He let out a short humorless laugh. “You always did know how to make me the problem.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to,” he replied, still glaring at me.
I adjusted my stance, needing movement, needing something to break the tension, and I leaned toward the center drawer to put some of my stuff away.
Keaton reached at the same time, and our fingers hit the handle together.
In the mirror, I caught the split second when his gaze lifted to mine, when the anger in his face slipped and then dropped back to my mouth before he pulled it up again.
Maybe hewasremembering too.
I released the drawer first. “Go ahead.”
He pulled it open. “I don’t need your permission.”
My nostrils flared.
He snatched a bottle of black nail polish out and shut the drawer. “This is my drawer, by the way. The one below it is empty.”
“Fine.” I took a step and accidentally landed on his toes.
He sucked in a breath through his teeth. “Watch where you step.”
“Watch where you stand.” My words felt like a dare, like the only way we’d stop circling each other was if we settled it in the ring. Get it out of our system so we could stop acting like teenagers. Hell, we weren’t even like this when we were kids.
After a few beats, he said, “I’m done.”
“Good.”
He turned, disappeared into his room, and slammed the door behind him.
I gaped at the closed door for a second. The bathroom fell quiet again, but my head didn’t, and the worst part was that it wasn’t just anger burning in my chest.
It was awareness of his proximity to me.
It was the memories.
It was the way his focus kept catching on my mouth like he didn’t want it to, and the way he told me to lock the door next time, as if he needed me to keep him from walking in and forgetting he was supposed to hate me.
If he needed a locked door to keep himself from touching me, then whatever had been between us wasn’t as dead as he wanted it to be.
And neither were my feelings for him.
6
Keaton
I shutthe door behind me and leaned against it for a moment. The fact that Rowan Cross was here—in my house—was seriously fucking with my head. In the past, whenever memories of him tried to surface, I did everything I could to push them back to the darkest corners of my mind, where they belonged, right alongside all my other shitty childhood memories. But with him in my space, I knew that wasn’t going to work anymore.
I ran a hand over my head and exhaled slowly, trying to forget what had happened in the bathroom. It was pointless. The image of his bare chest and ripped abs was burned into my mind, along with the dark ink spread across his skin. That hadn’t been there the last time I’d seen him without a shirt, and I hated how much I wanted another look. Hated how I wanted to know why he’d picked that image to permanently mark his skin.
The fact that he’d caught me staring made it even worse. And then, like a total idiot, I taunted him while doing it.
What the fuck was wrong with me?
Actually, I knew exactly what was wrong with me. Rowan had always been able to make me forget everything else and only see him. Every stage of our relationship had been intense, making me feel as if my emotions were on the edge of something I couldn’t control.
