Page 31 of Lifeline

It had distracted me, and I had lingered long enough that he caught me. He hadn’t said anything, so I didn’t know what he thought about it, and I was going to need more than a half-finished double cocktail to give me the courage necessary to ask about that evening. All I could do was sit there and stew in my simmering arousal and hope I found a moment to take care of it later.

“It’s weird,” he said, looking around the room. “It’s so quiet.”

“That’s because you go to bed early; I’m used to the peace and quiet,” I snorted. Only to hear a sharp inhale from down the hallway as Jake started snoring. “Relatively speaking, that is.”

“You night owls,” he snorted. “I guess it’s a good thing your job means you don’t need to be up at the crack of dawn.”

“Hey, I still have a ‘duties list’ I need to do,” I protested.

“Did you think Xander was going to let you sit around and write…what was it again? Blog posts?”

“Sort of blog posts, sort of newsletters, with an occasional post or two on Insta and the Tok.”

“The Tok,” he said dryly. “You had to figure he’d give you more to do than being on the computer or phone all the time.”

“You sound like him,” I snorted. “And I’m not complaining or bothered that he gave me stuff to do. Hell, it beats being left to my own devices; nothing good ever comes from that.”

Mika listened and shook his head. “I suppose I’ll have to deal with Reno’s bad mood and sleep in the lab, or try to sleep through Jake’s snoring.”

“By the time I go to bed, he’s stopped snoring,” I said, checking the time on my computer before giving up on writing and closing it. “This is about the time when everyone’s asleep. Or at least, those that stay in the main building. Fuck knows what Carter and Mav’s sleeping habits are like.”

“Mav’s a night owl too; he just compensates for waking up early by having a nap midway through the day,” Mika said, adjusting his pants at the crotch and wiggling on the couch. “How’s the ankle, by the way?”

“The ankle that barely hurt days ago, that ankle?”

“That ankle.”

“Suffice to say it’s fine. It was fine by the time Colin cornered me when I was trying to shower.”

Mika glanced at me, then his eyes darted away almost guiltily. “Okay.”

The awkwardness had made a comeback, and I sighed, knowing it was going to hang in the air unless one of us had the courage to address it before it became the lurking elephant. “Look, about that⁠—”

His eyes went wide. “No, you don’t have to⁠—”

“I do, otherwise it’s just all awkward and shit,” I muttered, amused that I was making a liar out of myself because apparently it wasn’t going to take more alcohol to make me address that. “I know you spotted me being a creep, so I’m going to be the one to admit that, yeah, you saw what you saw. I creeped, and then I realized what I was doing and got the hell out of dodge. So…I did that. I’m sorry.”

He looked startled. “O…oh.”

I blinked. “What?”

There was another long pause before he took a deep breath. “There’s no need to apologize. I…no, wait, hold on. I mean, there’s no need to apologize because I was as guilty as you.”

That surprised me. “Really?”

“Really,” he said with a small smile. “I was also looking. You just didn’t catch me in the act like I accidentally caught you.”

I snorted. “I was never as sneaky as I hoped I was.”

He gave a slight shrug. “In the spirit of what you said earlier, maybe we’re being too hard on ourselves. We…well, things between us were left on a bad, suspended note. And we’ve only just started past our…past.”

“Sure,” I said, catching his logic and following it. “I suppose with a lot of things unresolved, there’s going to be…leftovers, I guess is the way I wanna put it.”

“That sounds about right,” he agreed, tugging at his collar and scratching idly at his collarbone.

Great, now I was getting turned on by the sight of a collarbone. What next? Was I going to salivate if he showed a bit of ankle?

“Plus, your ass was always distracting to me,” I said with a smirk, almost laughing when I saw him sigh quietly. As much as he had liked my butt, for whatever reason, his ass had always been phenomenal. Well, all his body, dick included, had been great to me and, more often than not, distracting. Except back then, my head was so fucked-up I would feel the gas pedal in my head shoved to the floor, but the fucked-up part was slamming the brake on, leaving me to squeal my tires and get nowhere. “So I guess it makes sense that it would distract me again.”