CHAPTER TWO

**CHAPTER TWO**

I woke with the taste of the dream still in my mouth.

It hadn’t been a gentle thing. It had been heat and pressure and a voice that sounded too much like his, low and certain, asking questions I didn’t have answers for. In the dark of it I had said things I would never say aloud. I had wanted things I had no right to want. When the dream finally broke, the silence of my room felt louder than any sound.

I sat up too fast. My pulse was still racing. The sheets were twisted around my legs. For a long minute I just sat there, staring at the faint gray light leaking through the curtains, trying to convince myself it had been nothing. Just a leftover from the night before. Just the hallway and the keyhole and Drake’s smirk and the way Jake filled every room he entered.

It didn’t work.

I dragged myself into the shower and turned the water as cold as it would go. It helped, a little. The shock of it forced my thoughts into something closer to order. By the time I stepped out, the edges of the dream had started to blur. I told myself that was enough.

It wasn’t.

I was still sitting on the edge of the bed in a towel when the door opened without a knock.

Jake stood in the doorway.

He looked freshly awake—hair slightly damp, shirt still open at the collar, the same quiet solidity he carried everywhere. His eyes moved over me once, quick and unreadable, then settled somewhere past my shoulder.

“Lectures,” he said. His voice was even. “Your mother’s already asking. You’re going to be late.”

I pulled the towel a fraction higher without thinking. “I know.”

He didn’t move. For a second the air between us felt thicker than it should have. Then he nodded once, as if deciding something, and stepped back into the hall.

“I’ll drive you.”

The door closed behind him. I sat there longer than I needed to, listening to his footsteps fade down the stairs, trying to decide whether the tightness in my chest was leftover from the dream or something newer.

By the time I made it downstairs, Drake was already outside, leaning against the car in his riding gear. Helmet under one arm. That permanent almost-smirk in place.

“Look who decided to join the living,” he said as I approached. “Miracles do happen.”

“Shut up.”

He fell into step beside me, easy and unhurried. “Rough night? You look like you lost a fight with your own thoughts.”

I didn’t answer. Ahead of us, my mother was saying goodbye to Jake by the driver’s side door. She had one hand on his chest, smiling up at him the way she always did—soft, unguarded, completely at home in the space he made for her. He bent his head and murmured something that made her laugh, low and private. His hand rested at her waist with the same unthinking certainty he used for everything else.

Drake watched them for a moment, then glanced sideways at me.

“He’s obsessed,” he said quietly. “Can’t go five minutes without touching her.”

I kept my eyes forward. “Mind your business.”

Jake looked up then.

The softness he’d given my mother was still on his face when his gaze found mine. It didn’t stay soft. It sharpened—focused, deliberate, as if he had reached across the space between us and closed a hand around something inside my ribs. He didn’t smile. He didn’t look away. He just held my eyes long enough for the morning air to thin out in my lungs.

Then my mother said his name, and the moment broke.

He turned back to her. Drake’s low chuckle brushed the edge of my hearing. I forced myself to keep walking toward the car, spine straight, expression blank, every nerve ending suddenly, uncomfortably awake.

The dream was still with me.

So was the way he had looked at me just now.

And I had the sudden, sinking certainty that neither of them was finished with me yet.