His tongue trails from the side of my chin to the corner of my mouth. I'm frozen on spot, barely breathing. When he pulls away, his eyes are the same shimmering silver I had seen the other night. My breathing spikes, and his eyes dart to my mouth. B...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
—26—
I blink, staring at the room as Nikki let's out a low whistle. "Chase is in a league of his own, isn't he?" she comments.
"I can't stand him," Whitler mutters on the other side of me.
It looks exactly like the rest of the house: a mess of texts and notes. The only difference is that there's a king-sized mattress directly in front of us tucked under a cracked window. There's not a bed frame, just a mattress and box spring, but it almost takes up the entire wall anyway, leaving just enough room for a stack of books on either side. Chase clearly made the bed before he went to the living room because the thin, grey comforter and three pillows lined along the wall are the only things in the room that look relatively put-together. Even the makeshift nightstands made out of stacks of books on either side of the bed are a disaster, pieces of ripped paper and worn spines hanging off. A pile of manila envelopes are gathered around the sliding closet doors on my right, papers and sticky notes riddled between them, while a collection of yet more books are on my left, carelessly thrown in the corner.
"He really needs a life," I say, sighing.
"It does kinda feel like he lives for his job," Nikki agrees, "but I like that about him."
Whit rolls her eyes. "Is there anything about Chase you don't like?"
She tilts her head, thinking about it, making Whit even more irritated, before she snickers. "Not that I can think of. What about you, Cupcake? Anything you don't like about Chase?"
It's my turn to roll my eyes. "I'm not dignifying that with an answer," I grumble as I step into the room and collapse on the bed, not bothering to lay the correct way.
"Which means no, there isn't," Nikki says, completely smug. "Where's the Cupcake that nearly punched him in the face a month ago? Hmm?"
"She's asking herself why she's friends with you," I mutter.
Nikki laughs and lays next to me, playing with my hair. Whitler combs the room—sliding open the closet doors, checking out the window next to it, tapping the crack in the window above the bed, sifting through the papers on the floor—before she sits on the other side of me with a sigh.
"Satisfied?" Nikki asks with a raised brow.
"No," she says tersely. "This place is too... bare."
Nikki snorts. "Bare? Seriously? It looks like a library threw up in here."
"Yeah, I can see that, Nik, but there's nothing... personal. He doesn't have any posters or plants or—shit, I don't know, but you'd think a guy who just lost his parents would at least have a picture of them or his friends or something, but he has nothing."
"He said he just moved, Whitler. Maybe he decided to buy a ticket and leave everything behind," she reasons. "That's what people do when they lose their parents, right? They have, like, a mental breakdown."
