I sit beside him instead and we watch the waves in silence for a while, ignoring the Friday night carnage directly below us.
Mal’s simmering presence is as addictive as I remember from that dodgy bar. His body heat inches from my skin, leaving me torn between leaning closer and shoving him off the roof.
“You’re a contradiction.”
The words rumble from him, startling me out of a daze, my head tipped back against the wall, heavy eyes half closed when I’ve never slept outside in my life.
I spare Mal a glance. “Contradiction, eh? How’s that?”
Slowly, like I’m a feral cat, Mal lifts an arm and taps two fingers to my temple. “When I look at you, I see a thousand things going on up there, but being around you is like a fucking Valium to me.”
“What we project isn’t who we are.”
“Right.” Mal’s hand drops. “But you do that shit on purpose.”
“Do I?”
“Yeah.”
He stares me down with zero doubt and it’s another cue to get the hell away from him. Or at least lean into the deflection I’m so good at. But I don’t want to prove him right. So I stay and shrug. “You don’t know me.”
“You don’t knowme,” he counters. “But I bet it didn’t take you long to figure out I’m an idiot who runs his fucking mouth.”
“And you think I’m the opposite?”
“Aren’t you?” That smirk returns. And somehow, he’s closer. Facing me more, wetting his lips again, an unconscious tic that has me taking a shallow inhale as words seem to drip from his lush mouth. “You ever say the first thing that’s on your mind?”
Recklessness steals over me. “Ask me and find out.”
Challenge flares in Mal’s deep stare.
He likes this.
Complex conversation.
I like it too—the light in his eyes eclipsing the dark. The intelligence that’s as hot as the scruff on his unshaven jaw, and the arch of his neck as he inclines his head in thought.
“All right then. What are you thinking about right now? No fucking cheating.”
That’s easy. And dangerous. But if it keeps him looking at me like this instead of at the sea with a gaze too broken for me to bear, I don’t give a shit.
My body gets the memo.
A stray lock of ash brown hair falls into Mal’s face. I catch it with my finger and tuck it behind his ear, hooked on the slow grin curving his lips. “I’mthinking, that I should probably remind myself that I’m never going to fuck you.”
There it is. The only truth I’m going to give him. No avoidance. No deflection. And he doesn’t blink—on some level, I knew he wouldn’t. He just leans forward, and so do I, and we’re closer than we were that sun-drenched morning at Saltkiss Bay.
My back is to the pub wall. Somewhere along the way, I’ve missed Mal rotating his body to face me, obscuring my view of the ocean, the Joker and the town sprawling out beyond, as if he’s shielding me from the real world.
He roots a hand to the wall by my head, closer still, rakish mischief lighting his eyes. “Whatever reminder you give yourself, you’ve proved my point.”
I don’t move. I don’t breathe. “Oh yeah? How’s that?”
“You’re saying we’re never going to fuck, and yet?—”
An earsplitting roar shatters the night. A thunderclap of sound shredding the quiet, jolting me from Mal, like a fist to my chest.
Motorbikes.
