Page 124 of Trust Me

Chapter 33

Oliver

New York was just as loud as I imagined it would be. The airport had been a nightmare, and the cab wasn’t much better. The only saving grace was that it wasn’t a metal tube in the sky.

That had been the real nightmare. If I could help it, I would never get on one again. Maybe I’d just walk back to Seattle.

“Are you okay?” Dean asked as we entered the hospital. He squeezed my hand, and I gripped his tighter in return.

“Of course.”

“You don’t have to put on a brave face for me. I’d actually prefer it if you didn’t.”

With a sigh, I pressed the button for the elevator. “It was just the plane.”

“It was a pretty smooth ride. Do you get motion sickness? You looked a little green.”

“Sure, I was a little green. I’d never been thirteen thousand feet in the air before. If humans were meant to fly, we’d have wings.”

The doors closed and he turned to me with wide eyes. “Wait, that was your first time on a plane?”

“Yup.”

“Damn, Oli. Why didn’t you tell me?”

I shrugged, wrapping my free arm around myself. “You didn’t need to worry about me.”

With a growl, he pulled me closer and ran his thumb along my jaw. “Don’t coddle me, okay?”

He didn’t give me a chance to answer. While the floor number ticked upward, he leaned forward to kiss me. It was gentle, without the heat that had coursed through us all week. In a way, it was more passionate in its simplicity.

“Are we just roommates?” I asked once the doors opened. It was something I should’ve brought up on the plane, but neither of us had spoken much. “For all intents and purposes, I mean.”

“Is that what you’d prefer?”

“Straight answers, Broku.”

He huffed. “Right. Well, I don’t want to hide it, but it’s not really a good time to drop that bomb, you know?”

“I get it.”

“But I don’t want to lie either.”

“It doesn’t bother me if you want to leave it undefined for now. We can see how it goes.”

He nodded, his shoulders relaxing. When the room number his mom had sent him came into view, he sped up. Both of us released each other’s hand before we stepped inside.

“Dean,” his mom exclaimed, rushing forward. They embraced tightly, swaying back and forth a little with the intensity of the hug. Just watching them made me shift on my feet, unsure what I was supposed to do.

When they separated, Mrs. Kennedy came up to me and grasped my hands. Her eyes were a little lighter than Dean’s, and her hair had a reddish tone to it. She was short, which made her look even tinier next to the two of us. It was the severity of her eyes that made me swallow hard. Not severe in a cutting way. They were severely . . . motherly.

“Thank you for coming with him, Oliver. You have no idea how much better I felt knowing that he wasn’t dealing with this alone.”

Awkwardly, I applied a little pressure to her hands. “He has a tendency to do that.”

She smiled kindly. “He got it from his father.”

Dean snorted, but there was an intense warmth in his eyes. “Coming from the woman who had to be forced to stay home when running a hundred-and-two fever. As a nurse.”