“Hey,” I said.
“Hi.” She closed the book, keeping her finger stuck between the pages.
Silence lingered as I tried to figure out how to bring up the topic. It should have been easy, except the words refused to come as Liv stared expectantly at me. She fidgeted, glancing toward the door, her weight shifting as if preparing to get to her feet.
“Doing all right?” I asked.
She nodded, smiling. “Of course.”
Our eyes met, and our gazes locked on one another, time seeming to freeze. Her scent made my wolf growl with hunger and want, just as I had expected. For the briefest of moments, I pictured myself grabbing her, laying her down on the couch, and tearing off her clothes. I wanted to feel her writhing beneath me, I wanted to hear her cry out, wanted to see her satisfaction when she came.
I shoved those thoughts and urges away. They were too much of a distraction.
As if she could sense those urges—and she might have been able to through the mating bond—she blushed and glanced away, breaking the spell. Her fingers twitched, sliding out of the book, her stopping point forgotten.
“I should probably get ready for work,” she said, standing. “Amelia needs help opening things up for the kids.”
She was nearly out of the room before my mind righted itself and I remembered why I had come to talk to her in the first place.
“Wait,” I said.
She halted in the doorway, turning back to look at me, her brow furrowed in confusion. Up until now, we had both given one another space, not intruding on the other’s routines as we continued to navigate everything between us.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“I wanted to talk to you about what happened when we were kids,” I said.
Liv froze, her eyes wide, mouth slightly agape. She looked like a deer in the headlights.
“What about when we were kids?” she asked, her tone overly casual.
I let out a deep breath. “The whole bit about you coming and telling me we were mates.”
I had never seen Liv look as though she wanted to run for the hills more than she did right now, and that included the day I was now referring to, and the day I had come to her apartment. Her eyes darted back and forth as if she were searching for a way out. When she saw she wasn’t going to get away from the conversation, she took a deep breath, gnawing at her lip.
“What about it?” she finally asked.
It was going to be like this, then. A dull throb began in my temple.
“I know that things probably didn’t go the way you had pictured,” I said. “But we never talked about it after it happened. I wanted to give you the chance to talk about it if you needed to.”
She bit her lip, shifting back and forth as she glanced away. “What’s there to talk about?” she asked. “I told you I thought we were mates. You told me I was wrong and that you had no interest in being with me, regardless. That’s all.”
Based on her expression, there was plenty to talk about. I might have been imagining it, but I could have sworn that there was hurt in her features.
“I just don’t want there to be bad feelings about any of it,” I said.
“Why would you think there would be bad feelings?”
“You’ve sort of avoided me ever since,” I said. “That sort of suggests bad feelings if you ask me.”
She didn’t answer for a long moment.
“There wasn’t anything to talk about,” she repeated. “And you made your position clear, so there was no need for me to come talk to you. I wouldn’t necessarily call that avoiding, would you?”
No, I wouldn’t call that avoiding. I called it running for the hills. I regarded Liv for a long moment, wondering what it would take for her to open up to me. I cared about her being happy. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t see that.
“Liv, we’re mates. We’re going to have to live with one another, and there’s no changing that. I would like us to get to a point where one of us doesn’t leave the room the second the other one comes in.”
