Page 77 of Off Plan

What an idiot Icontinuedto be.

I grabbed my stethoscope from my desk and looped it around my neck, then turned toward him. He didn’t move a muscle. Even his breathing was shallow.

I laid my palm lightly against his forehead. Our skin was the same temperature, but Fenn shivered anyway and his eyes blinked shut.

“No sign of fever,” I said softly.

I brushed a lock of hair off his forehead, then trailed my fingers down the sides of his face to the hinge of his stubbled jaw, and lower still, until I could feel his Adam’s apple jerking convulsively as he swallowed.

“Everything feels normal.” My voice was loud in the silent room, and my hand came to rest near his on his chest. “Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been experiencing.”

Fenn’s eyes met mine. “Well. For one thing, I can’t concentrate for shit. I’ve been hallucinating. I’m hungry, but not for food. And I’ve had… tachy-things. In my heart.”

I pursed my lips.Fuck, he could be adorable. “How long have you been experiencing these symptoms?”

“To be honest, it hasn’t really gone away since last night, Mason. But certain things have made it worse.”

Mason.

I slid the stethoscope into my ears and pressed the chestpiece to his T-shirt with one palm, while I slid the other along the hard plane of his abs. The quick, steadylub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dubin my ears did funny things to my own heartbeat.

I took my stethoscope off and inhaled sharply. I could almost taste the soap-clean scent of him. “What sorts of things have made it worse?”

He moved his hand from behind his head to thread with mine atop his chest. “Thinking about you. Tryingnotto think about you. Seeing you earlier. Seeing you now. Hearing your voice.”

“B-but—”

“Then there was this…” His fingers held on to mine when I tried to pull away, to get a little space, and I saw that he was holding his phone in his other hand. He swiped it open with his thumb. “‘No hashtags. No apologies. No explanations.’That’s a heck of a caption.”

I swallowed, looking from the picture of us on his screen—the picture I’d posted—to his eyes, to our joined hands. “You gave me the words. Accidentally.”

“I know.”

“But I didn’t post that foryou. It wasn’t because of the dare.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t expect you to ever see it.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t even know you had Instagram.”

“I didn’t, until about two hours ago, when Beale suggested I look at your account.”

I blinked. “Beale saw the picture?”

“Yes. Is that a problem?”

“N-no. Not at all. He just didn’t say anything to me about it.” Probably because it wasn’t nearly as remarkable to anyone else as it was to me. I blew out a breath. “I posted that picture because it was true and honest. But I’m still a work in progress. For the first time I can remember, I don’t know exactly what my future is going to look like. And I know you want someone who’s got their shit figured out. You deserve that. But I… I don’t know how to just be friends with you, so—”

Fenn swung his legs over the side of the table toward me and used our joined hands to pull me between his spread knees. “You wanna hear my truth, Mason?”

I nodded.

He smiled, just a little. “I didn’t want to stop holding you last night.”

“Yeah?” I sucked in a breath, lost in the blue-blue.