Hell, maybe he really didn’t understand.
Truth was, I’d been thinking about how his hands had felt on my body, and I hadn’t stopped. I was annoyed, confused, and worst of all, edged. I was angry at how easy it was for him to turn away from me, how he could walk out the door without a secondthought when I could barely catch my breath after just a look from him.
And yeah, maybe my anger was outing me. I’d practically begged for trouble by baiting Marco like some kind of horny masochist. But there’d always been something weirdly charged simmering between us. I was pretty sure I wasn’t hallucinating that part.
Honestly, I was too tired, too bored, and way too deprived of decent sex to keep pretending otherwise. It’d been months.Months.A girl could only binge-watch so much reality TV before even Marco started looking like a tempting distraction.
Maybe I was losing it. Actually, scratch that—I’d definitely lost it. But in the months since Sebastian and I were forcibly benched from each other, apparently my libido hadn’t gotten the memo.
Still, I didn’t need to complicate things any more than I already had. Because that was exactly what sleeping with Marco would do. Complicate things. He was already a tangled knot of issues, and adding sex into the equation would turn it into an impossible mess.
I knew myself well enough to understand physical intimacy wouldn’t stay neatly confined. It never did. It’d bleed into emotions and expectations and vulnerabilities I wasn’t willing to face—especially not with someone with the emotional availability of a brick wall.
Besides, admitting I actually liked Marco, even just a little, would mean admitting he mattered, that he could hurt me. And I was way too proud—or maybe too scared—to hand him that kind of power
It was safer, smarter, and far easier to pretend whatever I was feeling was frustration. Safer to let him believe he was just another distraction, another temporary fix, nothing more.
Even if deep down I already knew better.
“You know what?” I finally said. “Forget it.”
“Forget what?”
“This.” I finally sighed, pushing a stray strand of hair out of my face. “Sleep wherever you want. Couch, floor, bathtub. Hell, sleep on the fire escape. I don’t care.”
“You’ve got an attitude with me,Valentina,” he said, looking down at me as if he were waiting for me to realize it too. “I just spent my entire night doing you a favor, and this is what I get?”
That made my stomach twist. Not because he was wrong, but because he wasn’t. Hehadshown up. Hehadhelped. And it was easier to bite at him than to sit with that truth.
“If you wanted a thank you, you should’ve just said so.”
His jaw flexed. “I don’t need your gratitude.”
“Itseemslike you want it though,” I said, tilting my head and testing him like I was daring him to admit he cared even a little. Because if he cared, maybe I wasn’t the only one teetering on the edge here.
“If I wanted something from you, Valentina, I wouldn’t settle for a thank you.”
“So what do you want then?”
His jaw tightened, and for a split second I swore I saw hesitation flash in his eyes.
“I want you to stop picking fights with me.”
I couldn’t help the smile that tugged at the corner of my mouth. “You’d be bored out of your damn mind if I did.”
“I wouldn’t say ‘bored,’” he admitted. “That’d be an oversimplification.”
“Good. It’d be a shame if all this”—I swept a hand down my torso slowly—“went to waste on a man who’s probably still a virgin at thirty-two.”
He didn’t seem shocked by what I’d said. “You’ve got a filthy mouth.”
I fluttered my lashes. “You bring it out in me.”
“I bet it’s good for more than talking.”
I glanced at his mouth and then back up to his eyes. “Trust me, you’re not the first man to wonder.”
His stare went blank. “LikeGreg?”
