He snorts. “Pretty sure that’s a matter of opinion.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, you look like you’re going to fall down any second. I don’t know what you were thinking to come running down the halls after you nearly bled to death. Go back to bed.”
“I don’t want to go back to bed. I want to talk to you about what happened this afternoon.”
“Blank” doesn’t describe what happens to his face. It goes beyond blank, beyond empty, until there’s absolutely nothing there. No sign at all of the Jaxon I watched the meteor shower with. Definitely no sign of the boy who kissed me until my knees buckled and my heart nearly exploded.
He looks like a stranger. A cold, emotionless stranger, one who has every intention of ignoring me. But then he finally answers. “You got hurt. That’s what happened.”
“That’s not all that happened.” I reach for his arm—I want to touch him, feel him—but he steps out of reach before my fingers can so much as brush against his shirt.
“It’s the only thing that happened that matters.”
Ouch. My heart falls straight to my feet as I struggle with the fact that he’s grouping our kiss in with all the things he thinks don’t matter.
For long seconds, I don’t know what to say. But then I ask the one question that’s been burning inside my brain since I woke up. “Are you all right?”
“I’m not the one you need to worry about.”
“But I am worried about you.” It’s a lot to admit—especially when he’s working so hard to shut down everything between us—but that doesn’t make it any less true. “You look…”
His eyes meet mine. “What?”
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “Not okay.”
He looks away. “I’m fine.”
“Okay.” It’s obvious he doesn’t want to talk to me right now, so I take a step back. “I guess I—”
“I’m sorry.” It sounds like the words are dragged out of him.
“For what?” The apology astounds me.
“I didn’t protect you.”
“From an earthquake?”
His gaze swings back to mine, and for a second, just a second, I can see something in his eyes. Something powerful and terrible and all-consuming. But it’s gone as quickly as it came and then he’s back to showing nothing. “From a lot of things.”
“From what I understand, you saved my life.”
He snorts. “That’s the point. You don’t understand much. Which is why you should go back to your room and forget all about what happened earlier.”
“Forget about the earthquake?” I ask. “Or forget about you kissing me?” I don’t know where I got the guts to bring it up…except, truth is, it’s not bravery so much as desperation. I have to know what Jaxon’s thinking and why he’s thinking it.
“Forget about it all,” he answers.
“You know that’s not going to happen.” I reach for him once more, and this time he doesn’t jerk away. Instead, he just watches me as I rest my hand on his shoulder, hoping the contact will remind him of what it was like to touch me. Hoping it will break through the barriers he’s erected between us.
“Yeah, well, it needs to happen. You have no idea what we just did.”
“We kissed, Jaxon. That’s all we did.” It felt momentous, important—it still feels that way to me—but in the grand scheme of things, it really was just a kiss.
“I keep telling you that it doesn’t work like that here.” He shoves a frustrated hand through his hair. “Don’t you get that? You’ve been a pawn since you got here, a chess piece to move around the board to get the desired result. But now…now we’ve upped the stakes. This isn’t just a game anymore.”
He might mean his words as warnings, but they feel like body blows.
“I was a game to you?”
“You’re not listening.” His eyes glow incandescent with the effort of holding in emotions I can’t even begin to decipher—no matter how much I wish I could. “From the moment I kissed you. From the moment you got hurt, everything changed. You were in danger before, but now—”
He breaks off, jaw clenching, throat working. Then says, “Now I’ve all but put a bull’s eye in the middle of your back and dared someone to take a shot.”
“I don’t understand. You didn’t do anything.”