Page 54 of Final Drive

“Understand what?”

“That you’re wasting yourself on them.” His voice stays low, almost reasonable. “You could have so much more than this.”

“Move.”

“Reese, I’m trying to help you.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

His hand comes up toward my face, and I go rigid.

“You don’t know what they’re doing to you,” he says. “If you’d just let me⁠—”

He leans in.

I shove him hard enough that he has to take a step back.

“Don’t touch me.”

A few heads turn. For one second I see something in Quinton’s face I’ve never seen before. Anger, maybe. Not embarrassment. Not surprise.

Then it’s gone, and the pleasant version of him slides back over the top.

“Sorry.” He puts his hands up and moves back. “I misread it. I thought⁠—”

“You thought wrong.”

“I know. I said I’m sorry.”

I don’t wait for the rest. I get through the door into the cold, and my heart is going hard enough to hurt.

The walk home takes fifteen minutes. My hands stop shaking somewhere around the tenth, and the rest of me doesn’t settle at all. Quinton knew. That’s the thought that follows me all the way back. Not that he tried to kiss me. Not even that he grabbed my arm after I told him I was leaving.

He knew.

Kowalski walked into the boathouse yesterday already knowing exactly what I was. Quinton just used the same word like it belonged in a conversation we’d been having for months. Maybe there are a dozen ways he could have heard it. I can’t think of one I believe.

The house is loud when I come in. Zane and Beckett are arguing in the living room, Tyler’s typing at the dining table, and somebody’s doing dishes in the kitchen. All of it ordinary. All of it safe.

Home.

The word lands before I can stop it.

I don’t want ordinary right now. I don’t want eight faces turning toward me or Gray asking what happened or Jackson feeling whatever’s coming off me through the bond. I don’t want to explain why I’ve come in gray and shaking and wanting to get in the shower with the water as hot as it goes.

I make it three steps down the hall before Eli looks up from the study.

He’s in there on his own, reading something on his tablet. His eyes find my face, then my hands, then the bag I’m still gripping hard enough to hurt.

“Reese?” He sets the tablet aside. “What happened?”

I step into the room and close the door behind me.

“Quinton tried to kiss me.”

Eli sets both hands flat on the desk. It isn’t what I’d get from Bo or Gray or Jackson. There’s none of the immediate heat, and somehow that frightens me more.

“Tell me all of it,” he says.