Page 5 of Between the Blue
He doesn’t need to know, but his silence is making me feel the need to unnecessarily explain myself.
“I literally just moved into my apartment. So this was all I could find this morning. I definitely wasn’t planning on anyone seeing them. But I guess it’s just your lucky day, James.”
I glance up at him, and I swear I register a slight twitch in his left eyebrow, but then I think I may have imagined it.
I reach for my blouse on the floor, internally cringing at the fact that it’ll certainly need a sooner trip to the dry cleaners after being exposed to a gym locker room floor. As I grab it, I feel it snag on something, then groan as the stack of Polaroids I was hoping to review while stuck at red lights on my drive home come flying out from underneath the pink fabric, splaying out in a dramatic display.
I let out an exasperated huff, moving to scoop up the photos, not thinking much of them for the first few seconds until I suddenly remember that the average person probably doesn’t carry twenty or so photos of dramatically posed half naked men and women around in their gym bags.
My gaze is slowly pulled upwards like a magnet. And, sure enough, those eyes that I’m going to see in my dreams–and now nightmares– are trained on the photos in my hand. I swallow hard, looking down at the photos and trying to convince myself it doesn’t look that bad.
It does.
When I look back at James’s face, I find his gaze now locked on mine. I attempt a weak laugh, thinking of the best way to talk myself out of this situation. But then I also wonder why I’m setting back my morning schedule even more for the sake of a man that’s been looking at me like I’m the gum on the bottom of his shoe from the first moment we locked eyes.
“I know it probably looks bad that I’m accusing you of being a creep when I have these,” I say, “but I have an explanation. I’m a photographer.”
He blinks.
“I actually just moved here for photography school. From Georgia.”
Why are you telling him this?
“So I have an excuse for this,” I say, holding up the photos and shaking them before gently dropping them into my bag.
“But you, on the other hand, still do not.”
I start to get to my feet, but end up reaching for his gym bag in front of me, handing it to him as I stand back up to my full height.
James’s eyes never leave my face as he yanks the bag from my grasp, slinging it over his shoulder without so much as a “thank you”or a nod of his head.
“I mean, unless I have something wrong, which I know that I don’t…” I mutter angrily, basically to myself at this point. “Across the weight room, down the stairs, take a left, first door on your ri–”
My spine steels, my eyes blinking as I retrace the steps I just took to get here.
I definitely walked across the weight room and down the stairs, but then I was on my phone and there was a dead end, forcing me to go one of two directions.
And I took a right.
And then went through the first door on my left.
Dammit.
“You were saying?”
My gaze snaps up at the first sound of his deep voice.
My mouth opens, but no words come out.
James raises his brows.
“I…”
“So you did have something wrong, then,” he says.
“I…” I shake my head, pushing a strand of hair that’s come loose from my ponytail behind my ear. “I’m sor–”
But I don’t even get the full word out before James is shifting his eyes away from mine with complete disdain and indifference, bumping my shoulder as he shoves past me, only stopping when he reaches a locker ten feet away.
