“Was going to start with an apology, but you looked like you might throw the can at my head.”
“I still might.”
He nodded. “Fair.”
I finally turned to him.
Mistake.
He stood there in black sweats and a white shirt that clung to him in all the wrong places, hair damp from the locker room and wind-tossed now, jaw tight, mouth serious, shoulders still carrying the fight he had not gotten to finish. The stadium lights were long gone, but the bonfire lit one side of his face in gold, the other in shadow.
He looked less like campus prime candy and more like trouble with a pulse.
“You cannot do that again,” I said.
His gaze held mine. “I know.”
“No, I need you to actually hear me, Drew. You cannot turn me into the thing men fight over. Not Tristan. Not you. Not anyone.”
His jaw flexed.
“I know.”
“You shoved him.”
“He came at me.”
“Because you shoved him.”
“Because he opened his mouth.”
“Because you opened yours first.”
Drew’s brows pulled together. “Are we doing a legal timeline or a moral one?”
“We are doing the one where you stop acting like I’m property.”
That hit.
Good.
It was supposed to.
His face changed—not anger, exactly. Something sharper and more wounded, gone almost as fast as it appeared.
“You think that’s what that was?”
“I think that’s what it looked like.”
His laugh was short and ugly. “Then everyone on that beach needs glasses.”
“Drew.”
“No.” He stepped closer, then stopped himself, like he remembered my leg, my space, my temper. “I get that I was an ass. I do. But don’t stand there and tell me I was trying to own you.”
I folded my arms, mostly so I would not touch him.
“What were you trying to do?”
