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My mind goes blissfully quiet.
I don’t allow myself to think too much further about what that might mean, falling onto the mattress beside him in a heap of breaths.
An electrical current of pleasure still hums through my body, and I fight to slow my quick and shallow breaths, and the beats of my heart. The same choppy, yet contented sighs escape Jude’s mouth, and pride blooms inside me—strengthening with each intimate sound.
I wish we had done this sooner.
Or maybe I don’t. Maybe it would have been harder that way.
Jude rises from his bed, chuckling softly, and the light sound reels me back into the present moment. Jude standing half-naked in the darkness of his room. The cooling stickiness of his orgasm drying on my skin. The wetness of my own soaking through my underwear.
“What’s so funny?” I ask, biting back a smile.
He gives a quick shake of his head, biting down on his own grin before he says, “As if jerking off to thoughts of you all summer wasn’t bad enough, now you’ve got me coming in my briefs like an inexperienced asshole.”
My cheeks warm with his statement, and I breathe out a laugh. Pride curves around my limbs like vines, dragging me deeper into his mattress.
When he comes back from the bathroom, after cleaning himself and offering me a warm towel, too, he slinks into bed behind me, his arms winding through and curling around my body.
Flora, spice, and thunderstorms—Jude—envelops me. And I fall asleep with him completely surrounding me.
Chapter Seventeen
Declan
I think we have a lot of soulmates.
Some for a lifetime, and some for a short time, and they all change our lives irrevocably, but they’re not all meant to stay.
Like Quinn.
And maybe like Jude, too.
I came to Oklahoma this summer knowing it was the start of something new. What I didn’t realize… was that I held the capability to hold my heart open so easily. To new friendships, new relationships, new possibilities. To an entirely new life slowly unfolding before me.
I had hoped, but I couldn’t have imagined it would so quickly feel this real. This innate feeling that I’m capable of something better.
Better than what I’ve been shown, better than what’s expected of me, and better than all the shit I’ve chosen to leave behind.
I have Addy, in part, to thank for that. And the Masons. And our unexpected roommates and friends down the hallway.And Jude.
I look over at him in his bed where he lies. His mouth parted, his chest rising and falling with calming, slow breaths, tattoos etched across his torso and climbing all the way up his neck.
I haven’t seen the images that rest beneath his chin until now, I realize—a background of black and gray shapes, with two elegant, curving words resting inside them.
Inhale,andExhale.
I feel myself doing just that. Feeding air into my lungs, oxygen into my bloodstream, an unexpected feeling of calmness, of rightness, settling over me.
I don’t know what the next few weeks, or even months, are going to bring—I don’t know, really, where we’re supposed to go from here, states and thousands of miles apart—but at the very least, I know we’ve formed a genuine friendship, and it’s one I don’t plan on easily letting go of.
The rest…
Well, the rest I’ll just have to wait and see.
______
I sneak out of Jude’s room before he wakes, slipping straight from his bed and into Addy’s. Her cool sheets meet the warmth of my skin, and she shifts beside me before being pulled back into sleep. Her soft snores make me crack a smile. I don’t want to wake her when she looks so blissfully lost to the world, but we have to leave soon. I can already smell Stacy’s farewell breakfast wafting up the stairs, into the hallway, and beneath Addy’s door.