Play The Part (Player Next Door Book 3)

26 | Stay A Little Longer

Well, lookie here, we have a festive chapter.  I'll save all festivities for the end ha he ho ho hooo!

The amazing @nocontextabiha has done it again with another beautiful chapter poster!

Chapter 25: Stay A Little Longer

~4 Hours Later on the Beach~

We were wet and cold with grains of sand sticking to our bodies. So this is what heaven feels like. Nowhere else I'd rather be.

Nowhere else we could be, together.

The blackmailer was out there. They had broken into my home, broken onto Luke's laptop to print his texts. If this ruse was going to work, we needed everyone to believe we'd broken up.

And while all that stress was out there, it melted away here with the waves of the beach and the beating of Luke's heart that I could hear with my ear pressed against his chest.

I felt safe in his arms and in the cloak of darkness. But it'd be nice to have an actual cloak too, because it's cold.

His strong arm was wrapped around me, and his fingers stroked my arm absentmindedly.

"Are you cold?" he whispered, feeling the hairs on my arms stand up.

"A little," I answered, rotating my head up to look at his chiselled face, "But I want to stay a little longer."

His cold lips pressed against my forehead.

"I don't want you to leave, Luke," I mumbled into his shirt, fine for my words to get eaten up in the cotton, "You're graduating soon and then you'll be gone."

"We're both going to get out," he said, sounding more confident than I felt. He sat up and shifted me round, so I was still leaning against him but in a new position.

I wanted some of his confidence. And it would be good for him if he shared – he could do with less.

"I'm always surprised that you hate this town so much," I said, lowering my hand to aimlessly trace circles in the sand, "I thought no one could hate it more than me."

"You probably hate it more," he agreed, extending his hand to draw horns on the circles I just made.

I grabbed his hand to stop him and then made a halo over a circle instead. He dodged my hand to make one more and then let me play peacefully in the sand. Soon after, I felt his soft lips kiss the cape of my neck. My skin tingled where his lips lingered.

A handsome angel with a devil's attitude sometimes.

He whispered, "We've changed a lot, but the town stays exactly the same. Don't you feel that?"

Definitely.

I thought about my family tonight and Luke's mom when I went looking for him: the same reactions about our relationship, the same disapproval, despite months of proving how we were good for each other.

I thought about how, when I was just a kid, I was branded 'unfriendable' and how that label lingered with me all the way into junior year of high school, until I met Luke and Austin, Jake and Cearra...

I thought about how the people in my neighborhood look at me as the 'daughter of that guy who left his family.' I'm more than that. My mom, my sister and I are more than just defined by my dad.

"We've been shoved into shallow boxes with a permanent label slapped on. Try to break out of it or grow into something bigger or reinvent the label, and they resist," I said, totally understanding what Luke meant to the bottom of my core, "It's just that your box is a sparkly one that everyone wants to look at, while mine is the dusty one in a dark corner people want to forget."