He looked up once, just once, to check if I was watching. And when our eyes met, he didn’t scowl or look away like he usually did. He just blinked, lips twitching faintly, and said, “Stop staring. You’re making me nervous.”
I wanted to laugh, but it got caught somewhere in my throat. Because how could I laugh when it felt like I was witnessing something I wasn’t supposed to?
Something private.
Joshua Lockhart—silver spoon, captain, heir, mean—was standing there barefoot in his kitchen, cooking for me like it was the most normal thing in the world.
And I was watching him.
It wasn’t fair.
It wasn’t fair that I couldn’t stay away. Couldn’t stop caring.
Because it’s stupid, isn’t it? To care about the person who hurt you? To sit on his counter, watching him cook like some normal boy when he was anything but?
But here I was.
Watching his shoulders tense as he strained the pasta, water hissing in the sink, his jaw flexing as he tried to play off how seriously he was taking this.
And my heart, my dumb, traitorous heart didn’t care about the logic.
It just whispered,he’s trying.
Trying to be gentle.
Trying to be better.
Trying for me.
And that was all it took.
I didn’t need grand gestures or apologies carved into marble. Just this, him fumbling over dinner and still glancing up to make sure I was okay.
And maybe that was why I’d never learn. Because when it came to him, I never had survival instincts.
Just faith.
Blind, reckless, aching faith in a boy who broke me.
It’s odd.
It really is.
But… I guess a greedy part of me, the attention-deprived part, liked it. I don’t know why. Maybe because when Joshua looked at me, really looked, it felt like I existed a little louder than usual. Like all the quiet I’d lived in suddenly had an echo.
I had friends now, real ones. Jennie with her sunshine voice, Layla with her soft heart, Aly with her blunt care.
I even liked Miles.
He was the kind of boy who made everything feel easy, warm, steady, safe. The type you could trust to never raise his voice or make you cry.
But when it came to Joshua…
It was different.
It was dangerous.
It was confusing.
