It’s Complicated #2
Phillip’s amusement reached his eyes, and he strode over to me, inches away.
Not one to be intimidated, I stood straighter and met his gaze with heat.
His sparkly, annoyingly beautiful eyes didn’t leave mine for minutes before he finally chuckled happily and patted my head, like I was five and not two months away from eighteen.
“I think we’re going to be great partners,” he said with a bedazzling smile, making me genuinely wonder if the dude was an incubus. “Rose, I’ll come by after class tomorrow.” His fingers strayed in my hair, out of sight of my Grams’s gaze. “And I’ll see you in class tomorrow, V.”
I followed his exit with a feeling in my stomach I couldn’t put into words. When my grandmother called out to me, the trance was broken, and I quickly recovered the weapons left out on the table.
Grams’s smile was despondent, probably because of Nigel.
As much as she was a hard-ass, she had a soft heart and she loved passionately. She’d said so when she met Gramps, who died when I was ten. Unlike everyone else, he was fully human and not a Hunter. The Organization made an exception for her, because Grams was one of the best they’d ever employed.
But I doubt that same exception would be made for me with a Shifter. And something told me that was why she touched my shoulder with such tenderness; she knew what it was like to want something you shouldn’t.
It’d been a week since Nigel walked out of our house in an angry huff, and it’d been just as long since I’d seen or heard from him.
I stared down at my phone screen in class, the numerous texts made to him left unread and unanswered. My thumb traced them before I pocketed the phone.
Kate looked over, knowing only that Nigel and I had fought and he took a leave from his duties to focus on his upcoming exam. “He’ll call you. I’m sure of it,” she whispered, eyeing the front because Phillip was ruthless to talkers during a lesson.
“He won’t,” I said, sighing. “It’s complicated. I just…he won’t.”
Her lips downturned. “He will, V. He really likes you.”
Did he, though? Did he really? I wasn’t so confident anymore.
Put any weapon in my hand, and I could tackle whatever problem arose. But leave me in the dark, no text, no way to reach out and understand what was really going on, and I was basically left out at sea without a paddle.
Relationships were so damn complicated.
I liked it better when I was trying to figure out whether or not to start with a blade or stake first. I liked it better when my head wasn’t wrapped around itself trying to figure out what another person was going through when they didn’t bother to answer me back.
Or why a person who kept their hands to themselves and barely touched me out of respect would then go radio silent the minute things got hard.
It didn’t make any damn sense. Was everything we shared over the last few months worth so little to him?
Was I worth so little?
“V?” a deep, gravelly voice called out.
Having heard the whisper of his voice in my head more times than I cared to admit, I looked up quickly. “Sir?”
“Can you stay after class and help me collect materials from the experiment?” Phillip asked nonchalantly, giving many of the girls reason to bemoan his clear favoritism of me.
Peering around at the jealous eyes of girls and boys near and far, I finally nodded. “Sure thing, Mr. Smith.”
When the bell rang, almost everyone left.
But Daxon hung back and watched me from where he sat at the other side of the classroom.
Looking up from my task, I caught his green-eyed gaze from across the desks and stopped.
Something about the way he looked at me tickled my Hunter instincts.
And for the first time, I credited the man at the front of the room for his intuition about the gym-addicted beach boy.
“Daxon?” Phillip called out.
The six-foot jock smiled at me before answering. “I thought it was a pretty big task for a little thing like V, so I stayed back to help.”
Great. He thinks I’m just a little woman in need of his manly muscles.
“That’s nice of you, dude,” I said, masking my disgust with an ultra-sweet tone. “These microscopes are much too heavy for my tiny girl arms.”
Phillip’s chuckle echoed in my ears, and I turned just in time to see his tattooed hand go over his mouth to conceal his amusement. “That’s nice of you, but I’ll help her. You can head on home.”
Daxon stiffened for some odd reason when Phillip took a purposeful step his direction.
The Austrian rubbed the colorful tattoos along his neck with a large hand covered in thick metal rings, his long fingers smoothing over crosses covered in bright red blood, thick flames doused with vibrant reds and oranges, and a demon’s horns.
A depiction of Hell, I imagine. But what caught my eye were the assortment of silver rings fitted around each finger to act like a deconstructed brass knuckle when the Austrian wanted to throw a punch.
Silver.