Page 163 of While You Were Trending

He brushes my hair back from my face, smiling softly, and I feel the featherlight knowledge deep inside me of something even scarier than liking this man.

Something I refuse to put into words.

“You can make as much as you want tonight,” he murmurs.

He doesn’t need to say it.

I know I’m welcome just as much as I know he wouldn’t tease me with a pottery night and not follow through with making sure that I get to enjoy every bit of it as long as I want.

Not that I’d take advantage and overstay my welcome.

But he’d make sure I could if I wanted to.

He’s a good one.

A good one who’s mine.

Temporarily.

“When do we leave?” I ask.

“No specific timeline. You tell me when you’re ready.”

“I’m ready.”

His smile widens, the twin dimples making their rare appearance. “Right now? You don’t need to eat dinner? Finish the cheese? Put shoes on?”

“Nope.”

“Ask Mabel for permission?”

“Don’t be a dick,” Mabel calls from the hallway.

“This sounds like something Cricket would like too,” Declan says. “Should we invite her?”

“Flow and I are about to go without you,” I tell him.

He laughs. “You’ll probably both be better at this than I am.”

“She’s coming?”

“I’ll get more views if she helps.”

He’s not wrong.

“You don’t need to change?” he asks me.

I shake my head. “Let’s go.”

“Take a snack,” Mabel calls.

“Already packed,” Declan calls back.

I slip my shoes on and join him in his SUV, where he does, indeed, have a bag of snacks waiting in a soft-sided travel cooler.

There are clementines and string cheese and little snack packs of assorted nuts, along with hummus packs and baby carrots. Flow sprawls across the back seat as Declan takes us around the town of Foxwood and out to a cute little stucco cottage off a dirt road where a short woman with tight, curly black hair and warm brown eyes greets us with a smile.

“Ah, your friend could make it. Wonderful,” she says to Declan.