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“Normal?” I asked with a squeak, wiping any trace of my release off my mouth with the back of my hand. “There is nothing normal about this!”

“So we jerked off together. So what?”

I jumped up and shoved at his chest, belatedly realizing that would mean touching his naked pecs with my bare hands. His skin was like molten lava and his muscles hard as volcanic fucking rock.

“We didn’t do anything,” I insisted through gritted teeth. “Stay the fuck away from me.”

He stared at me in surprise, as if shocked that I still hated him.

News alert, asshole: I did.

I hated him even more now.

“We didn’t do anything?” he said in a voice laced with suppressed laughter. “Okay, McNeely. If that’s what you need to tell yourself to sleep at night.”

“I don’t need your fucking permission,” I snapped and then shoved past him to get my own damned towel.

I felt Vaughn’s eyes on me as he crawled back in bed, but I ignored him. When I grabbed a clean pair of shorts and pulled them under the covers with me to change without an audience, he finally, finally, turned off the lamp, plunging us into full darkness.

I shimmied out of my cum-covered shorts and into clean ones. It took me a while to come down from my racing heart, but Vaughn didn’t have any trouble falling asleep. His breathing turned into his usual steady rhythm within minutes.

When sleep finally came for me, it brought the worst of the nightmares. But somehow, I was able to make it through the night without waking up screaming and humiliating myself even more with my asshole roommate.

8

VAUGHN

I awoke to whimpering, but not the good kind. Not the kind McNeely had given me, practically against his will, earlier in the night.

No, this was whimpering like he was in pain. Like he was legit crying.

I glanced across the room but couldn’t make out the shape of him in the dark. I shifted up on my elbow but still couldn’t see anything other than the fact that he didn’t have any covers over him.

Maybe he was cold?

It wasn’t my problem. He’d made it crystal clear he didn’t want my help. But…

Shit.

I climbed out of bed and grabbed his comforter, the cotton so smooth and sleek, it felt as expensive as it probably was. Before I could lay it over him, he whimpered again and sniffled wetly.

“Princess,” I whispered softly, afraid of upsetting him if he was having a private breakdown and didn’t want witnesses. “You okay?”

As I moved the comforter over him, his body trembled. He made a choked gurgling sound, and I immediately put my hand on the center of his back, worried he was choking. “McNeely.”

He seemed to calm under my touch, so I kept my hand there for a few beats while covering him with the blanket. As soon as I moved my hand away to return to my own bed, he whimpered again and jerked, closing his body into a tighter ball.

“McNeely,” I whispered, nerves tightening my stomach. “Bett?”

When that didn’t make a difference, I placed my hand on his back again, pressing and rubbing a circle until he calmed. Over the next several minutes, the cycle continued. If I removed my hand, he got upset. When I put it back, he chilled out.

Sleep started to claim me, and I found myself nodding off while kneeling next to his bed. My neck ached, and my arm was dead asleep.

I drifted off again and woke a little while later with my hand now held in between both of his, like at some point, he’d turned to face me and claimed it. Our fingers were tangled together, with his other hand cupped around them. The warmth from our skin had made our palms clammy.

Had he woken up and caught me there? I couldn’t imagine that was the case since he disliked me so strongly. He hadn’t been taking comfort from me. Any warm body would have done the trick.

Now that he was sleeping soundly, I extricated myself from him and returned to my own bed. To the comfort of my own mattress. Where I lay awake for a long time, wondering why he’d been upset… and why the fuck I’d thought that was my business.