Lib Novel Page 24
When I swing it open, there she is. We stare at each other for a long moment, her breathing heavily.
She’s wearing a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, which reminds me that I’m in nothing but my boxers. I watch her gaze sweep over me, past my chest and shoulders, drinking me in, and I recognize that look on her face. It’s the face she’d make any time I tipped her head up, about to kiss her.
Her hair is loose over her shoulders, slightly wavy and frizzy, likely from being in the medical bay. On her feet is a pair of slippers from the hospital, and I picture her walking through Rosecreek like this for anyone to see. It makes something protective and possessive rise up in me.
When her lips part, her eyes grow dark, my stomach tightens.
I take a deep breath, averting my eyes from her. I’ll need more clothes—something to hide the way I’m feeling about her—if she’s going to be looking at me. If she’s going to be here.
“I want to see the footage,” she says, finally, when it feels like we’ve been standing here for hours, looking at one another, thinking and thinking and thinking about a time when we were able to touch one another.
“What?” I ask, letting out a breath of surprise. “Didn’t they say you needed to stay in bed?”
I look at her cheeks, which have practically no color, and suddenly want her to come inside, in case she’s going to pass out.
“Come here,” I say, opening the door and inviting her inside. When she brushes past me, I want nothing more than to reach out and wrap her in my arms. I’m torn between this primal urge to touch her, to have her, and this other, more protective feeling that wants to wrap her up and hold her until he’s better.
It’s maddening.
“The footage,” she snaps, turning to me and crossing her arms. “I feel fine,” she lies, “and I want to watch the video of what happened that night. I know you have it. Veronica said she got to watch it.”
“She asked me to send it to her.”
“So, everyone gets to watch it except me?”
“You almost died, Olivia!” I snap, putting a fist to my chest when my heart starts to squeeze painfully. My eyes dart to the medicine on the table, the pills Maisie has been begging me to take. Instead, I reach for my energy drink and knock the rest back.
“Everyone on this team is always almost dying,” she says, voice tight. “And nobody condemns them to be in best for the rest of their lives.
“It’s been one day.”
“It’s awful.”
“Your blood pressure is too low, they need to—”
“Oh, my god,” she says, pressing her fingers to her temples. “Has Maisie been sharing my private medical information with you? That is such a HIPPA violation.”
I shut my mouth, looking down at the floor, not wanting her to read in my expression that Maisie didn’t tell me anything—I simply looked at her chart in the system—
“Oh my god, Byron, you looked up my stuff. That is—”
“You wanna see the footage?” I snap, turning away from her and walking back into my computer room. “Fine. Come see the footage.”
She blinks, apparently surprised that I gave in that easily. I gave in because if I kept standing across from her, watching her yell at me, I was going to scoop her up and take her to my bedroom, and from the look on her face, I knew she would let me.
We’re mated. And blood bound. Our bodies are itching, begging us to come together, to relieve that feeling. Olivia would do it, just to stem the building pressure, and then I would be forced to face the fact that I love her, that I’ve loved her from the moment she arrived in Rosecreek.
And I’d be forced to face the fact that even though I’m her mate, I’m not the right one for her. If the universe chooses these things, it’s finally gotten one wrong.
I tap my keyboard a few times, bringing my computer to life. With a few clicks, I make it over to the footage. The audio file is stored carefully, encrypted, with plenty of warnings and checks. It doesn’t feel relevant now that we have the text, but something stopped me from deleting it.
“Sit down.”
I watch Olivia sit in my chair, and my breath gets stuck in my throat. I can’t help thinking about how we’d talked about getting our computers in here together, setting them up next to each other so we could work and play in the same room, at the same time. I glance toward the other side of the room, where there’s more than enough room for the set-up Olivia had shown me—complete with a white PC tower and RGB components.
Her dream set-up includes a chair like mine, but pink, and a mechanical keyboard with cute keycaps. I want it—I want her there, next to me. I just don’t want the rest of it.
“Here,” I say, feeling choked as I settle my headphones down over her ears, click on the video, watch her watching herself. If she passes out—or something worse than that happens—Maisie and Veronica will have my head.