Chapter 5: Caged: Chapter 5

Does counting the rotations of the fan count as meditation?

Because it’s sure not helping me calm down.

I’ve been up here for an hour, and there’s no way I’m falling asleep any time soon. Not with my emotions riding a roller coaster like it’s a weekend at the Jersey shore. I’ve always loved the roller coasters.

The bigger, the faster, the crazier, the better.

I love that feeling of your stomach dropping as you fly around the loops backward, not able to see what’s coming at you. I always thought they were an adrenaline high and would beg Brandon to ride them again and again.

I wish I was fearless like that in my real life.

I wish I could take what I want and not worry what was coming at me.

Not worry about the consequences.

Not let the past determine my future.

Knowing there’s no chance I’m falling asleep anytime soon, I shoot a text to Daphne.

I hit Daphne’s number and watch her face appear in her dark bedroom after one ring. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing . . .” She gives me the look—the one only your best friend can give you because words aren’t even needed. “I don’t know, D. Everything?” I’m not even sure why I called her, but I need to figure this out.

“You made it one whole night, huh?” She gets up and tells her husband she’ll be back. “What did he do?”

Daphne knows me better than anyone in the world, and I love her for it. She was the first person I ever let in who wasn’t Brandon. I trust her with my life, and because of her, I’ve got a tribe of women who surround me and support me. But it took a long time for me to feel that level of comfort. And I don’t know if I’m capable of giving anyone else that same kind of trust.

Because I’m broken.

“He didn’t do anything, D. It’s me. You know Hudson. He’s a touchy-feely kind of guy, and—”

She cuts me off, “And you’re not a touchy kind of girl.”

“Exactly.” I hesitate, before adding, “But what if I want to be?”

Daphne sits down on her couch and wraps a blanket around her shoulders. “Do you?” My heart squeezes at the hesitancy in her voice, like I’m a deer caught in headlights she’s expecting to bolt. “I’m going to ask you something, Mads, and I don’t want you to get mad at me.”

“I won’t get mad, D.”

“Do you just want to be touched, or do you want Hudson to touch you? There’s a big difference between the two, and I want you to really think about the answer.”

I sit up in bed, bringing my knees up to my chest and wrap an arm around them, really considering her question. Thinking about the way my body warms under hands. How it warms, just imagining what it could be like. He’s the only man who’s ever made me feel that way, and I’m not sure what to do with this realization. “I think I want Hudson . . . It’s not that I want anyone else to touch me. Just him.”

“You think or you know?” Daphne pushes.

“I’m torn, D. I know what I want, but I don’t know if Hudson’s capable of giving it to me. And I don’t know that it’s fair to ask him if I’m not sure what I’m doing.” I close my eyes and try to picture what that conversation would look like, but I can’t. “It’s the first time I’ve ever wanted it. Truly wanted more. All the dates I’ve gone on . . . All the guys we met in college . . . Not one of them ever made me feel the way I felt tonight with my hands on his chest.”

“It’s a nice chest,” she sighs. “And we’ll circle back to the fact that your hands were on it later.”

“It is a very nice chest,” I laugh softly, breaking the heavy weight hanging in the air. “I’m sorry. Did I wake you up?”

“Nope. This kid has been kicking hard tonight. And when she’s not practicing her soccer skills on my kidneys, the heartburn is making sure I can’t lie down anyway.” She angles the phone down so I can see her big, pregnant belly.

“I still can’t believe you’re going to be a mommy.”

“Me either.” She brings the screen back up to her face. “Mads . . . I can’t believe I’m about to say this about Hudson Kingston, but he’s Max’s brother, and I love him, so I’m saying it anyway.”

I wait for a long beat, wondering what words of wisdom she’s going to lay at my feet.

“Don’t hurt him, Maddie. He might seem invincible, but he’s not. He’s a really good guy, with a really big heart. Be sure of what you want before you make any decisions. Because from what I’ve seen, when the Kingstons fall, they fall hard. They love hard. And if you give him your heart, I don’t see how he could ever let it go. Because you, Mads, are incredible.”

My emotion at her words gets caught in my throat. “I doubt we have to worry about me hurting Hud, D.”

“Just keep it in mind, okay?”

“I will.” I would never want to hurt Hudson or Daphne. “Love you, D.”

“Love you too, Mads.”

A creak in the hall a few minutes later has me watching a shadow that stops on the other side of the closed door. My heart races, wondering if Hudson’s going to knock. But after a minute, the shadow is gone, and the footsteps head further down the hall to the next room. Hudson’s bedroom.

I sit there, paralyzed and debating what to do for at least ten minutes as disappointment chokes me. Until I finally get up, positive this is insane but forcing myself to move until I’m standing in front of his closed door with my hand pressed against it.

“Maddie?” he calls from inside the room.

“Yeah,” I whisper back.

He doesn’t say anything, but the door opens, and I swallow my tongue.

Steam is billowing in from the master bathroom, This man is beautiful. Standing with one crutch under his arm, a towel wrapped around his hips, and his wet hair dripping down his face, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything sexier. I rake my eyes over all the beautiful, inked muscles on display and have to fight the sudden urge to reach out and trace every last line.

It’s a new urge, and I don’t hate it.

“Are you okay, Mads?” He adjusts his hold on the crutch, still favoring his sore knee and searching my face for an answer. “Maddie?”

I take a deep breath to settle my thoughts as they go into overdrive. “I’m fine. I just . . . God, why is it so hard?”

Hudson cocks his eyebrow, and I realize what I said. More importantly, what it sounded like. “Not you, you big goof.”

“I know, sunshine. I just wanted to see you smile. You never smiled tonight. Not your real smile anyway.” Hudson steps back. “Let me throw some pants on.”

“Okay.”

He moves into the walk-in closet, nearly out of view but not completely.

No . . . I can’t tear my eyes away, as the black towel hits the plush carpet, and am rewarded with an unobstructed view of one calf before it’s covered by a pair of dark jersey pajama pants. When he steps back into the room, he’s shirtless with just those pajama bottoms hanging from incredibly lean hips. Of course, this king has those damn dips that form a perfect V leading to . . . trouble.

. I bring my eyes back up to meet his and see a devilish spark staring back at me.

Hudson ambles across the room and presses a button that closes the drapes, then sits on the bed with the TV remote in his hand. “Come on, Mads. I want to see what happens in the next . Watch it with me.”

And like a moth to a flame, I throw caution to the wind and walk into the room.

Oh. My. God.

Ohmygod . . . Noooo.

I know, without a doubt, exactly where I am the next morning before I crack open a single eye. Wide-awake Maddie might hate the idea of being touched, but apparently, I turn into a little ho when I’m sleeping and can’t get enough of it. I hold myself still, unsure if I’m trying to soak this moment in before I have to get up or if I’m scared it’s a dream I don’t want to end. Hudson’s arms are wrapped around me, and so is that clean, crisp scent I swear makes me stupid every time I’m near him.

There’s an incredibly hard body beneath me.

And this time, it’s not just beneath my face.

No. Because that wasn’t humiliating enough.

It’s beneath a leg, half my chest, an arm, and my face.

I don’t move a muscle while I listen to Hudson’s even breathing and say a quick prayer to every god I’ve ever read about, and some I may have only heard of in some less than stellar books, that if I move off him slowly and carefully, he won’t wake up. Because seriously . . . if I’m going to do the walk of shame for the very first freaking time, I should have at least gotten an orgasm I didn’t give myself out of it. Not just a movie.

I don’t think I’ve ever moved this slowly in my entire life, but somehow, I manage to extricate myself from Hudson’s bed, without the man in question waking up, and basically run back to the other room to get dressed and get out of the house.

Once I’m in my car, I send him a text, grab a protein bar from my purse, and head to my house. It doesn’t take me long to get there, but figuring out what the heck I want to wear tonight is a whole different story. I want to look . . . hot? Sexy? I don’t know what I want to look like. I just know I’m not finding it in this closet, so after close to an hour of indecision, I call in the reserves.

And that’s when I turn my phone off . . .

Is it possible to love your friends and hate them at the same time?

Okay, so calling last night a long night is the understatement of the century.

Maybe the fucking millennia.

Maddie and I didn’t talk about what happened earlier in the kitchen. I didn’t tell her that every protective instinct in my body was demanding that I wrap my arms around her and promise her no one would ever hurt her again. Because I have no doubt she was hurt, and when I find out by who, I will hunt them down and kill them myself.

Once I dangled in front of her, it only took her a moment to decide watching it in my room didn’t need to be any different than watching it downstairs.

She was wrong.

We both were.

She climbed into my bed, and we both sat there, leaning against the headboard with the blanket pulled up over us to watch the movie.

I may have needed to cover her bare legs because they were wreaking fucking havoc on my sanity. And that shit was already dangling by a very thin thread. Having her in my space . . . in my bed, where fantasies of her spread out beneath me played out in my mind like a home movie.

. I needed to cover both of us up before she started to think I was a horny asshole.

Not that she’d be wrong about that.

I don’t know why this woman likes these damn movies, since she can’t stay awake till the end to save her life. And this one wasn’t even as good as the first one. It was a little over halfway through when her head rested on my shoulder. I waited until the end of the movie to move so we were both lying down. I probably should have woken her up so she could sleep in her own room, but I liked having her in my bed with me. I was a gentleman about it, though, and kept a few inches between us. Even if I didn’t want to. Even if every bone in my body was screaming for me not to.

Madison Dixon crawled under my skin years ago, and I’ve ignored it. She’s my friend. It’s better for her that way.

That’s what I’ve told myself. But I’ve always known there was something about her. Every time I’d hear her talking about another date gone wrong—and there have been a ton of fucked up dates—I always felt relief.

That’s not how a friend should feel. I should want her to find someone. To be happy.

I shouldn’t want to tell her none of those guys are good enough.

And I definitely don’t need to tell her I am—because I’m not.

These last few days have made those less than platonic feelings really hard to ignore.

Curled up on her side with her hands under her face, she looked like a damn angel, and something primal in me liked having her in my bed. Like it was where she belonged, even if there was no way I’d be able to sleep. I figured I’d be awake all night because my dick was hard and I refused to do anything about it. But it turned out that wasn’t the only reason. Madison Dixon is a bed hog. She’s also a goddamn ice cube. Her feet could flash freeze whatever they touch . . . and they touched me. A lot. And they’re not the only thing that touched me. Nooo . . . She’s a cuddler.

It started with her cold feet being shoved between my legs after she’d managed to inch her way across the bed. My eyes popped open, thinking some kind of fucking cold-ass poltergeist was under the sheets with us. But within minutes of warming up her feet between my legs, she rolled her entire body against me, fully twined her legs with mine, and threw her arm across my chest. Then she sort of shimmied against me until she got comfortable, sighed the prettiest sigh I’ve ever fucking heard, and never moved again. Not once. All. Night. Long.

And when did I start categorizing a woman’s sighs? Seriously? What the actual fuck?

Here’s the thing . . . within seconds, she’d warmed up. From the tips of her ice-cube toes to the top of her sexy smelling head, she warmed up and lay lax against me while I stared at the ceiling, trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do with my arms. Maddie was obviously asleep. My little sunshine spent half the night pissed because she doesn’t like to be touched. And fucking consent can’t be given if she’s asleep.

So with my hands folded behind my head, I spent most of the night staring at the ceiling, telling my ragingly hard dick to take a fucking break because the soft, now entirely warm woman who had wrapped herself around me was not going to do anything more than sleep tonight.

being the keyword . . . Because I swear to God, this woman is getting to me in ways no one ever has. And I’m starting to think there’s a reason for it, and I’m an idiot for ignoring it.

Lenny and Jace’s mom used to say everything happens for a reason, even if you don’t know what that reason is while it’s happening.

Is there a reason we’re being pushed together?

I still don’t know if I can give her what she deserves, even if it might actually be what I also want.

And when she woke up this morning and snuck out of bed like her ass was on fire, I let her think I was sleeping because what the fuck am I supposed to say to her? I don’t think, , is gonna work.

She ran outta the front door pretty quickly after she left my room, and my phone pinged with an incoming text after she left.

Oh, sunshine. That’s how we’re gonna play this?