“It’s fucking not!” It takes every bit of willpower I have to wrench away from him. To step back. And it hurts, as if I need confirmation that the sulk-athon I treated us both to earlier has only made things worse. “Fuck. I’m sorry.”
Kai stays still this time. He’s expressionless if I don’t look too hard, and I don’t, cos I’m chickenshit. Instead, I fight for words to explain the parts he’s missing. To help him make sense of the fact that everything was fine when he left me this morning, and now I’m a massive dick.
The bad kind, obviously.
Tell him the truth.“Jax got in my head,” I blurt before I can think too hard about it. “He didn’t mean to, but he reminded me of some shit about myself and it got to me and I took it out on you and everyone else instead of acknowledging that I’ve fucked this up.”
It comes out in a rush. No punctuation. No pause for breath.
I take one now while Kai digests, trying not to scrutinize his deepening frown. Today makes no sense to him, and I need to change that. Ineedto tell him we can’t fuck around anymore—
Fuck around?My soul rebels. I feel sick. That’s not what this was. What itis. Kai’s special. He’s not the first dude I’ve ever touched, but something primal inside me, somethingwicked, wants him to be the last.
“Fucked what up? I don’t understand.”
Kai’s low, rumbling voice breaks into the whirling dervish my thoughts become if I can’t tie myself down to the world. Since we met, losing myself in him has been the most grounded I’ve ever felt, laced in a wicked irony because his simple laugh makes me feel like I’m flying. A balance exists, and I’ve spent my life searching for it. But I found it with him. I know I did.
I take another breath. Suck it down and close my eyes. If he didn’t know me, perhaps he’d think me a weirdo. But he does know me, and heknowsI’m a fucking weirdo, so…
“Joss?”
Seriously.
I open my eyes. Kai hasn’t moved, but his brows are ticked up, a rare sign of impatience, and I hate that I’ve put it there. That sometimes I’m so incapable of linear conversation, of sensible thought, that I drag the people I care about into this hole with me. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, I got that. But why? What did Jax say to you?”
“He told me I never notice when people get too close to me. Then I leave, and those people get hurt.”
“What?”
“He said—”
“Yeah, I heard what he said, but what the fuck does it mean?” Kai speaks like he does almost everything else. Quietly. But there’s an edge I haven’t heard before. A rumble of thunder in the distance.
“It means he’s figured out we’re…” I wave a hand between us. “And he thinks it’s a bad idea.”
Kai’s expression darkens. “Why does he think that?”
“Because he knows I can be oblivious, maybe?”
“That’s not true.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You’re not oblivious tome. Fuck, Joss. You’re the only one I’ve felt myself with since the…Christ.” He starts to pace. “Is that what this is about? Jax thinks I’m too fuckin’ incapable to be with you?”
“What? No. He’s saying I do this shit every place I ever go.”
Kai swivels to face me. “Meaning what? That you sleep with all your roommates? That you kiss them and blow them and make them come until their eyeballs fall out of their damn head?”
It shouldn’t be hot when he says it like that. That he’s angry and obsessed with eyeballs.
But it is hot.
Dangerously hot.
I fight to keep my hands at my sides and not reach for him. “I don’t sleep with everyone I live with. Technically, I’m not sleeping with you either. We didn’t have sex.”
