Problematic Summer Romance (Not in Love, #2)(64)

“Not particularly.”

I don’t hide my smile. “I think that I took you by surprise, back in Edinburgh. You enjoyed talking to me. You opened up. We got close in a way that you hadn’t experienced before. And that made you uncomfortable.”

“Maya—”

“But you liked it, too. And that’s why for the past three years you never once declined a call from me. You always reached out if you didn’t hear from me for a few days. We became really intimate, emotionally. So much so, you couldn’t risk that intimacy to become physical, too.”

I pause. Give him a chance to object. Instead, he just observes me, granite hard.

“It made it easier, didn’t it? The distance. The phone.” Another wave rolls in. “Tell me if I’m wrong—”

“You’re wrong.”

I lean closer. His eyes glint into mine, darker than the night around us. I refuse to let him look away. “Tell me if I’m wrong,” I repeat.

He doesn’t lie again. And all at once, for the first time in years, something gives. A turn of his head, a twitch in his mouth. He glances away, but when he faces me again, I can almost touch the change in him. His mouth parts. His body inches toward mine, the fabric of his clothes rough against my skin. The air surrounding us snaps, like a physical manifestation of the control he has held on to since Edinburgh.

The beginning of fracture. Admit the truth. Admit it.

A gust of breeze rises, whipping through his hair, then mine. “How do I make you shut up, Maya?”

“Just tell me that I’m wrong.” Slowly, I smile. “Buy my silence, Conor. Tell me that I got it wrong, and I’m never going to bring it up again. I’m going to text my new friend back, and—”

“Go to your room.”

I flinch back. Swallow my disappointment, straighten my spine. “You don’t get to tell me what to—”

“Maya,” he half growls. The sound comes from deep in his chest. “Go to your fucking room. Right now.”

And…Oh.

Oh.

That edge in his voice—I was wrong. He’s not trying to send me to bed, after all.

Something is not quite as it was.

I rise to my feet without asking him to explain himself. He and I no longer talk, anyway. We’re stuck in this complicated cycle of toxic silence and avoidance, and—this is the closest I’ve felt to him in ten months.

There’s no point in letting go now.

I start down the stone path, not bothering to pick up my phone. It’ll be here tomorrow, or it won’t. It’s hard to resist, the urge to turn around and investigate Conor’s eyes, make sure that he’ll follow me inside. But one of us has to take the lead, and I can be Orpheus.

I can keep going forward.

I can listen for his steps as he comes after me.





Chapter 27




He doesn’t knock, and I don’t expect him to. I’m leaning against the wall right in front of the door, waiting for him. I do briefly wonder whether I misunderstood, whether I’m crazy, whether he’ll change his mind, but he appears and mirrors my pose, back against the door, restructuring the shape of the room with his presence.

“Hey,” I say, soft even though the house is asleep, or too inebriated to pay attention to us. My neighbors are Nyota and Axel. The former is supportive of any interaction between Conor and me, and the latter…Axel is the kind of guy to give a universal thumbs-up to whoever’s about to get laid, be it person, anime character, or wild animal.

“Was it necessary, sending me up alone? I doubt Lucrezia patrols the hallways.”

“That’s not why, Maya.”

“What, then?”

“A chance for you to change your mind. Clear your head.”

“You’re assuming that I can’t think clearly when you’re around.”

“I can’t think clearly when you are around.” He breaks eye contact. “You’re way too fucking young to—”

“To consort with boys, to have sexual desires, to choose who to satisfy them with.” A still moment. “Conor?”

His frown is displeased.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

He nods once.

“You are so fucking boring.”

The line of his jaw softens. His exhaled huff could be laughter, too. “Thank you, Trouble.” He pushes away from the door, crossing the room to me. In the soft, warm light of the floor lamp, his hair is pitch black. Without the speckles of gray and fine lines around his eyes, this Conor could easily be a boy, ten years younger than I know him to be.

And he would still bitch about being too old for me.

“Do you do it on purpose?” he asks, standing squarely before me. We haven’t been this close since Edinburgh. I’ve taken off my T-shirt, and his head dips to look down at me, fingertips tracing the top elastic of my bikini bottoms, stopping right above my belly button.

Suddenly, violently, I am light-headed. “What?”

“The stuff you wear. You do it to drive me out of my mind, don’t you?”

I glance at myself. I didn’t have a chance to go shopping before this trip, or I’d have bought the flossiest piece of nylon-spandex blend on the discount rack, just to annoy the shit out of him. But the bikinis I already owned are style over skimpiness. Retro. Vintage high waist. Lots of polka dots. Jade calls them my hipster librarian swimsuits.