“I hurt your feelings.”
He’d done more than that, but I kept my mouth shut.
His sigh brushed my chin. “What happened has got nothing to do with you,” he started to say before I snorted. Those fingers slipped deeper through my hair, fully cupping the back of my head. “I’m sorry, Gracie,” he said.
“What?” I jerked. Did this… man… just apologize?
I stared at him. He stared at me.
“For being a butthole.”
My eyes narrowed. What the hell was he up to? “What are you doing? What do you want from me?”
“What makes you think I want something?”
“Because you’re saying sorry and playing with my hair. You’re being way too nice.”
Why the hell did he look so surprised?
“Alex, you literally implied that I planned this. That you weren’t going to give me more than what you promised. That I couldn’t expect more. Now you’re telling me sorry and that I should rely on you after all?” I shook my head. “You’ve got these moments of being so ridiculously kind in your own way, and then making me feel”—I held my index finger and thumb an inch apart—“this small. I don’t want to do this. I know you’re a good man, but you don’t need to save everyone. You don’t need to save me, all right? You already did.”
Those lean cheeks flexed. His eyes narrowed just a little bit. Something in his energy changed too.
And that’s when I took advantage and leaned far enough away that his hand slipped out of my hair. “So, stop. Please.”
That snapped him out of it. “I’m nice” was what he decided to focus on.
I wasn’t even going to poke at that comment if I had a ten-foot pole. I sighed and side-eyed him, not understanding this at all. “What do you want? What are you trying to do here?” I asked him warily.
He didn’t even think about it. “Apologizing.”
I didn’t trust this version of him.
“I regret what I said.” Those eyeballs glowed faintly for a split second. “How I made you feel.”
“You meant it. You don’t need to feel bad.”
His expression went cloudy. “I told you I’ve never been responsible for another person before.”
Oh boy. I snorted. “You’re so full of shit. You’ve been responsible for billions of people for years.”
That got me a blink. “It’s different.”
“Not really,” I told him. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you don’t want to be more involved in my life than you need to. I get it. I’m nobody. You have seven billion responsibilities, the weight of the Earth on your shoulders, and I don’t have a single idea what your day-to-day life is like and what else you have to worry about. You’re already bogged down.I get it.I couldn’t handle it; 99.99 percent of people wouldn’t want to either. I don’t want to be an extra weight. I don’t want to be a bother. Obviously, you have people that love you just the way you are. I don’t know who Leon and Selene are, but they care about you enough to fly halfway across the country for you and then drive it back. I don’t even… I don’t even have an emergency medical contact anymore.”
Saying that out loud broke my own heart. “You could use a little more patience, but you don’t need to change who you are for anybody. Especially not me.”
I watched as he listened, his aggravated expression back the moment I started speaking, but I saw it wither away with every word out of my mouth. That regal, perfect face dropped any semblance of annoyance and frustration, and… it didn’t go soft. But it went thoughtful, I guess. He looked… surprised too, maybe?
For someone so self-aware of everything from how gently he had to touch things so as not to break them, to how he listened so he didn’t pick up a thousand conversations, it was like this was something that went totally over his head.
Those incredible eyes flared that beautiful glowing purple again for a long, long moment, before a crease formed between his eyebrows.
“It’s okay. I promise,” I whispered truthfully. “I’ve been taking care of people my whole life. I can take care of myself.”
Alex’s sigh was long. His arms crossed over his chest. “You make it really hard to not like you.”
I hadn’t seen that coming.
