Alive at Night (Wildflower, #1)

by Amelie Rhys

I gave in. He did say please, after all. And that was an awfully large leap of progress for him.

Her eyes grew wide, and—oh my God, was she choking? Shit, I was not confident enough in my first aid skills for this.

This nervous, sweaty-palmed girl was me most days; I just never let him see it.

My life was a collection of outlet malls, romance novels, enough plants to have my own greenhouse, and Gemma. Because I did have one friend. In Boston, anyway. The few friends I’d made in college were now scattered throughout the country, and it was scary how quickly we’d drifted apart.

Juniper was so eager to prove herself all the damn time that it led to disastrous decision-making.

Words danced on the tip of my tongue, and I knew I shouldn’t say them. They’d come back to haunt me. But it was Halloween. Let the haunting begin.

Chance played a part in everyone’s lives, but it felt different for me. So many decisions and doors needed to open just to match me with my own parents, my own house, my hometown.

I liked having my to-do lists, but sometimes I didn’t know how to live until everything was checked off.

“You think he’s mad at you?” “He’s always mad at me.”

This wasn’t supposed to feel this good.

The guy who knew me better than anyone shouldn’t be my best friend’s brother.

Even though he did it in a bossy and overbearing way, he was good at ensuring people were taken care of.

I didn’t know what was happening to me, but letting him pick my food meant one less thing I had to worry about today.

Fiction was always more fun to talk about than real life anyway.

I had to look away again because something was very wrong with that annoying thing inside my chest. It was aching. Hurting. And my eyes, something was wrong with them, too. They were leaking.

“I know what you said. But I don’t know how to just turn off my feelings.”

I know it sounds silly, but if Sofia believes someone like you thinks I’m good enough to keep around, to date, to…to love, then maybe she will too. Maybe she’ll keep me around. Maybe I can convince her I’m worth that.”

I tried really hard to think of something to say that would fix those thoughts in her brain, but I realized my words didn’t matter. It was my actions. They’d caused it—or had a hand in causing how she was feeling. So they were going to fix it.

“I want to stay with you,” I whispered, “if you’re not sick of me.”

I continued to stare silently at him. “You have pretty eyes,” I said beneath my breath—like it was a secret. It sort of was.

If she was going to offer up her mouth for me, I was going to fucking take it.

So annoyingly familiar and sweet and perfect.

Always good enough to kiss, never good enough to wait around for anything else—that was my story.

I needed to fall, and I needed to fall into him.

“Sometimes it feels good to prolong moments where you can really live before being crashed back into a reality where you just exist.”

It was the worst sort of anticipation, nothing like this weekend when I knew we were moments from kissing. Now I knew we were moments from breaking.

Brown hair, brown eyes, so fucking pretty. Please tell me someone knows where the hell she is.”

It really put a damper on my efforts to freeze him out when I got all hot and bothered every time he even glanced at me.

I wished Julian would talk to me. And not just cryptically or condescendingly. But honestly.

Wanting him like this was gut-wrenching. The want kept growing and growing the more I thought about it. But it wasn’t anything more than a whole new way for him to hurt me.

“That’s my girl.”

I wanted this fierceness of his and the tender way he held me when we shared a bed. I wanted to talk to him about my books and tell him what I had eaten for dinner. I wanted him to fix my hair when it wasn’t right and dance with me when I felt lonely. But he thought all of those things were a bad idea. And yet, here we were.

I worried his answer would break me, but I also worried that not asking would break me more.

“Every time I turned the corner, you were there. Your stacks of books, that perfume, clothes—all over my house. Everywhere, all the time. Such a goddamn tease. Because even though you were there, you hated me. And even if you didn’t, I couldn’t have you.”

“I only hated you because of how you made me feel. You were the only one who never accepted me, who didn’t consider me welcome. All I wanted was more family to call my own.”

I loved my parents to no end, but being an only child grew lonely sometimes. The chaos, the connectivity of the Briggs family…it drew me in and held me tight.

If things didn’t work between us, the worst-case scenario was reverting back to what it was before: arguments, hurt hearts, and irritation. And we would survive. We would exist. I had a feeling we could live, though.

He had all that bottled up inside him, and he still pushed me away last week? It made it seem that much more hopeless. And I refused to exist hopelessly.

I was tired of feeling unwanted.

“I think about you constantly. I want you constantly.”

I didn’t want to just exist in his life. I wanted to live it with him, which was a terrifying realization.

It’s hard to trust that things that happen at night will still feel real in the morning,”

A staggering number of people in this world wouldn’t listen to a word out of my mouth unless they liked the lipstick on it.

We shouldn’t be doing any of this, but I no longer cared.

“I’m beyond obsessed with the idea that no one else has fucking touched you like I plan to.”

I’d much rather talk to her than do just about anything.

“Well, it’s not like we’re dating,” she said with a little sniff as she spun back toward her desk. “I can’t help but notice that you haven’t bothered to ask me out.”

I feel like we come from different worlds, but maybe one day, we’ll exist in the same one.”

Everything was utterly the same yet completely different, and I didn’t know what to think.

Maybe changing the status quo wasn’t so bad. Not when it meant feeling tingly in all of my limbs.