“Gray, let me fix your hand.” I walked toward him, my hands raised as if he were a wounded animal. “I’ll answer all your questions. Just like I did with Jett earlier.”
I flinched when he threw the coffee cup across the room, realizing my mistake as soon as the words hadleft my mouth.
“Of course you toldhimeverything,” Gray sneered at me as he walked past me, his shoulder knocking me out of the way. “I can look after my own hand.”
Wildly, I grabbed for him, my arms hooking around his forearm as I pulled him back. “No!Stopwalking away from me,” I growled as I physically tried to restrain him. “Gray, talk tome.”
He whirled on me, but I stood firm as he glared down at me, the heat of his rage radiating from his body. “Like you talk to me? Okay,Queeny.” He grabbed a seat and pulled it back from the table, waiting for me to take it. “Sit. Let’s talk.”
I hesitated. I knew him. I knew that with him this heated, things would go badly. Still, I sat. I had kept the truth from him for a year, and whatever they had found had made him reckless, and because I was part of this, whether I accepted it or not, I could sit and I could talk.
Lowering myself into the chair, I watched him as if he were a caged animal while he regarded me almost warily as though he expected me to bolt. When I was seated, he yanked a chair out and dropped into it, his hard stare never leaving mine.
“Tell me everything.”
Carefully, slowly, I told him what I had told Jett. I watched him as he sat rigid in his chair, his gaze never wavering, his attention wholly on me, and while I spoke, I waited for the eruption. Gray would never harm me, not physically. Emotionally . . . well, we had no problems taking those blows from each other.
“You changed your mind?” he asked me, the tone in which he asked me almost daring me to say no.
“I changed my mind. I couldn’t do that to him, her, I don’t know, it?” I sniffed as I finally broke his stare. “I couldn’t do it to us.”
“There is no us.”
The unforgiving words caused more pain than he knew, and I’d be damned if I showed him. Instead, I sat in front of him, the maskfirmly in place as he assessed me, equally as closed off to me as I was to him.
“And now you know it all.” Leaning back in my seat, I looked at his hand. “Coach is going to kick your ass.”
Gray grunted but said nothing as he looked at his hand. “I fell.”
“I can see teeth marks.”
“I fell against someone’s face.”
My eyebrows rose as I turned away from him. “He films the births?” I asked quietly.
“Yes.”
“You watched them?” Why? What else was there on the film?
“Yes.”
“Why are you so angry about them?”
Tiredly, he rubbed his eyes. “I stink.”
“Your personality could be better, I agree,” I murmured as he stood, and I caught the quick flash of a smile.
“There’s showers down here, I’m going to clean up.” He didn’t look at me, but he turned his head toward me, and I was already agreeing before he spoke.
“I won’t leave the room again.”
“I won’t be long.” The door closed softly behind him, and I was once again alone.
Sitting in the chair, I realized neither of us had cleaned the mess of the coffee-stained wall and the broken cup. I sat for longer than I should have before I moved and started cleaning up. There was a large pile of napkins that I used to clean the wall, and then, crouching, I gingerly started picking up the broken shards of the cup.
It was inevitable that I would cut my finger; it was my luck, I suppose. Hissing at the cut, I stood with my finger in my mouth as I dropped some more napkins onto the floor, pressing my foot on them to soak up the spilled coffee.
Reaching over for another napkin for my finger, I opened thecupboard to see if Onyx had a first aid kit. He didn’t. Wrapping a napkin around my finger, I watched the blood soak through the white paper.
