Who I Am With You (Imagination #10) - Staci Stallings Page 0,257

much like living.

The bleep of the phone alarm just after ten did only a passing job of waking Greg Everett. He moaned, reached for the thing, and nearly dropped it in the transfer to his control. His eyes fell closed again for a blessed second when he got the bleeping stopped, and he dropped the phone to his chest and lay there more in touch with the dream world than reality.

What was today anyway?

He vaguely remembered the time stamp saying 10:03 on the phone. If it was any day that counted, he had just missed half of everything.

Sunday, his brain finally supplied. It was definitely Sunday.

Only then did other thoughts begin to push themselves into the muddle of his foggy mind. He winced and squeezed one eye even tighter shut. No. That wasn’t possible.

There was no way any of what his brain was telling him had actually happened.

Taylor.

In a cute dress that left him breathless and robbed him of all of his senses, coming down the hall in her dorm, turning for his inspection. She was amazing.

Then, other, more ominous thoughts overtook that one.

The Valentine’s Dance.

With Alpha Chi.

Dancing with her.

That guy… the one he didn’t even know… shaking his hand as Taylor’s boyfriend.

Worse thoughts showed up.

Being on the steps.

On the sidewalk.

He groaned at the memory of kissing her. Why? Why? Why?

What was he thinking?

And then the pebbles of memories became an avalanche. Crying to Paige. Nelson’s concern. Being in the chapel and trying to figure out how to fix any of it.

The breath escaped his lungs as he remembered Taylor. Standing there next to the pew. Is this seat taken?

Sorting, flipping, fumbling. He tried to figure out if that had been real or just some kind of crazy dream.

No. It seemed real. Very real.

As insane as that sounded. It actually seemed like it had happened.

They had sat there, in the chapel, and talked.

He’d told her.

All of it.

He let out a long breath at that one as his heart wobbled inside him. What was he thinking?

Other memories came then.

Them sitting in the car, talking again. There was something about caterpillars and visions. He couldn’t remember it all, but he felt every second of it.

And she had kissed him.

He rewound through that memory three times to make sure he wasn’t just imagining it.

Yes, he finally decided, Taylor Grayson had kissed him, and not a thanks-for-being-my-plus-one-tonight-kind-of kiss either. An actual, soft, mesmerizing kiss that tipped his heart over even now.

He remembered walking her to the door, her arm wound through his as it had been so many times. But this felt so, so very different. This felt like she actually meant it, like she was glad to be more than his plus-one, like she was more than his plus-one.

The breath left him completely at the thought of their kiss just inside the two sets of double doors at her dorms. How she had ducked as she leaned up against the wall and been even shy just before he put his hand on her neck to brush the hair from her shoulder. The memory tore through him as he saw her there, her eyes coming up to his, trusting but barely. And he had kissed her like he’d never kissed anyone before. It started in hesitation but ended in a certainty he had never known possible.

When it was over, he remembered to the depths of him the feeling of her being in his arms. He had held her for the first time ever, not to comfort her or to be her friend but because he loved her. Then, she had said goodnight and fled through the doors. That was the last he’d seen of her, and now, just as he had the previous night, he wondered what came next.

It was Sunday. So they would at least see each other at the chapel later. His heart jumped into overdrive as he wondered how that would go. Should he go talk to her? Would she come talk to him? He suddenly felt like he was in middle school again playing “Check Yes or No.”

Realizing he couldn’t just lay here all day, he sat up and looked at his phone again. He’d put it in Do Not Disturb mode the night before, so coming all the way up, he rubbed his eye and went back to the home screen. That’s when he saw there was a text.

Not really thinking about it, he tapped the screen to bring it up. He read it without thinking he should prepare