“Don’t say it.”

Whitney pauses with her mouth half-open on the tail end of a sentence that started with, “I definitely think we should go to,” and I’m not going to that place. That wine bar. No.

“Vino.”

I pull a t-shirt over my head and make a face at her. “Is that the only place you like in the whole city?”

She crosses her arms, which has the effect of pushing her breasts up into a positively salacious position. “Of course it’s not the only place that I like. It’s my favorite place.”

It helps that she’s wearing a brand-new bra and panty set, close to the ones I took off of her an hour and a half ago. It took that long to tear myself away from her body and get us both into the shower. It was either that or fall into her eyes forever, and I can’t do that.

I don’t know why, but I can’t do that.

She’s not making it easy.

“I have a different favorite place.”

My entire body is loose, relaxed. I raise my hand to my neck to rub at the ache there, but there’s no ache.

There’s...no ache.

“What’s your other favorite place?” Her voice cuts into my revelation. It draws me back to her. She’s an enigma. She’s her own source of gravity.

I drag a finger down from the hollow of her neck to the warm, scented cleavage rising out of her bra. “Here.”

Whitney puts a hand on mine and presses it closer. “Stay a while.”

“Oh, my God. Are you sex-obsessed?”

She gives me a serious expression. “Maybe. It’s a possibility. But the only way to find out is...” She hooks an answering finger in the collar of my shirt and tugs me closer. My head spins. I put my hand on hers and meet her with a kiss.

“Are you trying to kill me?”

“Not right now.” Whitney leans in for another kiss.

It’s a fine line with her, like it is with hard liquor. Being inside her, taking her like that, melted the tension out of my shoulders and my back. It stripped my guard away. But if I lean into it too far, it comes back. There’s a resistance at the base of my spine that I can’t abandon. I don’t know what’s on the other side.

“You’re going to, if you keep this up.” I keep my tone light, but she pulls back, her dark eyes searching mine.

A smile quirks the corner of her lips. “Ah. I get it. You’re too hungry to go on.”

It’s half-true. I’m hungry enough that my stomach is an empty pit, but I can feel that edge, feel that line between relaxation and losing control creeping forward. It shouldn’t be. This is Whitney. This is supposed to be fun. But it’s like going out for a drink and knocking seven back. The cure’s the same for both—food, and something more like conversation.

“Is it that obvious?”

“Men are always ravenous.”

I push her away from me, getting some distance. The sweet soapy ocean scent of her body wash is tantalizing, and I need a breath of air, or else I’ll fall headfirst.

Maybe I already have.

“Get dressed before I take you back to bed.”

Whitney turns away, swinging her hips on the way to the door. “Don’t tempt me.”

“I am not tempting you.”

She drags her fingers along the edge of my dresser, the fuchsia bra and panty set caressing her skin. My pulse pounds in my temples. If she doesn’t get out soon, we’re going to be in major trouble. We’re both going to be in over our heads, and I don’t even know what this is supposed to be. I have no idea what outcome Whitney’s hoping for.

I don’t know what outcome I’m hoping for.

The tips of her fingers knock against my phone, sending it spinning across to the corner. “Oh—sorry.” She stills it with her hand and it buzzes against the wooden surface of the dresser. “Somebody’s sending you a message.” Then, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, she flips it over in her hand and steps back into the room. “Who’s Bennett Powell?”

The name coming out of her mouth is a jolt. I shake off the sensation that she’s somehow violated my privacy—and really, who the hell cares?—and take the phone from her hand. “My missing roommate.”

Her eyes fly open. “Oh, my God.” Whitney dashes for the bedroom door and runs across to her own room on the balls of her feet, like a gazelle, fucking graceful, like she’s just been caught out in the woods. “Yeah, you’re right. We have to go to dinner. A missing roommate? What other secrets have you been hiding?”

Whitney insists on choosing a restaurant at random.

I feel it right away—that tightening at the base of my neck, my shoulders drawing up. Maybe she was right. Maybe we should have stayed in bed for the rest of the night. For the rest of the weekend, even. It’s been a long time since that knot loosened at all. I was used to it. Now it nags at me.

We walk side by side down the street by Whitney’s favorite place in the early evening glow. I rub at my neck.

“Miss me already?” Whitney jokes, then puts her own hand on the back of my neck. It’s a foreign feeling, her fingertips there, but I shove down the impulse to push her away.

“You didn’t do anything sexy to the back of my neck.”

“Yet.”

“You’re something else. You know that?”

“I’ve been told. What about here?” She gestures to a Thai place with a menu posted in the window. It looks like people have been picking at the edges. This Week’s Menu is scrawled at the top, along with a date from six months ago.

“Not a chance.”

Whitney sighs. “Have you no sense of adventure?”

“I have a sense that I’d rather not get food poisoning.”

I turn down three more restaurants, the pressure in my neck growing, until finally Whitney stops outside an authentic Mexican place. It’s a building wedged between two others, about as wide as an alley, and colored lights spill out from the front windows and the doorway. People spill out from the front, coming and going. The place is packed. It’s loud as hell. No. I don’t want loud, or people.

In the street behind us, a car screeches like it’s dying. It’s a metal-on-metal whine and it burrows into my brain, a flash of pain at the base of my neck, and my heart zig-zags against my ribcage.

“Wes?”

Whitney has stepped in front of me, toward the two low steps of the restaurant. She holds the handle of her purse lightly, as if she’s never once heard of being robbed in New York City, and her eyebrows are raised.

I missed something, but I don’t know what.

I move toward her, putting myself between the purse and a group of women stumbling out of the restaurant, arms linked, screeching with laughter.

“Any objections?”

I have a thousand objections, but if I keep saying no, then Whitney is going to choose on her own. And the longer we keep walking, the better the odds that she’ll choose somewhere truly outrageous. It’s Friday night in New York City and things are only going to get rowdier. I’m bracing for the inevitable collision in the traffic several beats before I realize it.

“This place.” I give it a nod like it was my idea all along, and stride toward the doorway, sweeping her up in my arm as I go.

Our booth for two is tucked into a little arched alcove, and I twist in my seat, looking for the exits. We’re twenty feet away from the door in the kitchen, which isn’t bad, though the front door is—

“What are you looking for?”

“Exits.” I snap back to Whitney’s face before I can come up with a convincing lie.

“Exits? For the building?” She peeks out over one of the menus, which has a colorful sombrero on the front. My stomach growls.

“Old habit.”

“Military thing?”

I pick up a menu and force myself to focus on it. “What, you don’t look for the exits every place you go?”

She arches one eyebrow. “Not usually?”

“You’re just asking to get trapped if something goes south, you know.”

“Okay. So it is a military thing.”

“Not necessarily.” I scan the left side of the menu, and then the right. “I was friends with Dayton growing up. You know that.”

“What does that have to do with finding the exits?”

I get a quick little film reel of all the stupid shit Dayton and I used to do as kids, and later teenagers. It was like being drunk, in a way. I never had a reason for anything, other than the adrenaline rush that came from skirting the edge of risk.

Or diving right into it.

“You wouldn’t get it. You were probably a rule-follower.”

A veiled hurt flashes in Whitney’s eyes. “Not exactly.”

That was the line, and I blundered right into it like a self-absorbed asshole. I take her hand. “Hey.” Her eyes flick to mine over the top of the menu. “I know you’re not some goody-two-shoes—”

Whitney snorts. “I think you’re the first person to say that in a hundred years.”

“—Mary Sue, prim and proper—”

She covers her mouth with her other hand and grins.

“—stuck-up—”

“Too far, too far...”

“—uptown girl.”

She bursts out laughing. “No. None of those things.” She slips her hand from mine, not unkindly, and jabs a finger at me. “You should count your lucky stars that I’m not.”

“Why?” I lean in close. “Because of the sex?”

“Because of the room you sleep in—”

“I don’t always sleep in there.”

“—in my apartment.”

“I’m paying half the rent.”

“Oh, but I had to choose you. I wouldn’t let just any man move in with me.”

“No.” A bright truth, like a camera flash, goes off in my chest. “Just a control-freak veteran in need of a roommate.”

Whitney slaps her menu to the table and claps her hands. “That’s the magic word.”

“Veteran?”

“Roommate. Tell me about your missing roommate.”

As if on cue, my phone buzzes in my pocket.

I didn’t answer the first text.

Now there are two.

Bennett: Hey

Bennett: You ever coming home???

“He’s missing,” I say bluntly.

Whitney nods like a therapist. “Mm-hmm. Yes. What can you tell me about why he’s missing?”

I put the phone face-down on the table. “Bennett Powell walked away from Newark a while ago. Maybe three months? Three-and-a-half, now that I’ve been in the city. I looked for him, but it seemed like he didn’t want to be found. And now—”

The phone buzzes again.

“—now he’s texting me. Out of nowhere.”

Whitney reaches for the phone. I pin it down with my fingertips. “What are you doing?”

“Answering him. I’d bet a hundred dollars you haven’t said a word.”

“How would you know that?”

“Because you haven’t typed anything in. Did he show up at your old doorstep? That’s so mysterious.” Her face is contemplative, shining. “What’s he like? Why would he walk away?”

I can’t picture his face—not the way he looked in Newark, when we were sharing the two-bedroom in a brand-new development that overlooked a parking lot. I signed the lease on the place before I was officially out of the Army. I still waffled about it every time I picked up the pen. But it came back to me—that tank. The crunch of the metal. The unholy screech.

One week later, Bennett Powell was knocking on my door.

“I don’t know. Maybe he was looking for something.”

I can’t resist it. I turn the phone over.

Bennett: I’m waiting outside, Wes.

I show it to Whitney, and her eyes go wide at the words on the screen. “Seems like now he’s looking for you.”

My stomach turns over. “I don’t want to be found.”