It was nearing midnight, and the apartment had long since settled into its silence. Sienna was asleep in her room, the television was off, the kitchen light was switched off. Outside, campus life was winding down, with laughter trailing off in the distance and the occasional engine humming through the street. But for Maya, sleep was no longer the nightly retreat it used to be.
It had become a battlefield.
She stirred restlessly in her bed, the sheets twisting at her legs, the cotton clinging to her skin slick with the subtle sheen of night sweats. The dream had returned. Not just any dream, but that one. The one where Logan stood at the edge of her subconscious like a sin carved from the shadow, his eyes molten, his hands cupping her face with a reverence that mocked his real world cockiness.
She'd dreamt he'd kissed her again. God help her, she had felt it.
It wasn't like the stories. It wasn't soft, poetic, something you read about in books or wrapped in lacey metaphors. It had been primal desperate. His mouth crushing hers, his hands burying in her hair, her fingers curling into the planes of his back, holding on like she might fall into something too big, too deep, too much.
And in the dream, she always whispered his name.
Not out of weakness.
But out of inevitability.
Now she sat up with a gasp, the chill of the air contrasting sharply with the heat pulsing low in her belly. She ran a trembling hand through her tangled hair and swung her legs off the side of the bed. Her throat felt tight, like the words she refused to say out loud had lodged themselves somewhere just beneath her skin.
This had to stop.
This...whatever this was with Logan, this slow disintegration of her logic, her focus, it was dangerous. She was Maya Thompson. She didn't lose control. She didn't daydream during lectures or miss study group or flub essays. But for the past four days, her head had been a tempest and her heart was no better.
And her grades, her perfect pristine academic record, were beginning to mind.
A missed citation here. A half-hearted analysis there. Professor Laird had handed her back a B-plus essay like it was a funeral notice. Maya had stared at it as though it were a foreign language.
B-plus.
It felt like a slap.
Because when you'd built your entire life on being the best, on climbing higher than your scholarship, faster than your circumstances, smarter than every legacy name around you, then even a slight tumble felt like your world was cracking down in the middle.
And the cause of it?
One charming, arrogant, maddening Logan Hayes.
Who had a mouth like sin, a brain like a literary trap, and eyes that made her forget what words were.
She pulled herself to her feet and wandered barefoot into the kitchen, pouring water with shaky hands. The odd glass kissed her lips, but the thirst remained. Not for water. Not for anything else she could put into words.
Behind her, a door creaked open.
Sienna.
Disheveled in her pineapple-print pajamas rubbing sleep from her eyes and giving Maya a half-lidded squint.
"Please tell me you're making tea and not plotting murder," she said, yawning.
Maya didn't answer right away. She just sipped and leaned against the counter, the silence stretching long like the string of a violin.
Sienna narrowed her eyes. "You had the dream again, didn't you?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Maya said softly. She always pretended whenever Sienna asked her a guilty question.
"Oh, girl, please." Sienna snorted and made a beeline for the kettle. "You're are radiating pent-up sexual frustration like a damn WIFI signal. And you're pacing like the heroine of a gothic novel. Should I be worried you're going to start writing broody sonnets about his hands?"
Maya groaned and let her head fall back.
"Okay, fine. Yes. I had the dream again. The stupid, vivid, utterly inappropriate-"
"Hot-as-hell-"
"-dream,' Maya finished, shooting her a look. "And I'm losing it. I flopped my Victorian lit quiz."
Sienna stopped mid-stir, spoon in hand, and blinked. "You flopped?"
"Not an F," Maya mumbled. "But still, I blanked. Like my brain had gone rogue. Like I was too busy thinking about...about..."
"Logan's mouth."
Maya closed her eyes and sighed in defeat. "His interpretation of Keats, actually. Which is somehow worse."
Sienna didn't laugh. She just looked at her the teasing gone soft, laced with empathy. "Maya, you don't have to keep pretending this isn't real."
Maya swallowed hard. "It shouldn't be. That's the thing. It's Logan. He's unpredictable. He lies. He looks at me like he knows things he shouldn't. Like he's waiting for me to fall. And I hate it. I hate that part of me wants to."
Silence settled over the kitchen.
Then Sienna came over and gently set her cup down beside Maya's.
"Maybe you're not falling. Maybe you already did."
Maya looked at her, her eyes glassy and her breath uneven.
And for the first time, she didn't deny it.
Outside, the wind picked up again.
And somewhere in the dark. Logan Hayes couldn't sleep either.
Logan lay on his back, one arm flung over his forehead, the other clenched into the sheets that still carried the faintest trace of her scent, coconut and lavender. The ceiling stared back at him, blank and uncaring, while inside him a storm brewed low and slow, fierce as hunger.
Maya Thompson.
Sharp-tongued. Proud. So damn disciplined it made him want to ruin her in every way a man could without ever touching her.
And yet, touching was all he thought about.
Her laugh, her lashes, the way she chewed the inside of her cheek when she was trying not to smile, every little detail of her haunted him like a melody. She wasn't his. Not yet. Not officially. Not in any way that counted.
But the thought of her with someone else, that guy, that Damian, made his blood rise like fire licking at paper.
She should be his.
In every way that mattered.
And it burned in his chest, a reckless, possessive ache that no amount of cleverness could erase.
Logan Hayes never obsessed,
But with Maya, he was utterly, irrevocably consumed.