Page 154 of The ARC Unit: Breach

My stomach tightened again at his words. I walked toward the bed because the alternative was explaining why his commands had suddenly become complicated. Wolf dropped the folded blanket onto the open floor beside the wall.

I stopped.

“No.”

He looked up. “We already settled this.”

“The group settled that I was sleeping in here. Nobody agreed you were sleeping on bare concrete.”

“It’s one night.”

“Take the bed. I’ll take the floor.”

“No.”

“We could share it.”

The words left my mouth before I had time to evaluate them.

Wolf went very still.

I did too.

The bed was not large. It was technically wide enough for two adults if both of them had extremely disciplined ideas about personal space, which Wolf probably did and I currently did not trust myself to maintain.

I looked at the mattress.

“I-I mean like to sleep,” I said.

“I know what you meant.”

His voice had gone lower.

That did not help.

“You’re the one acting like I proposed a crime,” I replied.

“I’m not acting like anything.”

“You stopped moving.”

“So did you.”

I opened my mouth and then closed it. Wolf looked at the bed, then at me in his shirt.

“Floor’s fine.”

I heard the finality and recognized it for what it was. He was not refusing because the bed physically could not hold us. He was refusing because he knew exactly what being in it together would mean after yesterday’s conversation, the kitchen this morning and the fact that he had just worked out I was naked under his shirt.

I let him have the boundary without arguing it into the ground.

“Fine. But take the extra pillow.”

Wolf reached for one.

I climbed into his bed.

The mattress was firmer than mine. His sheets smelled faintly of clean cotton, cigarette smoke and the same woody scent caught in his shirt, except stronger here where it had been pressed into the pillow and blanket night after night. Every choice I had made in the previous five minutes seemed much more questionable from beneath his sheets.