“Liar.”
“Hey, I’m a lover these days.”
“With who? Kai?”
“What?”
Jax crosses his legs at the ankles, his boots battered and worn, like mine, but his laces match. Go him. “Tanner thinks you’re hooking up. I told him he was wrong, then I saw you together the other night, and it got me thinking.”
“About...?”
“About how Kai is still going through some shit. I don’t think he could handle getting hurt on top of that.”
I stare, brain gearing up like a hammer thrower, spinning faster and faster before it takes flight. It’s too fast for me to compute. I don’t even try. I focus on single words and piece them together, looking for logic, but all I get is more heart-thudding anger and shock that I can’t quite speak. “What…fuck. What thefuckmakes you think I’d hurt Kai?”
Jax winces. “I don’t. At least, not on purpose. It’s just you’re a fucking whirlwind, Joss. You’re magnetic and mesmerizing, and people get sucked in before you leave without noticing they’re head over heels in love with you.”
A startled laugh escapes me. “Don’t talk shite. No one has ever been in love with me.”
“What about Sammy?”
“Who?”
“My cousin. You were with her that summer in Bude? And then you left, and she cried until Christmas.”
I stand, breathing through my nose as my blood pumps for all the wrong reasons. “That was ten fucking years ago. I wasseventeen. You think I’m still that gangly kid who couldn’t roll a joint for himself?”
Jax says nothing, just eyes me as I pace around the small clearing we picked to have lunch. I can’t work out if he’s genuinely annoyed that I didn’t put a ring on his cousin a decade ago, or if this is about something real.
It’s about Kai.
I know that.
Iknow.
I come to a stop in front of Jax. “Kai’s not in love with me.”
It comes out less certain than it feels, and Jax dead-eyes me, daring me to blink.
I don’t, but only because I’m used to fighting. I’m not like him. I don’t have a tattooed lumbersexual in my corner ready to murder any fucker who wrongs me. If I did, I’d be the one with no head. Because it doesn’t matter which way up I look at anything, Ialwaysget it wrong.
Unease prickles my skin, hot with shame. “Kai’s not in love with me.”
I whisper it this time. Jax leans forward. He has eyes the color of the sea in Fistral Bay—light blue when the world is sweet, a darker, petrol hue when it’s not.
They’re darker than hell right now. “So you are hooking up, then?”
Hooking up. Fuck that phrase to Satan’s lungs and back. I’m sleeping with Kai. Kissing him. Letting my hands roam his body and his mine. Gripping our cocks in my fist. Blowing him. Sliding my dick between his lips until we both groan. The only thing we’re not doing is fucking, in the literal sense, and I realize with a horrible moment of clarity that it’s not the dealbreaker I’d counted on.
Because how I feel about Kai has nothing to do with tab A and slot B and everything to do with the warmth that’s flowed between us since we met. The acceptance. The laughter.
We’re friends.
Yup. But there’s more.
So much more.
I don’t have an answer to Jax’s question. Just an empty stare that makes him exhale his own aggravation.
