Chapter 14 #2
She is wearing an oversized sweatshirt and tights, with the expression of a woman who has been awake for several hours, constructing elaborate theories without adult supervision. Her gaze drops to my neck before I have fully closed the door behind me.
Her eyes widen. “Oh.”
“Don’t,” I tell her.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You said oh.”
She lifts one shoulder with the casual innocence of someone who has never been innocent a day in her life. “Oh is a gateway noise. It is not legally binding.”
“It was judgmental.”
“It was observant.” Her eyes drop to my neck again, and her mouth twitches at the corner. “Very observant. Skylar James, that is not a hickey. That is a crime scene with romantic lighting.”
I shut the door and move past her into the apartment. “Cassie.”
“No, seriously. Should I be calling someone? Because that thing looks like he tried to leave a forwarding address with his mouth.”
Heat crawls up my neck, which is entirely pointless because the evidence is already there like a neon sign on a quiet street.
“I hate you,” I say.
“You love me. Tragically and completely. I am essential to your emotional survival and we both know it.”
“You are essential to my migraines,” I tell her.
“Same department, different floor.”
The apartment smells like coffee, toast, and Cassie’s vanilla body spray.
A half-eaten piece of toast sits abandoned on the coffee table beside her mug because Cassie starts things and gets distracted by whatever internal drama has been running through her head.
She follows me and stands in the middle of the living room, arms folded, eyes entirely too sharp for this hour.
“I am trying to be respectful,” she says.
I turn and stare at her.
She lasts three seconds.
“Fine. Respectful is boring and fundamentally not my brand.” She points at my neck with one finger. “Did he bite you or try to repossess you? Because that mark has the energy of a man filing a claim.”
I press my hand over it. “Stop looking at it.”
“I can’t. It’s looking back.”
“Can you just, for one minute, not be you?”
“Absolutely not. You would miss me immediately and we both know it.”
I groan and sink onto the couch.
The moment I do, my body delivers a comprehensive, entirely unhelpful reminder of exactly what I did last night and this morning.
My thighs ache. There is a deep, low soreness that makes my stomach flip and my face heat, accompanied by the undeniable evidence of a man who took his time and was fully aware of what he was doing.
Cassie notices the way I shift. Her eyebrows rise. “Oh.”
I point at her. “Don’t make that noise again.”
“That one was legally binding.”
“Cassie.”
“Tell me what the sex was like.” She drops onto the couch beside me, close enough that personal space has never survived contact with Cassie, and today is no exception.
“You had sex. With The Man. The myth. The walking bad decision with prison shoulders and a face that should come with a formal warning.”
I stare at the ceiling. “I should have waited until you were out before I came home.”
“Absolutely not. I have been awake since six, cultivating questions, and I deserve answers.” She pulls her knee up onto the cushion and turns to face me fully, which means this is now an official conversation, whether I like it or not.
“You came home walking like that and you expect me to just make tea and mind my business?”
“I am not walking like anything.”
“Oh, honey, you sat on a soft couch like you’ve been in the gym, working muscles all this time.”
My face burns. “It was just sex.”
Cassie stares at me for a long moment.
“Firstly,” she says, “nothing with Zane Rivera has ever been just anything and you know it. Secondly, that hickey is filing for permanent residency on your neck. And thirdly.” She pauses for effect.
“How big is his cock now, because prison clearly did something to the rest of him, and I am asking for science.”
“Cassie.”
“Science, Sky. Purely academic.”
I press both hands over my eyes and stay like this for a moment in the dark behind my palms.
“It was.” I stop, pull my hands away from my face, and start again. “It was a lot.”
Cassie lets out a sound of pure delight. “I knew it. I knew it. The quiet ones always are.”
“He isn’t quiet.”
“He is quieter than he was.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” she agrees, and her voice shifts, the teasing softening slightly around the edges without disappearing entirely.
She leans back into the cushions, tucks one leg beneath her, and looks at me in that way that means the jokes have done their job and something real is required now.
“Was it awful, though? Not the sex part. The rest of it. Seeing him again. Talking to him. All of it.”
I gaze down at my hands. My fingers still remember gripping Zane’s shoulders. The sheets.
“It was.” I stop, because there is no word big enough and no word safe enough to put around it all without either minimizing it or making it more than I am ready to call it out loud. “A lot.”
Cassie nods slowly. “That tracks. Zane has always been a lot. Even at seventeen, he had the emotional atmosphere of a house fire. You never knew whether you were going to get warmth or ash.”
A laugh catches in my chest and hurts on the way out.
“He apologized,” I say.
Cassie goes still. That alone tells me how significant it is, because Cassie never goes still.
“For what he said to me,” I continue, my voice softer now, “the last time we saw each other. How he told me I was just a fuck. A mouth for him to use and nothing else.”
Cassie’s expression turns murderous.
I glance away and keep talking before I lose my nerve. “He said he knew sex mattered to me. That I didn’t give myself to people easily. And he used it because he thought that if he made me hate him, that was the only way to make me leave.”
I swallow hard against the tightness in my throat. “He said he thought he would ruin me eventually. That being with him had already dragged me into things I never should have been near. So he made himself into something ugly enough for me to walk away from.”
Cassie leans forward slowly, elbows on her knees, and looks at the floor for a moment before looking back at me. “It is also completely fucked up.”
“I know.”
“It is also exactly the kind of stupid martyr bullshit he would pull because apparently asking the woman he loves what she wants was too much emotional cardio.” Cassie reaches for my hand, her expression softening. “Did you believe him?”
“Yes.”