked at the ceiling.

I just, I thought. With a penguin.

I picked Mr. Bond up very carefully, set him back on his side of the pillow, and pulled the blanket over my head.

"Mr. Bond," I said, into the dark under the covers. "I am so sorry. You didn't see anything. Nothing happened. We are never going to talk about this."

He did not respond, which was the correct choice.

I stayed under the blanket for another thirty seconds, then gave up and sat on the edge of the bed with my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands.

I knew exactly what I had been dreaming about. There was no pretending otherwise. Declan, 2A, the warm lights, his hands at my waist, and then — my palm flat against that one thin layer of fabric, the heat underneath it, the sound he'd made low in his throat like he'd tried to swallow it and almost managed.

And then I had woken up.

"Just a little more," I said to the floor. "Literally just a little more and I would have known what came next."

And then something shifted.

Wait.

I stood up so fast I had to grab the nightstand.

I had just dreamed in complete sensory detail about a man I had touched exactly once, through his pants, for approximately four seconds. I had the texture of it. The weight. I had the specific quality of the heat and the way something in my knees had gone soft and the exact rhythm of my own heartbeat.

I was a writer.

I had a chapter due.

"Oh my god," I said out loud. "I have material."

I was at my desk in forty-five seconds.

The laptop was already open. I pulled up the draft, cracked my knuckles once out of habit, and started typing, and the words came out faster than they had in three months. I changed the names, changed the apartment, put them somewhere with wood floors and rain against the windows instead, but I kept everything that mattered — the specific quality of being pressed down and not wanting to move, the way his weight had settled over her, the heat of him through one thin layer of cotton, her fingers closing once, and then again.

I wrote the whole lead-up in forty minutes. I didn't stop to fix sentences. I just kept going.

And then I hit the part where it was supposed to go further, and I stopped.

I stared at the screen.

I typed a sentence. Deleted it. Typed another one. Read it back and deleted that too.

The problem was I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. I had the approach. I had the runway. I had every single thing that happened before the plane actually left the ground, and then I had nothing, because I had never been on the plane. I had only ever stood in the terminal reading about other people's flights.

"Great," I said. "Incredible. You can write a very convincing almost."

I read back through what I had. The almost was actually pretty good. The almost had real weight to it, the specific ache of wanting something and being right on the edge of having it.

I cut the scene where it broke off, cleaned up the last paragraph, and uploaded it.

Then I sat there and looked at the little confirmation notification on the screen, and I laughed, just a short stupid laugh, alone in my apartment at whatever time it was in the morning.

"I haven't done that in months," I said to the empty room. "Just sat down and wrote a whole chapter."

That's because of him, something in the back of my head said. That's entirely because of Declan.

Which meant I needed more. Not less — more. More proximity, more detail, more of whatever last night had been, and then the actual thing itself, because I could not keep writing the runway. I needed the flight.

This is research, I told myself. This is for the readers. This is also for the rent.

I reached for my phone to check the time.

The screen said 7:45.

I stared at it.

My shift started at eight.

"No no no no no —"

I knocked the chair back getting up, hit the doorframe going into the bedroom, and dug through the laundry basket with both hands until I found the uniform shirt at the very bottom, wrinkled like someone had slept on it.

I pulled it on while I was still moving toward the front door. The third button went into the wrong hole and I had to stop in the hallway to fix it, hopping on one foot because I only had one sock on, and the other sock was not anywhere I could see, and then I spotted it under the couch and hooked it out with two fingers without breaking stride.

Eighteen minutes on foot, I thought, jamming my feet into my shoes by the door. I am going to be so fired.

I made it with fifty-three seconds to spare, which felt like a personal record and also like something that should never happen again.

The breakfast rush hit before I had even finished tying my apron, and then it was just eggs and bacon and coffee and more coffee and can I get that to go and she wanted the wheat toast not the sourdough for the next two and a half hours straight.

By ten-thirty the tables had mostly cleared out. I leaned against the back of the counter, drank half a glass of water in one go, and finally pulled out my phone.

The new chapter had been up for three hours. The page reads were already almost double the last one. Someone in the comments had written okay did the author get a boyfriend or something because WHAT WAS THAT. Three people had liked the comment.

I looked at the number for a second. Then I checked my account balance. The new royalty deposit had come through — not a lot, but enough to cover the electric bill and the internet and still have a little left over.

I put the phone down on the counter and exhaled, slow and all the way out, and felt my shoulders drop about two inches.

Real experience, I thought. Readers can always tell.

The front door swung open behind me, and Roni dropped onto the stool at the end of the counter like she owned it, crossed her arms on the surface, and looked at me.

"Start talking," she said. "Everything. Don't skip anything."

I picked up a clean glass and started polishing it, which gave my hands something to do, and told her about last night. The moving help, the hallway, 2A, the floor, his knee on my leg, the sorry afterward.

Roni listened with her chin in her hand. When I finished she picked up the coffee I'd poured her, took a sip, and set it back down.

"Piper," she said. "This man sounds dangerous."

"He was just reacting to something —"

"He has PTSD and he put you on the floor." She wasn't being loud about it, which was almost worse. "I'm not saying he's a bad person. I'm saying you don't know which wire in him is the one that trips."

I set the glass down. "He's actually pretty decent. When my shirt slipped he told me. And last night, he left me only the light stuff." I picked up another glass. "He doesn't feel like a player. He feels like someone who's just — careful."

"Oh, how charming," Roni said. "A careful man who throws women onto floors."

"I'm being serious."

"So am I." But she was almost smiling. "You're too nice sometimes. Almost stupidly naive, not in a bad way, I mean. But men are all the same under the —"

The bell above the door rang.

I looked up automatically. "Welcome to —"

The word stopped in my mouth.

Because Declan was standing in the doorway.