Chapter Twenty-One
Mia
I traced idle patterns on Luke’s bare chest. Somehow over the last week, we’d fallen into a routine of hooking up after work, then falling asleep until one of us woke up to sleep-stalk the other. Usually me, as sex seemed to put him into a coma.
Not that I was complaining. Luke was so often troubled when he was awake that I enjoyed this quiet time with him.Took comfort in his peaceful expression and boyish good looks. Though he’d aged like a dream, he seemed younger with his eyes closed.
I sat up slightly to get a better view of him, all the while wondering how I’d gone from barely being able to face him, to falling in love with him all over again in the space of a few short months. Because Iwasin love with him. So in love. I just didn’t knowwhy, orhow, when I’d spent so long hating him.
The opposite of love is indifference, child. Hating that boy is as tragic as loving him.
At the time, I’d had no idea what my mother had meant, but it kind of made sense now, even if nothing else did.
What the hell are we doing?
I had no idea. All I knew was that we’d fallen into a vortex of substituting sex for communication, affectionas comfort, and the weight of our unspoken conversations was suffocating.
Like he’d heard the chaos in my mind, Luke stirred and opened his eyes. In the darkness, he stared blankly at me a moment, then his expression morphed from relieved to wary and back again in the space of a split second.
I was growing used to that, the way he woke suddenly and didn’t seem to quite believe where hewas, or who he was with. Moving our late-night encounters back to his house seemed to help, but he was still...unsettled. We both were.
Luke blinked again and sat up. “What time is it?”
“Just after midnight.”
He groaned. “Again? Girl, you gotta stop letting me pass out at eight o’clock every night. It’s fucking with my head.”
I poked him in the side. “Andyouhave to stop callingmegirl. I’m a woman, you fool.”
“I know. I don’t mean anything by it. It’s just habit.”
Habit. Right. After ten years of silence—
Stop it.Christ, that was getting boring. I’d gone to sleep with a resolution to stop fixating on the past, and here we were. He’d been awake half a second and I was already there. MaybeIwas the fool.
Luke flopped onto his back. “I’m hungry.”
“Me too. Do you think we should start eating dinner before we go to bed?”
He cracked an eye open and gave me a look I couldn’t decipher. Then he sighed and sat up again. “Come on. I’m sure I can find something.”
I doubted it, as snooping around his kitchen the last time I’d been here had revealed an empty fridge and cupboards that held far more cleaning products than any normal bachelorwas permitted to have. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt and swiped his abandoned T-shirt from the floor. “Lead the way, sailor.”
That earned me another look, but I let it slide and followed him downstairs, trying not to drool at how edible he was in nothing but sweatpants.
I failed, obviously, because it didn’t matter how my heart felt about him, no red-blooded human could be unaffectedby him. From his strong shoulders to his perfect feet, he was flawless.
And a magician, apparently.
I scrutinised the handful of ingredients he’d dumped on the counter. “How are you going to make dinner out of one packet of microwave rice and a couple of eggs?”
“I’ve got hot sauce too. And onions.”
Like that made it better. I hopped up on the counter to watch him work, enjoyingthe cool marble against my bare thighs. It reminded me of our town hall encounter, and even though we’d fucked twice tonight already, heat pooled between my legs.
Luke chucked a wok on the stove and smirked at me.
I raised an eyebrow, but he left the bait hanging and cooked up a storm instead, while I watched, and drooled over both him and the food.
