My Cone and Only (King Family #1) - Susannah Nix Page 0,14

silent wishes that night. Ones I hadn’t wanted to say out loud in front of my brother. Or Wyatt.

“Well, I never got to meet Taylor Lautner,” I said. “But technically I guess there’s still time for that.”

Wyatt’s face had grown slack, his lips parting, and I could hear a faint rush of air in his throat with every rise and fall of his chest. The night we’d watched the meteor shower, we’d all fallen asleep in the bed of my dad’s pickup. Me in the middle with Josh and Wyatt on either side of me. It’d been cold, and my brother had been hogging the blankets, so I’d burrowed against Wyatt in my sleep for warmth. I remembered waking up with my face in his chest and lying there counting his heartbeats until my parents came out to get us. It was one of my most treasured memories from those years.

“Wyatt?” I said quietly, wondering if he’d dropped off to sleep.

“Hmmm?” he murmured.

“Did any of your wishes come true?”

A single furrow appeared between his brows. “Not the one that mattered.”

I was tempted to ask him what it was. I desperately wanted to know what actually mattered to Wyatt King. What heart’s desire still eluded him after all these years. But it felt like an invasion of privacy, and I’d done enough of that already by looking at that notebook. Alcohol had loosened his lips, and if I pressed he might tell me something he’d rather keep secret. I was here to take care of him, not take advantage of him. Just like he’d do for me if the roles were reversed—like he had done for me.

The top few buttons of his midnight blue shirt were undone, exposing the top of his chest and the small gold St. Christopher medallion he never took off. His mother had given it to him a few months before she died. I’d never seen him without it in all the years since.

I laid my hand over it, the tiny gold disk warm from his body heat. The furrow in his brow smoothed away, and he shifted to lay his hand over mine, trapping it above his heart.

I stayed with him, counting his heartbeats, until I was sure he’d fallen asleep.

4

Wyatt

When my phone started vibrating under my ass, I tried to roll over and fell off the couch.

Fuck.

I lay on the floor, cursing my poor decision-making skills as my ass continued to vibrate. My head felt like it had been run over by a tractor, my throat burned like I’d gargled acid, and my mouth was as parched as the Rio Grande Valley on the tail end of a hundred-year drought.

A montage of scenes from the night before played behind my puffy, closed eyelids. Dancing with Andie. Drinking. That Austin dickhead laying hands on Andie. Getting my ass whupped by the Austin dickhead and then chewed out by my uncle. Andie driving me home and taking care of me.

I paused at that point in the replay, trying to piece together exactly what we’d talked about. I remembered telling her how I’d changed her shirt and put her to bed the night she had too many birthday B-52s, which—fuck—I’d never meant to tell her about that. I also remembered something about sour gummies, and something about the night we’d fallen asleep watching the meteor shower.

Jesus, what else had I confessed to her? I had a tendency to run my mouth when I was drunk—which was a pretty good reason not to get drunk, but that whole poor decision-making thing always managed to bite me in the ass.

I hoped to hell I hadn’t told her how on the night we watched the meteor shower, when she’d fallen asleep next to me, I’d realized that of all the girls I knew, she was the only one I really liked. And how I’d stupidly wished that we’d get married one day, so she’d fall asleep next to me like that every night. Or how I’d woken up a few hours later with her face burrowed against my chest and a raging case of morning wood I wasn’t sure I’d managed to hide.

I’d better not have fucking told her any of that, or I’d need to start making arrangements to leave town under the cloak of darkness and change my name so I never had to face her again.

At least my ass had finally stopped vibrating. Experimentally, I tried opening my eyes. Both seemed to work, although the light shining in