Chapter 25 #2
“I know. I just wanted him to know that I give him failing grades. That thing in your bus after dinner that night was not prime keeper material.”
She laughs, and I relax deeper into the pink chair.
If I can make her laugh, she’s loosening up enough that she’ll still be worried about me, but not so much that she’ll ask Simon’s security detail to call in favors to find me.
“Please relay to Daphne that I delight in disappointing people,” Simon says, “so I’m rather more likely to find excuses to fail to meet expectations if she insists upon setting them so high.”
Yep.
Still hear him smiling as he says it.
He’s hilarious. Sometimes odd but always hilarious.
“Really? You’re going to intentionally fail to meet expectations now?” Bea asks him, and I can hear her smile too.
“Only when it doesn’t put me in danger of provoking your ire.”
Dammit.
Now I’m smiling so hard myself that my cheeks hurt and my eyes are burning.
I hate that I’m missing seeing them happy together. Bea deserves this so much.
“You two are adorable,” I say, but my voice drops on the last syllable, because something isn’t right.
I look up. Was that footsteps on the floorboards above?
“Daph?” Bea says.
The trap door.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
The trap door is open.
“Gotta go, love you, bye,” I blurt.
I hang up the phone and shove it into my bra a split second before Oliver pokes his head down the stairs.
His hair is disheveled.
The bags beneath his tired hazel eyes have their own bags too.
And his lips are drawn down in a pouty, scowly, angry frown that has my nipples tingling even as apprehension slithers up my neck.
“Who were you talking to?” he says.
I gesture to the TV. “No one. You must’ve heard this.”
His head disappears, and a moment later, his denim-clad legs appear on the ladder.
Then his crotch, which I try to pretend doesn’t exist.
Then his trim torso in a white undershirt. One that fits.
Broader shoulders than Oliver Cumberland should legally be allowed to have.
Thicker neck than Oliver Cumberland should legally be allowed to have too.
And then—there it is.
The scowly, irritated, grumpy face. “You’re watching a nature documentary with a male Australian narrator.”
“Are you sure it’s Australian? I was thinking English. Scottish, maybe?”
He ignores my attempts at deflecting this conversation and stalks to my chair. “What the hell is a rocking chair test?”
Fuuuuuuck.
He heard my whole conversation.
Did he hear me call him boring too?
“And who where you talking to?” He’s full-on growling now.
I hate it and like it entirely too much at the same time. “You never have conversations with yourself to rationalize the crazy shit you’re doing?”
He leans over me and pokes his hands between the cushions, his face close enough for me to see the individual whiskers making up his five-o’clock shadow and a scar over his left eyebrow that’s so thin, it’s barely perceptible.
Are his eyes hazel? Or are they green?
Why have I never noticed before how much green is sprinkled in his irises?
“What are you doing?” I ask boldly, to try to fool both of us into believing I have any control in this situation.
“Where’d you get a phone?” he replies.
“I was talking to myself.”
His fascinating eyes meet mine, and I realize he has unbelievably thick lashes. They’re not long enough to be the kind that I’d envy, but they are stupid thick. He smells like sleep and salt and my kind of danger, which is the very, very, very last thing he should smell like.
And the very last thing I should be thinking about now is how much control he must have to be breathing like that, right in my face, and not strangling me. “Our agreement includes you not telling anyone about our agreement. Give me the phone or I’m getting it myself.”
“I don’t have a phone, and no one knows what we’re doing.”
“Who’s Bea?”
He has a phone. He’s used it. And it’s undoubtedly one he bought with cash or his fake ID so that no one who’d want to track him could track him.
He could look me up and find out who Bea is in a heartbeat.
And that makes my heartbeat stutter.
He wouldn’t hurt her.
I don’t think.
“Give. Me. The. Fucking. Phone.”
“Why don’t you trust me?”
“Because you’re you and you have an agenda and you won’t tell me what it is. And that’s only the first reason.”
“People change when their whole life is ripped out from beneath them. You don’t know me. You don’t know me at all.”
“And that makes me trust you even less.”
He’s still in my face.
Still breathing heavily, nostrils flaring, the honey parts of the hazel in his eyes flickering like a candle fighting for its flame.
“So kick me out,” I tell him. “If you don’t trust me, kick me out. Take me to town and drop me off at a hotel. Then I’m not your problem anymore.”
I’d still be his problem, and we both know it.
But I’m enjoying the hell out of watching his nostrils quiver harder and his Adam’s apple bob and his lips tighten into a grim line while he has his hands on the arms of this chair, trapping me here.
I’m so damn messed up in my head right now.
Messed up enough that I don’t respond the right way when he sticks his fingers down my shirt and finds my phone in my bra for himself.
Because I like it.
I like his fingers on my chest.
I want him to touch me.
I want to work out this issue between us by grabbing him by the collar and pulling him the last few inches so that I can taste his lips, feel his stubble against my cheeks, and find out if this thing I’m feeling is mutual or if I’m truly, completely, and in all other ways fucking up my life one more time.
But as quickly as he touched me, he’s gone.
Standing straight up.
Powering the phone off.
Shooting me injured looks like it’s my fault he had to touch me and now he’s disgusted with both of us.
I shimmy back in the chair and pull my legs to my chest, wishing it didn’t suddenly feel cold as an iceberg in here. “Some of us have jobs that we’ll get fired from and then be unable to afford rent if we don’t call in and take vacation time.”
A muscle clenches in his jaw.
“And I didn’t tell anyone who you are, where we are, or why we’re here.” Goddammit.
Why do I suddenly feel like crying?
I hate crying.
Hate it.
The number of times I got yelled at for crying when I was little—and then the way I was accused of weaponizing my feelings to get my way—and then the time I overheard my mother telling one of my friends’ mothers that I was sooo overdramatic and then both of them laughed about how much my friend and I both cried…
Yeah.
Crying makes me feel like an asshole and then reminds me that everyone in my life for the first twenty-four or twenty-five years of it were all assholes too for making me feel like that.
Bea was the first person in my life to hug me when I cried and tell me to let it all out, that crying was the body’s natural response to stress and it was okay to cry.
The first person.
How was that even possible?
“Fine,” I spit out. “Fine. You win. You’re in charge. Happy now? Get out of here and let me sleep. I’m tired of your ugly face.”
It takes every ounce of control I possess to not let him see how angry and hurt and desperate I feel right now, and honestly?
I’m probably doing a shitty job even with every ounce of control I possess because let’s be real here.
I might not be the Daphne who gets kicked out of colleges and regularly arrested for going overboard at protests anymore, but I’m still impulsive and I still love to have fun and I want to know that I’m lovable despite my flaws.
And Oliver’s making it incredibly clear that I’m not.
Not to him.
“Ungrateful asshole,” I add.
He flinches, and then he’s gone, striding up the ladder so quickly that I barely register him leaving.
I grab the blanket and shove it over my head, in case he comes back.
He’s gotten all of the satisfaction out of my discomfort that I’m willing to give him tonight.
And if he leaves without me in the morning—well, I hope he does.
Because then he’s not my problem anymore.