Page 187 of Ex Somnis

Disgusting.

She reaches out to squeeze my forearm. “I’d read that.”

“In space.”

She sighs. “Of course.”

“With aliens.”

“Oh God.”

“The man is an alien.”

“The emotionally damaged man?”

“Yes.”

“You’re the emotionally damaged man.”

“I’m actually three emotionally damaged aliens in a trench coat.”

A laugh bursts out of her.

“There it is,” I say, pointing at her. “Now it’s literature.”

She shakes her head, still smiling. “Do the aliens get a happy ending?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re aliens.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“You’ve identified the central conflict.”

Her smile turns even softer, and I almost let the moment sit there unbothered, except there’s a thing I’ve been carrying around for days now. It’s burning a hole through whatever is left of my conscience.

“Speaking of things I’ll have to confess to…” I say, before I lose the nerve. “I may have read your messages on your phone while you were asleep. I may have also listened to a voicemail from Spencer. Well, we all did, but I was the one holding the phone.”

Her e-reader finally slips from her hands, falling to the mattress beside her.

“Wait, what?”

“He wouldn’t stop texting you, and you don’t have a passcode, and I…” I exhale through my nose, hard. “Fuck. I shouldn’t have looked. I know that. But I did, and then I texted him back.”

“You texted him?”

“Told him to fuck off. That you’re ours. Then I blocked him.”

Instead of the anger I’d been bracing for and genuinely deserve, she rises to her knees, cradles my jaw, and kisses me hard. “I don’t give a single fuck about Spencer,” she rasps against my lips.

“You don’t?”

“No.”

She’s already climbing into my lap, knees on either side of my hips, settling there as if she belongs there, which, fine, she does. “We’re absolutely going to have words about you going through my phone without permission, because no passcode does not mean open season⁠—”