I look at him and he’s carefully placing his folded T-shirt and boxers into his bag. Like his methods—compared to my haphazard stuffing—give him the high ground in this. Not for long.
“You’re projecting,” I say, launching my counter.
“What?”
“You’re the one whose life changedirreversiblyforever,” I say, unleashing a smile right before changing to a mock shock expression. “What? You think you walked away unscathed? Please, it takes two elements to tango.”
He frowns but doesn’t speak. I revel in reducing Xander to silence, a much welcome change from his carefully crafted comebacks. “You were the wood. I was the fire. Now, you’re ash.”
“Your name is literally Ash,” he says, bumbling the delivery. Fuck, it feels good to take him down a few pegs.
“You’re grasping at straws. It’s pathetic,” I say, feeling like I’m circling a victory here. “So in that case, I want to apologize, for cataclysmically changing your life.” Now it’s my time to smirk at him.
“You didn’t,” he says, scoffing.
“So we were both equally unaffected?” I say, trying my best to remain innocent on the outside. But if he’s going to talk shit then I owe him nothing.
“Yes,” he says through gritted teeth. Like lying isn’t his day job. Please.
“Good boy,” I say, my stomach dropping at the innuendo.Oh Ash, you didn’t just say that.It’s out in the open now—if I want to win the battle of the wit, then I must commit.
I force myself to look at him, willing myself not to break. His eyes lock on mine. My stomach does a lazy forward roll. It’s official. He’s staring at me. And I’m staring at him. And what we have here, is a stare off. I count my breath.
One.
Two.
Three.
There is no way I’m losing this stare off. Especially after the “good boy” comment. I’ll never live it down.Don’t break, Ash. Don’t break.
The only difference is that his eyes have grown dark and I have no idea how to recover from this. So I break.
“Here,” I say, throwing his T-shirt and boxers across the bed, doing my best to wrap this up.
Of course, trying to throw the lightest, softest, most comfortable cotton across the bed doesn’t work. They both flutter to the mattress, landing in the middle. “Shit.” I get up on the bed to reach for my pathetic attempt, when I feel them being shoved into my hands. No. I push against the resistance, trying to return them to their owner, but then they’re immediately back in my hands.
I finally look up and see Xander. Leaning on the bed. Meeting me in the middle.
“Keep them,” he says, and the clothes are back in my hands.
“I don’t want them,” I say, shoving them back into his hands. It lasts all of two seconds because they’re back in my hands.
“You might not want them. But you’re going to need them.”
“I don’tneedthem,” I say, making another attempt to return them. This time, though, I put my back into it as I shove the clothes in his hands and hold his wrists.I will not be walking out of this sleep study with your fucking sleepwear.
Physics, though, is not on my side. Because Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that whenever one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts equal and opposite force on the first. It appears we’re at a stalemate. Fucking Newton.
What happens next happens so quickly I’m going to need Ms. Chatterjee, the physics teacher, to explain it to me, because Xander stops pushing against me and I end up facedown on the mattress, his clothes still in my hands.
I see Xander looking down at me, pressing his lips together, holding in a laugh. His whole unfazed demeanor sends white hot anger through me.
I am so fucking sick of Xander Miller.
My rage unlocks access to the self-defense class Em and I took a couple of summers back and I reach up and get a fistful of Xander’s T-shirt, yanking him hard toward me. This coupled with the edge of the mattress sends him off balance and falling toward me. I grab hold of his other sleeve and use it as leverage to roll on top of him.
Holy shit. I can’t believe that worked.
