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So I lie. “I care about you as a friend,” I tell him. “We’re just two friends having fun. That’s all.”
It’s such a lie that I don’t think he’ll even buy it.
But he takes it. He pretends to buy it. He’ll use it as a way out.
“I see.” He clears his throat, eyes drifting down to the pattern on the duvet. “Then I think maybe it’s for the best that we go back to just being friends again. Colleagues. While we still can.”
Even though I knew that was coming, even though I enabled it by lying, it still stings. “Sure. That’s fine with me.”
But I can’t look at him anymore. I close my eyes, trying to keep it together.
“Laila?” he asks gently. I feel his fingertips at my cheek.
The nerve of him. To say all this shit and then to still show me this kind of soft touch, this kind of affection.
When I open my eyes to look at him, I know he sees my anger.
That we won’t even go back to being friends now.
That we’re right back at square one, when he waltzed into this fucking place and turned my whole life upside down again.
“You hate me,” he says, his voice cracking with emotion.
I harden my heart against his words. “I don’t care about you enough to hate you, James.”
He flinches like I slapped him across the face.
Eyes going dark.
He nods, getting to his feet and striding quickly toward the door.
He closes it behind him, and I hear him go down the hall, open the door to his own room. Hear the headboard knock against the wall as he climbs into bed.
I can’t handle it.
I get up and go into the washroom, sitting down on the toilet.
The only place I can cry without him hearing me.
Twenty-One
JAMES
I fucked up.
I fucked up big-time.
I fucked up big-time before with Laila, but this time, this is such a monumentally huge fuckup that it’s blown past the boundaries of the solar system. I’m talking a fuckup of galactic proportions, one that I will take to my grave as my biggest regret.
“James?”
“Huh?” I turn to see Magnus staring at me quizzically. I guess I am standing in the hallway outside Laila’s room, just staring at her door like a fucking stalker. Since I fucked shit up last night, I’ve been trying to apologize for how I acted, but she won’t give me the time of day, and I can’t exactly grovel in public here with her. So I’ve been standing outside her door in hopes that I’ll catch her for a moment. It’s after dinner, and I know she’s in there with a book or perhaps sticking her pins in a Scotsman-shaped voodoo doll.
“You look rough, man,” Magnus says, slapping his hand on my back. “I mean it. You need to come with me.”
“Go with you where?” I ask, pivoting to watch him throw on his coat.
“Well, me and Einar. We’re taking you out. You haven’t had a night out in a long time.”
