DON’T STOP (Lila and Darrell) novel Chapter 108

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Chapter 108-

Chapter 108

Daisy

IR M

The first thing I felt when I opened my eyes was warmth. The second thing I felt was his arm around me. I looked down at it. At the way we were tangled together, his chest against my back, his arm draped over my waist like it belonged there, like we were two people who did this all the time and had never stopped. Like three years was nothing.

I untangled myself quickly and sat up.

The hotel room was bright with morning light pushing through the curtains. I pressed my fingers to my forehead and sat on the edge of the bed and let last night come flooding back in full, unsparing detail. The balcony. The kiss. The car. The hotel. The hot sex. All of it arriving in sequence like evidence at a hearing.

I rubbed my forehead hard.

“Are you awake?”

I turned. Norman was lying on his side, head propped on one hand, watching me with a small smile that looked entirely too comfortable for this situation.

“Yeah,” I said, and stood up.

I reached for my gown from the floor and stepped/into it, pulling it up efficiently, keeping my back

to him.

“You said that day would be the last time,” he said.

“It is,” I said flatly, reaching behind me for the zipper. “That’s what you said as well.”

“I never said that,” he retorted, shaking his head. “I simply agreed.”

I scoffed and kept reaching. The zipper wouldn’t budge. I twisted my arm

searching, and nothing.

“Let me help-” he started, shifting on the bed.

further Singers

“Don’t.” The word came out sharp enough to stop him completely. I twisted harder and felt the zipper give, pulling it up myself with more force than was necessary Done

I stepped into my heels, picked up my bag from the floor, choked i open and reached inside. I found what I was looking for and turned around

I threw the money onto the bed. Several notes, landing across his chest and the sheets around him

He looked down at it. Then up at me. “What is this?”

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Chapter 108-

You’re a gigolo. I said pleasantly. “I paid you for sleeping with me. Period.”

His brows lifted slowly. A soft scoff left his lips that wasn’t quite a laugh and wasn’t quite disbelie but was somewhere between both.

“You have got to be kidding me,” he said.

“No, I am not.” I clicked my bag shut.

“So who saved you last night at the railing?” His voice was still calm, alraost amused. “The gigolo did that too?”

“Besides,” he added, sitting up slightly, “you were the one who asked for sex.”

“Exactly!” I pointed at him and snapped my fingers. “I asked for it, and I paid the fee. Don’t usually confirm the product before they pay?” I tilted my head. “Consider yourself confirmed.”

He said nothing.

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He just looked at me with an expression that had stopped being amused and was now something flatter and harder that I chose not to examine.

“Have a good day,” I said.

I turned, crossed to the door, and reached for the handle.

‘Do you want to know the reason for the divorce three years ago?”

My hand stopped on the knob.

The room was very quiet.

I stood completely still with my fingers wrapped around the door handle and my back to him and my heart doing something loud and inconvenient in my chest.

After three years,” I said quietly, my hand still on the knob, my back still to him “Aíter three years, you suddenly want to ask me that question.”

“Good day, Mr. White.”

I opened the door and walked out.

The corridor was empty and bright and smelled like hotel carpet, and I walked down it with my

chin up and my heels clicking and my eyes burning in a way I refused to do anything about until I reached the elevator. The doors closed. I was alone.

My eyes went red immediately.

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pressed my hand against my chest, right over the ache that had taken up residence there ar stood in the mirrored elevator while my vision blurred. I didn’t make a sound. I just stood the and felt it – the question he’d never asked in three years of marriage, in three years of silenc it, finally sitting in the air between us at eight in the morning in a hotel room with money sca across the sheets.

I squeezed my eyes shut. Then breathed.

The doors opened in the lobby.

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, straightened my spine; and walked out through th hotel entrance into the morning light. Outside I stopped on the pavement, turned away from doorman, and let myself sob quietly for exactly one minute. Small, compressed, the kind of c that didn’t make a sound but shook your whole chest from the inside.

Then I wiped my face, opened my phone, and ordered an Uber.

The house was exactly as I’d left it.

Which meant it was a disaster.

I stood in the doorway of the sitting room and looked at it — the unwashed glasses, the scatter c wrappers, the general atmosphere of a space that had not been looked after by anyone at any po during my absence. I was exhausted. My feet hurt. was still in last night’s gown, and my eyes we probably still red, and I had approximately zero patience left in my entire body.

“Steve!”

I dropped my bag on the console table and started up the stairs.

“Steve!”

I pushed open the bedroom door.

I stopped.

The room smelled like sex. The sheets were tangled. Condom wrappers were on the floor and on the nightstand, scattered with the same careless abundance as the snack wrappers from earlier in the week. A girl I had never seen before was in my bed, sheet pulled to her chin, eyes wide and frozen with the expression of someone who had just made a significant miscalculation.

Steve was beside her. Asleep. Mouth slightly open.

I rubbed my face slowly with both hands.

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