And his tone, when he spoke, actually backed that up.
In fact, he almost laughed through his question.
“What the fuck are you sorry for?”
“Everything. All the shit I did.”
She gestured wildly in an attempt to make it clearer.
But it didn’t.In fact, it just pushed his eyebrow up another millimeter.
“Gotta be honest, I don’t remember you doing any shit.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t act like it was nothing.”
“Well, maybe if you explain, I can act like it was something.”
“Last time we met, I practically mauled you.”
She expected some kind of agreement with that.
At the very least, he was supposed to accept her interpretation of events.
Instead, his expression actually reached something like horrified. And when he finally spoke, his tone was close to despairing.“Oh Christ. You thinkyou’rethe one who did something wrong.”
“You say that like somebody else fucked everything up.”
“Because somebody elsedid. Somebody else is still fucking up now.”
“I don’t see how. I was the one who did that stuff.” She flushed, thinking of it. Of how bursting with feelings she’d been.“Youjust endured it.”
“Yeah, endured doesn’t seem like the right term to me.”
“Then what does?”
“Wanted.”
He looked away when he said the word—as if admitting it was just a little too much.
Though, she could understand him feeling that way.
It was too much for her, too.
She went to say something, and no sound came out.Her eyes had gone wide, and no amount of pressure would put them back to a normal size. And when she finally did manage to speak, her tone was not the one she intended. It sounded like all the air had been sucked out of every word.
“You couldn’t possibly have wanted me to do that.”
“Man, I wish that were the case.”
“But itisthe case,” she said, and now her voice was firmer. More like the woman she thought she was.“You didn’t want anything. I did the things I did, and then you reacted in the most horrified way a human being possibly can. Seriously, I don’t think you could have moved faster if I’d burst into flames.”
“I moved fast because moving fastwas the only decent thing to do.”
“To be honest, I have absolutely no idea what that means.”
“It means that a gentleman would have stopped all of this the second it started to turn into something else. But I didn’t. I didn’t stop it. Truthfully, it was all I could do to force myself not to ask for more.”
He sounded weary, she thought.
