Ever so slowly, I lowered my mouth to the lime. As I did so, I felt the brush of her lips on mine.
Just a touch. Just a breath, and it ignited fire in my veins.
And at that moment, I forgot a lot. My heart stopped, my breathing quit, my thoughts cea...
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We had two more days until our flight back home. Today, our competition hosts had a surprise for us – which, of course, involved competing. Tomorrow,
Last night, after the hot tub, August and I fell asleep pretty quickly. However, in the middle of the night, I woke up to another nightmare. The bed was humongous, so when I got up to shower at 4am, August didn't hear me. Since then, I had made a coffee and got out my laptop, textbooks, and binders, and had them spread around me at the dining table.
August was still asleep in the other room. The penthouse was conveniently huge, so I felt free to make some noise without bothering him.
It hit me during my 4am shower that we were going to be back at school in three days. Though the school year was ending, finals were approaching, and I felt like I had been slacking. So here I was, early in the morning, studying.
"Lia?" August's voice came from the bedroom before he slowly walked out of it, his hands rubbing sleep from his eyes. His hair was mussed, and he was only wearing gray sweatpants that hung low on his hips.
God, I was never going to get used to this view.
"Good morning," I said, taking a sip of my coffee to hopefully seem like less of a creep. He had already caught me staring last night. If he saw me now, I would never hear the end of it.
"Good morning," he said, stumbling into the kitchen and opening cabinets. "When did you get up?"
"Not long ago," I lied.
"Really?" He turned around to give me a skeptical glance. "So, I just imagined the shower turning on at 4am?"
Shit. "I... had a nightmare. I couldn't sleep."
"And you decided to not wake me? To not tell me?"
"What was there to tell?" I asked, shrugging.
He closed the cabinet, turned his body fully toward me. He leaned on the countertop, and I tried not to stare at the flex of his biceps as he did so. "You can tell me anything. If you can't sleep, wake me up. I don't want you to be alone."
"It was the middle of the night-"
"I don't care what time it was," he interrupted. "You can always wake me. I always want to be there for you, do you understand?"
I squeezed my hands together under the table. "Thank you."
✦✧✦✧
An hour later, we were boarding the buses to head back to the competition school. August had cooked me breakfast and we had eaten together in the penthouse. He had booked the penthouse for three nights, so we didn't have to pack up to go back to our old hotel room.
