The floor creaked as I walked out. I tried not to look at Kael from the hallway, but I couldn’t stop myself. He was awake, his eyes wide when they touched mine. He looked away and closed his eyes as I went into my room, feeling relief as soon as the door shut.
I lay in bed and listened to the soundtrack of my house. The fridge kicking on and off loudly, the dull drone of the a/c. I listened particularly for Kael to make the smallest of sounds. It occurred to me that I wasn’t worried, even for a second, to leave Elodie alone with him in the living room. Trust? An unfamiliar feeling, but a nice one. I tried and tried to quiet my mind as my body began to fall asleep.
I felt so restless. I turned over, grabbed a pillow, and put it between my legs, hugging it close. I thought about how it would be really nice to have someone next to me in bed. I like living alone, but there were times like tonight when I couldn’t sleep and just wished I had someone to bare my soul to as the dawn came and quieted us both.
Outside of my family and Elodie, it had been almost a year since I’d had human contact that wasn’t work-related. I had never really had that in large or consecutive doses, but Kael was making me feel a bit like I had a crush on him. That little patter of your chest when they look at you, the uncontrollable spells of word vomit. I didn’t know Kael well enough to actually have a crush, and I hadn’t been around men for so long that I’d forgotten what cute ones can do to our brains. I guess that doesn’t really apply to Brien; he was attractive, but it was his charm and the spreadsheets inside his mind that drew me to him. He gave me attention, told me I was hot and smart and should leave this Army town and move with him closer to Atlanta. His job as a government contractor was ending soon, and he wanted to be closer to his parents. As if they weren’t close enough. His mom knew every time we fought. His dad gave me a worried fake smile every time I talked about my job. He was my longest relationship, and, God, did he make me never want to have another one. He liked other girls way, way too much, and that’s what ended us, all three times. I went back twice out of loneliness, or was it self-pity? I didn’t know, but this was the longest I’d gone without going back to him.
He was the only boy I’d dated since I moved here, since high school, when I barely dated at all. Making out with senior boys who didn’t know my name apart from “Austin’s sister” wasn’t exactly dating. Brien’s manipulative charm was addictive, and I had hoped that one day he would actually understand me and find me good enough for him and his parents, although that day never came. But now, after these few months, the spell had finally worn off and he barely crossed my mind anymore.
I rolled onto my back, sprawling my legs and arms out. I moved my arms up and down like I was making an angel in the snow. I should be grateful I get to have the whole bed to myself and I should stop thinking about men, in general. Not Kael, not Brien, not my dipshit brother, and especially not my dad.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I woke up with my cell phone on my chest. It felt like the heat was on. I checked the time: almost four in the morning. I had to be up at eight so I could run to the grocery store, get gas, and be ready for work by ten. Thinking of my to-do list was stressing me out in the middle of the night, making my brain too awake to go right back to sleep. I rolled my T-shirt up, turned my fan on high, and lay back down, letting the cool air fill the room and brush across my skin.
Opening Facebook on my phone, I went to Elodie’s friends list and typed in Kael’s name. Nothing came up, so I searched for him again. I changed my search to “Mikael Martin” and found a profile with fewer than one hundred friends, which seemed odd to me, but made sense for what I knew of him so far. I didn’t talk to 99 percent of the people I was “friends” with, but I still had almost a thousand. That seemed excessive, having a thousand people I never spoke to have access to me.
His profile picture was a group shot of Kael with three other soldiers. They were all dressed in ACUs and standing next to a big tank. Kael was grinning in the picture, maybe even laughing—that’s how bright his smile was. It was weird to see him like that, his arm around one of the guys. Maybe this was his level-ten smile that I had been wondering about? I zoomed in on it. My stomach tingled. I went back to his profile, but apart from his profile picture and Fort Benning, Georgia, I couldn’t get any information from his page at all. Everything was private. I almost asked to be his friend, but it felt stalkerish to send him a Facebook request while he was sleeping on a chair in my living room.
I clicked out of his profile and went onto Instagram to see if he had one, though somehow I knew he didn’t. I typed his name in and searched, but nothing came up. I went to Elodie’s page like I had on Facebook, and still nothing. So he wasn’t an Instagram kind of guy; I liked that. I closed the app and threw my phone to the empty side of the bed and sat up. It was so hot in my room that I was starting to think Elodie might have accidently turned on the heat instead of the air again. My throat was dry. I could feel sweat on the back of my neck when I tied up my thick, curly hair.
Kael and Elodie would both be sleeping in the living room, so I made sure I was quiet when I walked down the hallway and into the kitchen. I knew the floor plan of my house so well I could easily navigate every inch in the darkness with only a little guidance from the night-light plugged into the kitchen outlet.
I grabbed the jug of water out of the fridge and chugged it until I couldn’t anymore and my throat burned from the cold. Every night when I was a kid, my mom had brought me a cup of ice water to help me sleep. I stopped craving it a few months ago but still kept a jug in the fridge, just in case the need for that comfort returned. I closed the fridge and almost screamed when I saw Kael sitting at the kitchen table.
“Shit, you scared me.” I wiped my wet lips with the back of my hand. “Sorry if I woke you up. It’s so hot in here.”
“I was up.”
I took a step closer to him and it took his eyes raking down my body, down my rolled T-shirt to my stomach and my exposed thighs, to realize I was barely dressed. It was dark in the room, but he could definitely see at least the outline of my body. I pulled my shirt down, attempting to undo the knot I had tied at the hem.
“Why are you up? Were you just sitting here in the dark?”
Kael’s head tilted just a bit, like he was confused by what I was saying, and he looked down at my legs. I immediately felt a wave of insecurity, thinking about the dips of cellulite peppered across my thighs. He looked back up at my face.
“Can I have some of that water?” he asked.
I flushed, wondering how the hell I hadn’t noticed him sitting there as I made my way to my fridge and chugged water out of a plastic gallon jug.
I nodded and opened the refrigerator door. “It’s just tap water. I buy one of these”—I held up the jug labeled Spring Water—“every once in a while, and just refill it with tap water. So it’s not actually spring water.”
“I can handle tap water.”
His sarcasm surprised me. I smiled at him and he smiled back—also a surprise. He took the container from my hand and lifted it to his mouth without touching his lips. I hadn’t been able to see what he was wearing, or not wearing, in this case. He had taken his uniform jacket and tan T-shirt off, and camo pants hung so low on his waist that they revealed briefs I could almost read the label of but knew I shouldn’t try to. I looked back at his face as he took another drink.