Page 88 of Auctioned To Be Mine

“Thanks.”

He crossed the room and set one of the bottles on the shelf beside my phone. I grabbed the towel from the hook and pressed it to my face. My legs were burning. My chest felt like it had been compressed in a vise. I could taste the salt on my lips.

“Krista sent me,” he said. “She could hear the treadmill from the living room.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. You want to tell me what happened or do you want me to guess?”

I sat down on the weight bench, opened the water bottle, and drank half of it in one go. Then I told him all of it. Dash listened without interrupting. He grimaced once or twice.

“Did she call you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Did she text you?”

“She said she needed time to cool off. What does that mean? Did I completely fuck myself?”

“You want the honest version or the version that makes you feel better?”

I gave him a dry look. “What do you think?”

He exhaled through his nose. “You fucked up.”

“Thanks,” I muttered.

“I know I said I’d do the same thing,” he said. “And I would. But I also know that doing the same thing doesn’t make it right. It just makes it human.”

I glared at him. “You told me to go!”

“No, I told you what I would do. The difference between what you did and what I would have done is that I would have been invisible. She never would have known I was there.”

“She didn’t know I was there until that asshole touched her.”

“Sounds like you jumped the gun.”

I pressed the towel against the back of my neck. “I saw his hand on her and I reacted. It was like a switch. I didn’t decide to do it. I was just up and moving.”

“I understand that. There’s a difference between being looked out for and being managed. She’s not going to stay mad forever. But she needs to know you understand what you did was wrong. Not just that you’re sorry it upset her.”

“Hard to do that when she won’t talk to me.”

“Then go talk to her.”

“She said she needed time.”

“She’s had time. Get that apology in now before it festers. That’s what you have to do in a relationship.”

“Okay,” I said.

Maybe I’d just been waiting for someone to tell me what I already knew I wanted to do.

I got cleaned up and headed over to her apartment. Normally, I would have texted her first but I was afraid she would have told me not to come. Taking a deep breath, I knocked and waited. She opened the door and looked at me and it was clear she was still pissed. She did not step back to let me in.

“What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to apologize. Can we talk?”