Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 128211 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 641(@200wpm)___ 513(@250wpm)___ 427(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128211 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 641(@200wpm)___ 513(@250wpm)___ 427(@300wpm)
FINN
Masochism, I suppose.
Blink.
I needed to blink.
I needed to blink, to smile, to fucking breathe.
I was all too aware of the cameras trained on us, trained on me as Finn waited for me to respond. But the nickname I never thought I’d hear again had sent an unwelcome warmth down my spine that had apparently seared my nerves and rendered me immobile.
This can’t be happening.
He can’t be real.
But he was. I knew it even as my brain tried to convince me otherwise. No defense mechanism was going to save me from the reality that Finn Pearson was in the crew quarters with me.
Two years had aged him, but only in ways that made him somehow even more attractive than he was the first time I met him in Greece. We’d worked the same charter there together for four months.
They’d been some of the happiest months of my life.
Until the memory of them became a repetitive heartbreak.
Finn and I had said goodbye at the end of the charter, and it wasn’t a pretty goodbye.
His boyish eyes were older now, more mature, the edges of them crinkling a bit as he threw that signature smirk of his at me.
God, how that smile made me weak. Even still. Even after he left me broken on the floor.
My knees buckled as I grappled, reaching through the depths of my emotions for anger but coming up blank. It seemed I was going to settle firmly with shock and disbelief, instead.
I found safety in cataloguing all the ways he’d changed, so I let myself focus on that while my brain scrambled to catch up and make words again.
His chestnut brown hair was longer than the last time I’d seen him, the locks messy and curling a bit over the edges of his ears. It somehow looked styled and like he’d just rolled out of bed all at once. I finally managed to blink, but with that came a flash of a memory long ago — my fingers tangled in that hair, gripping, pulling…
Stubble lined his jaw and upper lip, framing his stupidly perfect heart-shaped face. There were shocks of white in that dark beard that should have been reserved for a man twice his age. That somehow made him hotter.
The bastard.
And amid all that dark hair, sitting right above that cocky tilt of his lips were the eyes that had once been my downfall.
They were the color of the sea; green and blue with flecks of gold.
And they were just as dangerous as the waves they emulated.
“Finn,” I finally said, though it was more of a breath of disbelief than a name.
The sound of his name from my lips made the corner of his quirk higher.
“What—” I cleared my throat, turning my attention back to the provisions list on my laptop screen. Was I really about to ask what he was doing here? It was pretty damn obvious, wasn’t it?
He was here for the season, for the show — just like I was.
Suddenly, I wanted to throttle the producers I had thought were so cute and pleasant, their smiles all wide and beaming every time I spoke to them.
Little weasels knew exactly what they were doing.
“It’s been a while,” I finally said instead, hoping my smile looked at least twenty percent less forced than it felt as I glanced at him and then back at my screen. “How have you been?”
Finn sort of chuckled, taking a step toward me before adjusting the duffle bag on his shoulder. He was dressed in white shorts and a sky-blue button-up tucked into one side, the sleeves of it shoved up to his elbows and a brown belt hugging his hips. He looked more like he was paying for a charter than like he was about to work one.
“So formal,” he mused, and his hand inched forward, up — as if he were about to tuck the rogue strands of my hair that had fallen out of my ponytail behind my ear the way he used to. Instead, he shoved that hand into his pocket and nodded his chin toward my left ear. “Those are new.”
I let my fingers ghost over the dainty jewelry that had caught his eye, the industrial and tragus piercings I’d had done just weeks after the last time I’d seen him. My neck heated when I remembered that he knew better than anyone that piercings and micro tattoos were my way of avoiding, of giving myself another softer form of pain to focus on when my heart was splitting in two.
“I like them,” he said when I stayed silent.
The way my chest ached in that moment had me ready to double over, and I nearly did when my eyes met his again, when I saw his smile slip. There were a million words left unsaid flashing in those green irises, like ghosts trapped in glass and begging to escape.