Even though it didn’t quite feel like it.
It felt too brutal for it. Too much like he should have just said it, if it was.
Yet she couldn’t think what he might have put there instead.Maybe something mean, she told herself.Maybe he wanted to tell you to fuck off, or leave him alone.But if he did, the look in his eyes when he finally slid them back to her was a strange one. It was almost soft. Reaching for something.
“I think I’ve done enough to show you I can be what you need,” he said, so close to sounding real about it that she didn’t have the heart to tell him no.I’ll show him the pictures and videos resulting from this when we get to the hotel, and convince him this is ridiculous that way, she told herself.Then talk real strategies, no matter how botched and cobbled together they’re going to have to be.
But then they got outside, and he went ahead, and she stopped.
Just to check. Just to have a little look, line up some juicy ones, maybe.
And her heart almost halted in her chest. She couldn’t carry on walking, it was that disturbing to see. He actually called back to her—“Hey, what’s the holdup?” But she couldn’t answer. She was too busy scrolling through shaky video after blurry screencap of everything they had just done, frantically searching for the gruesome thing she had imagined.
But instead getting something she could never show him in a million years.
The stage thing had been bad enough. This was something else.
She had to look away. But not before she saw someone had put into words the first thing she thought on seeing his broken, open gaze locked to the slow slide of her soft, sweet mouth down one slick finger. On watching him lean forward without meaning to, on watching her own eyes look up at him from beneath far-too-heavy lids.
I swear to god, it couldn’t have looked filthier if they had actually fucked.
Eleven
She rationally knew there was no way out of what they had to do now. She had no ammunition to convince him with. No plan that made more sense than just letting this happen. Apparently, from the outside they had something that looked like killer chemistry. And she knew the word waskiller, too, because eleven thousand people had said so on some video captionedthey are so hot I want to jump down a well.
It was the weirdest thing in the world.
They should hate me, she thought.I should be getting death threats the way that Mabel did, she thought.I bet he loves nothing better than having her sit that juicy butt right on his gorgeous—she started to read, then had to hurl her phone into the footwell of the truck to avoid the rest.
He asked her if she was okay.
She didn’t know how to tell him no.
But she sort of wished she had once they got to the hotel for their next stop, about ten miles from the center of Hartford—grander than the first, all plush furniture and marble-effect floors and chandeliers—and the woman behind the deskwinked. She winked, and thensaid the most horrifying and preposterous words Daisy could have imagined:
“I saw you accidentally booked two rooms, so I’ve upgraded you to a suite.”
And apparently, they were the most horrifying and preposterous words to Miller, too. Because despite him arguing for this very thing, he stiffened the moment she spoke. She actually felt it through the space between their almost touching arms, as if his tension had set the air there on fire.
It burned.
She wanted to rip herself away.
Instead she smiled and nodded, and took the key, then started in the direction of the elevators. Only to find he wasn’t following her. He was still standing at the reception desk, staring at the person behind it with the wildest eyes she had ever seen him have. As if he had been shot, and just hadn’t yet realized he was dead.
She had to grab ahold of his jacket and yank him away.
And he let her, until the elevator doors were closed around them. Then he ripped away so fast and so fiercely she almost ended up holding a torn sleeve. She heard fabric and threads pop. Something definitely started to give. But she let go in time it seemed, and now he was free.
He just didn’tlookfree.
He looked like he was trying to superglue himself to the other side of the elevator from her. His hands were practically clutching pearls he didn’t have. “Under no circumstances can we do this,” he said.
As if he wasn’t the one who had come up with it.
“You were the one who said this was a good idea.”
“And I was wrong. I take it back. Let’s stop.”
