The Mess You Choose by Megan Hart

Author:Megan Hart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIRA Books
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

The next morning I found Alex sitting with his laptop at the kitchen table. His hair was sleep rumpled, chest and feet bare. He wore his Hello Kitty pajama bottoms. I’d never seen him wearing glasses. They changed his face. Made him a stranger again. Somehow, that made it easier to approach him.

“We need to talk.”

He looked up, then closed his laptop. “Okay.”

“James told me everything.” I wasn’t going to gild this conversation, or keep it pretty for the sake of peace. There were things I needed to say.

“Did he?” Alex crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair.

“Yes. He did.”

Aggression doesn’t come naturally to me, but I must have seemed threatening despite my pajamas and equally disheveled hair. Maybe it was the mug of coffee I brandished like a weapon, or the way I towered over him while he was seated.

“What did he tell you?” He could say so much with just the slightest quirk of brow and lip.

“About the rules you two laid out.”

He waited a beat before answering. “Did he tell you that, or did you ask him about it?”

“A little of both.”

He made a small noise. I sipped my coffee. He looked somewhat blank, but I thought that was on purpose, not because he didn’t get what I was trying to say. Not that I was, at that moment, saying anything.

It was hard to force a discussion like this, but like ripping off a bandage all at once, I figured I’d better give it a shot.

“He told me about how you talked about what you could and couldn’t do.”

Damn him. He wasn’t giving me an inch, not doing one damn thing to make it easier for me. He didn’t even nod.

“I don’t like it,” I finished firmly, albeit lamely.

This got a reaction from him. Scornful charm trickled into his eyes and tilted his mouth on one side. He leaned back more in the chair with a small shake of his head to clear the hair off his forehead.

“You don’t like what?”

I gripped my coffee mug in two hands and tried to keep my voice neutral. “The rules the two of you made.”

I stood my ground even when he was on his feet with one smooth motion, like a cat. He took the mug out of my hands and put it on the table. I didn’t back up, not even when he stood so close I could count the individual hairs surrounding his nipples.

“Which ones don’t you like?”

He moved forward and I back, slowly, like ripples in water. We stopped when my back hit the small section of wall between the window seat and the door to the deck.

My heart began a familiar thump-thumping that echoed in my wrists and odd places like the backs of my knees and behind my ears. The places I’d put perfume, if I wore it. The places I’d want someone to kiss.

Alex put a hand on the wall next to my head. “Tell me something, Anne.

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