She’d come running. Not hovering like Hayes, not the pity committee with casseroles and sad eyes. Clara had come running because she’d heard a thud and her brain had leaped straight to cracked skull and blood on tile.
The thought landed in my chest like a weight. Annoying, inconvenient warmth tried to spread behind my ribs.
It made me angrier.
I didn’t want warmth. I didn’t want soft edges. Soft was how you started needing people. Soft was how you let them into places they didn’t belong. Soft was how you ended up with someone seeing you in your worst moment and then acting like you owed them gratitude for it.
Clara didn’t have any business seeing me like that. She didn’t have any business being in this house at all, no matter what my exhausted, poorly functioning brain had agreed to earlier.
My gaze drifted to the hallway, waiting for movement. Waiting for the creak of stairs, the sound of her coming down with one of her jokes or that stubborn chin tipped up like she dared me to be a jerk about it.
Nothing.
The house sat heavy and quiet, the only sounds the TV and the heater kicking on and off.
Clara wasn’t coming down.
She’d retreated. Probably mortified. Probably telling herself this was a mistake. Probably texting her family a play-by-play while she laughed her ass off.
The image should’ve satisfied me. It should’ve been a clean, easy reaction.
Instead, my mind played the scene again, slower, crueler. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more there.
The way her hand had flown up, but not before the look in her eyes shifted. Shock, yes. Panic, yes. Then something else that flickered so quickly I couldn’t name it without wanting to put my head through the wall.
It hadn’t been disgust.
She hadn’t looked at my residual limb and flinched away like it was something grotesque.
For the smallest moment, it almost looked likedesire.
I cut the thought off hard, but my body reacted anyway. My chest tightened, my skin still humming with leftover heat. I hated the part of me that was cataloging her reaction like evidence. I hated that my brain wouldn’t let the moment die. It circled it, poked at it, kept turning it over like it could find the answer to a question I wasn’t ready to ask.
Clara was not anything I could afford to want. Wanting felt like the first step toward losing something. Wanting was a debt you paid later with interest.
I stared at the dark ceiling above the living room, the TV flashing reflected light in the corner of my eye. My hands loosened slowly from the cushion. My body felt heavy, used up, as if the shower had taken the last fight out of me.
Somewhere upstairs, a floorboard creaked.
My whole body went still.
I closed my eyes and exhaled through my nose, tasting anger, embarrassment, and something dangerously close to relief.
Tomorrow was going to be awkward as hell, and the worst part was that I’d done it to myself.
I shifted on the couch, trying to find a position that didn’t make my hips ache, and my body answered the movement with a cruel, immediate reminder that it had its own opinions about tonight.
I was hard.
Not a flicker. Not a passing thought I could ignore. Full and unmistakable, pressing against the seam of my sweatpants like I’d been sitting here watching porn instead of replaying the most humiliating five minutes of my life.
A sharp laugh scraped out of my throat, humorless and bitter. “Really?” I muttered to my dick. “That’s your takeaway?”
My pulse kicked again, like my body wanted to argue.
Heat curled low in my gut, the kind that didn’t care about pride or guilt or the fact that I’d been braced against tile two seconds away from eating shit in my own shower. It didn’t care that Clara was off-limits, that she was Hayes’s little sister, that she was upstairs right now probably wishing she could bleach her eyeballs.
All it cared about was the curve of her waist in those sleep shorts earlier, soft and bare and too damn casual for a house that had been mine alone.
