Page 44 of Leashed

Giving him a look of annoyance, she reached to the coffee table and picked up the remote, pausing the program. “Why wouldn’t he be? He trusts me. And we’ve been together long enough that silly insecurities aren’t an issue.” She pursed her lips as she heard how Nixon-esque she sounded. “It’s fine.”

He leaned back again and focused on the frozen program. “I wouldn’t be cool with it at all,” he stated. “If I was ever actually in a relationship. Or invested in a chick.” He shrugged. “My twin’s girlfriend is best friends with a guy she works with. Little too much close-quarter break room hanky-panky potential, if you ask me.”

“Good thing I never asked you,” she replied curtly, her mood souring as she stood. “On that note, I better get home and get some rest so I’m not falling asleep in class tomorrow.”

She grabbed her clothes off the kitchen counter and went into the bathroom to change.

The underlying message of his words weren’t lost on her. He’d been more forward in other conversations, but the message was the same: Nixon wasn’t invested in their relationship.

What he didn’t know is neither was she anymore.

And the truth was not something she was ready to face, her heart racing and chest tightening to the point of pain every time she thought about her life without Nixon in it.

She folded his shirt and shorts, moving from annoyed to angry as she placed them on the counter and stormed to the front entrance where he stood, arms crossed and eyes hard.

“I didn’t mean to piss you off,” he muttered, passing her jacket over. “I was just sayi—”

“Just saying my relationship is essentially fake,” she finished for him, pulling her boots on. “Thanks for the pizza.”

She yanked her keys from her purse and walked out the door, glaring at him when he followed her out.

“Being this mad about it makes me wonder how close to home I’m hitting,” he said, keeping pace with her no matter how quick she descended the stairs. “Come on, Sage. You read those books. What you have going on is nothing like that.”

With her eyes straight ahead, she pushed through the lobby door, his words hitting home as her chest tightened uncomfortably. “Those books are fiction. Escapism, Bo. You of all people should understand escapism.”

He stood on the sidewalk in his bare feet and watched her as she got in the car, reversing before the engine had a chance to warm up and cringing when it squealed in protest. She crawled across the icy parking lot, adjusting her rearview mirror and shaking her head when he was nowhere in sight.

*

Bo’s shoulders slammedinto the concrete barriers as he miscalculated the distance of a bus, the wheels grazing his tail while he leapt out of its path to the sound of the horn blaring. Catching his breath, he scanned the grouping of approaching cars and darted back onto the highway, flattening himself between the lanes and closing his eyes as the vehicles sped past him.

Nothing.

Aside from the breathlessness, there was no thrill, no rush of adrenaline while he played possum amid the speeding cars. No payout for the risk.

Waiting until there was a break in the flow, he bolted back to the relative safety of the barriers, trotting along them until he hit an opening large enough to slip through.

Home it was, then.

The dark side streets provided enough coverage for him to move unnoticed back to his apartment complex, back to his discarded clothes behind the maintenance shed. Back to the empty rooms.

Ensuring he was alone, he shifted and dressed, his bare feet freezing on the icy cement as he jogged to his apartment building and tugged his key from his back pocket. He took the stairs two at a time and entered his place in record time, snatching his phone off of the kitchen counter to see if Sage had let him know she’d made it home safe after the sound her engine had made when she’d pulled away.

He knew she had, since he’d passed down her street and seen her car in her stall, the lights in her apartment turning off one by one until only the one illuminating her patio remained.

But she didn’t know that.

And he didn’t want to think too hard about why it fucking mattered.

Flipping mattered.

And he sure as hell didn’t want to think too hard about why his traitor of a mind continued to monitor his cursing like an old harpy of a schoolmarm.

“Your soul mate is being difficult,” Clotho called out from the dark living room, startling him. “The end of her relationship should have coincided with your return to Seattle after Alexandros united with his destiny.”

“Looks like you got your lines crossed,” he replied, flopping onto the sofa beside her and refusing to give her words any foothold in his head. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”

“Why do you feel the need to always sit in the light?”

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