My dress is on the floor. I'm wearing nothing but my underwear and one sock — one sock, because apparently drunk Mia has priorities and symmetry isn't one of them. My arm is draped across Jared's bare chest, my leg hooked over his thigh like a vine that grew there overnight, and his arm is around my waist holding me against him like something he caught in his sleep and decided to keep. The TV is on, muted, game highlights playing on loop to nobody.
The dream is still pulsing between my legs. His mouth, his hands, the sound I made when everything cracked open — the ghost of it clings to my skin like heat from a fire that's already gone out, and the man I dreamed about in graphic, unforgivable detail is breathing six inches from my face.
I jerk upright. The room spins — concussion and wine competing for which can make me dizzier — and I grab the throw blanket and press it against my chest like a shield made of wool. "Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God."
I'm an idiot. A catastrophic, irreversible idiot. I slept with him. I actually fell asleep half-naked on a man I'm contractually obligated to pretend to love, a man whose world is made of cameras and threats and champagne towers and people who leave knives in doorframes.
What is wrong with me. What is actually, structurally, foundationally wrong with me that I can't maintain professional distance from a man whose jawline I apparently described as architecturally significant while drunk — I don't remember that part but something in my bones tells me it happened and I'll never recover from it.
And Luke. Steady, patient Luke who kissed me under a streetlight with careful hands and told me "you know where I am" with a smile that cost him everything he had. Luke who calls the nurses' station about William, who brings me water without being asked, who drove me home and held my face like I was something worth holding. Luke is out there waiting for the contract to expire, believing I'm playing a role, and I just incinerated every wall I had left by falling asleep on the chest of the performance.
Jared opens one eye. He's been awake. Of course he's been awake — lying there with one arm behind his head, the other still warm from where my waist used to be, watching me spiral with an expression I want to slap off his face and frame on a wall simultaneously. "Morning."
"Did we — did something—" I can't finish. My hands are white-knuckled on the blanket and my voice sounds like it belongs to someone who's just been pulled from wreckage.
He lets me panic for three more seconds. I can see him counting them behind those green eyes, savoring every one. Then he says, "Relax. Nothing happened."
The words hit my bloodstream like a drug. I stare at him, searching his face for the lie, the smirk, the tell — but his expression is steady. Amused, insufferable, but steady, and underneath both of those something else that I'm choosing not to examine because I'm in my underwear and my diagnostic capabilities are compromised.
"Then why am I—" I gesture at myself, the dress on the floor, the single sock, the general catastrophe of my physical presentation, the fact that my body was arranged around his like a human blanket.
He sits up and stretches — the motion pulling his shoulders back and revealing the full topography of his chest in morning light, every muscle defined, the bandaged hand from the kitchen flexing, a scar I've never noticed running along his left ribcage. The fact that I'm cataloging his anatomy right now while wearing one sock is a level of self-betrayal I'll be processing in therapy for years. He delivers the play-by-play with the clinical detachment of a sports commentator reviewing game tape.
"Cocktail number four. You announced the dress was suffocating you and started pulling it off mid-sentence about French conjugation — which, for the record, was impressively bad. Then you informed me I had pretty eyes." He pauses for effect.
"Twice. Then you tried to climb on top of me, got about halfway there, announced that my jawline was 'architecturally significant,' and passed out on my chest like a tranquilized cat." The grin arrives — devastating, earned, insufferable in a way that makes me want to throw the blanket at his head. "I figured sleeping was the better option."
The relief crashes through me so hard my shoulders drop three inches and my lungs remember how to function. Nothing happened. The dream was just a dream — my subconscious staging a full production complete with lighting and sound design and a performance my body didn't actually give.
The couch where I came apart under his mouth in the dream was the same couch where I apparently drooled on his chest while conjugating French verbs badly. The gap between those two realities is so vast and so humiliating I could park my entire life inside it and still have room for my dignity's funeral.
I bury my face in the blanket and breathe into the wool. "I'm going to need you to never mention this again. Not to me, not to anyone, not to your mirror, not to your reflection in a car window. The words architecturally significant will be erased from your vocabulary."
"Can't promise that." He swings his legs off the couch and stands, stepping over the cocktail glasses that litter the coffee table like evidence at a crime scene — four of them, each representing a decision worse than the last. "The conjugation part alone is six months of material. And the climbing — that's going in the vault for emergency deployment."
He heads toward the kitchen. I watch him go — the broad back, the way he moves through his own house with the unconscious authority of a man who takes up exactly as much space as he wants to. He stops in the doorway, one hand on the frame. Doesn't turn around. When he speaks, his voice has lost the grin entirely — quieter now, stripped down, the words delivered to the doorframe the way his confession in the car was delivered to the window.
"For what it's worth — the kiss wasn't the vodka."
He walks out. The faucet runs. A cabinet opens and closes. The coffee maker begins its slow, mechanical breathing. Morning sounds, ordinary sounds, the soundtrack of a man making coffee while a woman sits on his couch in her underwear and one sock with a dream still burning behind her eyes that she'll never be able to unwatch.
I pull the blanket tighter around my shoulders and stare at the wreckage of the living room — scattered glasses, crumpled dress, the muted TV cycling through highlights of games neither of us cared about, the couch cushions still dented with the shape of two bodies that fell asleep too close together. The dream pulses once more, a phantom ache, and fades.
The most dangerous thing in this arrangement isn't the contract. It isn't the cameras, or the threats, or Ron's blackmail, or the men who leave knives and letters and grab my arm in bathrooms. It's that some traitorous, reckless, irreversible part of me — the part that dreamed what it dreamed and woke up pressed against his chest and felt the wrong sunlight on her face and thought, for one fraction of a second before the panic hit, stay — is disappointed that nothing happened.