“I’m not.”
“You are internally mocking. I can feel it.”
His mouth twitched. “I’m listening.”
“No, you’re doing that thing where you look all quiet and hot and emotionally unavailable, but really you’re collecting information to weaponize later.”
“That’s specific.”
“You’re specific.”
“I don’t think that was an insult.”
“It was emotionally adjacent.”
His smile softened, and that was worse than the smirk. The smirk I could fight. The smirk made me want to throw something at him and then maybe kiss his stupid face depending on how my pain meds felt about it. But the softness? The quiet attention? The way he looked at me like he could hear the words I was too scared to say?
That was not fair.
“I had a plan,” I said, because if I stopped talking, I was going to start crying again, and I had already cried enough infront of this man to qualify for a loyalty punch card. “I picked the marble. I rehearsed nothing because I am deeply against preparedness when feelings are involved, but I had the vibe. The vibe was strong.”
“The vibe.”
“Yes, Cade. The vibe. Try to keep up.”
“I’m trying.”
“You are not. Your face is doing condescending cheekbone things.”
“That’s just my face.”
“That’s the problem.”
He looked down at our joined hands, and his thumb started moving again, slow and steady. “Tell me about the marble.”
My chest tightened.
For a second, the jokes slipped out of my reach.
I looked at his hand around mine instead of his face because his face was a problem. His face had always been a problem, but now it was also safety and heartbreak and the exact kind of thing a girl could survive hell for and still not feel ready to trust completely because losing him would not be a normal kind of pain.
“It was perfect,” I said softly. “Ice blue like your eyes. Not the exact color, but close enough. It made me think of your eyes this morning, which is embarrassing and very girl-with-feelings-coded, and I hate that for me.”
His fingers tightened faintly.
“And there was black in it too,” I continued, voice going thinner. “A little swirl of it. It looked messy, but pretty. Chaotic, honestly. Like it had no business working, but it did anyway.”
“Sounds familiar.”
I glanced at him. “Are you calling me messy?”
“I’m calling us chaos.”
My breath caught before I could stop it.
Us.
He said it so easily. Like the word already belonged there.
