One Night Only (Season 1: Deni's Story)

Epilogue: Chapter Forty-Five

Night and the dark are my recipe for restless energy under the right circumstances. I've been sleeping fine since my concert in Thunder Bay and getting back together with Hunter, but it seems there's no amount of sheep I can count that will help me drift off tonight.

It isn't even what happened with Bowie that feeds my brain chatter long after the lights are turned out in my house and each of us retires to our own bedroom. Nope. It's knowing Hunter is down the hall and that even though I'm awake, I can't talk to him or see him until morning.

I didn't get the chance to kiss him goodnight, which is something I was used to doing each night at the lake after our first kiss. That's because Mom stopped to chat with us about our plans for the next couple of days on the way up to her bedroom. She hung around until we took the hint she was there to check on us and intercept any midnight make-out session that might have been in the works, even though there wasn't one. She was obvious about it, but I get it. Responsible parenting and everything.

And yet, call it temptation. Call it me being selfish. Call it ridiculous, even. No matter the label, it doesn't change how strong my desire is to be spending this time with Hunter, instead of lying awake in the dark. It's shaping up to be a long and sleepless night.

I turn onto my side, but it's a fight to find a comfortable place to put my arms. I give up after the fourth time I change their position and reach for my phone instead. I'm not falling asleep by staring at the ceiling in silence, so maybe listening to an audiobook will help.

A text from Sawyer stops me before I get past unlocking the screen. I see you guys ran into Bowie after we left. Are you doing okay?

My stomach lurches. I didn't send a message to Sawyer about our encounter, and I'm certain Hunter didn't, either. Sawyer and Bowie went from tolerating one another to open contempt after touring together in the summer and what happened at the music festival, so they wouldn't be in contact. There's only one other plausible reason why he knows this.

So much for the audiobook. I open Twitter, wincing as I do. My notifications are a disaster. As I suspected, someone witnessed what went down outside of Astral tonight, and it doesn't stop with an onlooker's account of events or photos. There's also a video that captured the entire exchange between Hunter and Bowie. The picture and audio are clear, so the video must have been taken from close by. Whoever managed to do it without any of us seeing them gets my grudging admiration for being stealth, but it's already turning into a tabloid and social media free-for-all.

If there's any saving grace, it's that the first few tweets I read frame Bowie as the jealous ex-boyfriend who won't leave me alone. I stop scrolling before I see replies from Bowie's fans, because those won't take the same angle and it's guaranteed the words about Hunter and me won't be kind.

Hunter said he was prepared for something like this, but that was the possibility of it in the hypothetical realm, and not it happening in real time. He'll need to know before we leave the house tomorrow in case the paps have declared open season on following our every move. I would like to be the person he hears the news from rather than him finding out some other way, but I don't have a huge window of opportunity to ensure this happens.

I contemplate my phone for a full minute. It's possible Hunter is still awake right now and I can tell him before someone else does or he stumbles across it on his own. There's only one way to find out. I open my text messages and begin typing.

Are you still awake?

The three dots that show he's replying pop up on my screen within seconds.

I might be dreaming this and sleep-texting. Who's to say?

Keep dreaming and sleep-texting where you are, because I'm jailbreaking. See you in a minute.