Page 55 of The Rogue

That added to the weirdness of all of this. There was some major trauma in his life that she didn’t even know about? She had witnessed a whole lot of his childhood, so she had always been pretty sure that she just knew about the things that happened to him. Apparently not. It was a strange revelation. As was sitting there looking at his bare chest, his bicep, being this close to him in the truck.

“It was so exhausting, suddenly. She was wet, and it was getting a little bit humid inside. Her best friend was half-naked right next to her and he had just told her about something awful that had happened him. She wanted to reach out to him, but it felt weird to do it because there was something about the way he held her down by the water that had rearranged things inside of her. She felt exposed. Which was strange because he was the one that had told her this new thing about himself.

“Let’s go home. I’ll get you some hot chocolate. We’ll watch a movie.”

“No. I want...”

He looked at her, his gaze sharp.

“Just leave it. Okay? It’s not a big deal. I’m sorry that I freaked out at you.”

Was he sorry that he’d held her in his arms for a minute there? Was he sorry that something had shifted between them, and she didn’t know how they were going to shift it back? That was what she was really curious about. She didn’t care that he had been angry at her. She cared that she had suddenly seen an intensity in him that she had not seen all that often. It had come up at the wedding, when he had gone after Asher.

Intensity. She couldn’t help but think about that. She couldn’t help but think about it.

“How did you survive that?” she asked while they were driving back.

“It’s the simplest thing to survive. You sit in the dark and you wait for somebody to come get you. That’s it.”

He was being... very Justice about it. And she felt horrified.

“You must’ve been dehydrated.”

“Yeah, pretty dehydrated. But there was a little bit of water trickling in a top corner. And I sipped on that a little bit. I don’t know. I was a kid. So it’s fine. I mean kids are resilient. And you know...?”

They both had been. Because they’d had to be. But she didn’t like him minimizing this or writing it off. And she liked even less that she hadn’t known about it. It felt like a strange spanner that had been shoved into the works of their friendship, works that had been moving unevenly because their dynamic was all messed up and had been for the last few days. Imbalanced and kind of a mess. Because of everything she had been through, and everything he’d had to help her with.

They were driving back toward the house, and she put her hand over his without even thinking. Because it was what they did. But she was wearing a jacket and bikini bottoms, and he was in his underwear, and the air was thick with something electric, while there were raw waves of emotion she couldn’t begin to read radiating from him. It was a mistake, because the normal touch wasn’t normal in a moment that contained nothing of what they normally were.

She didn’t want to jerk her hand away because it would reveal it. Would reveal her. What if everything inside him was the same?

Her wedding had just been called off. What was wrong with her? Why was she allowing it to reverberate through the solid pieces of her life like this?

She moved her hand away. “I’m just really sorry that you went through that.”

“I’m sorry that we went through a lot of things, Rue. You and me. It’s not fair. But life isn’t fair, and you and I both know that. I had a terrible dad, and I happened to get caught in a cave-in. But you know, I didn’t die. I wasn’t seriously injured. It was scary. And you know, the kind of scary that gives you nightmares for years when you’re a kid. But I survived.”

Except she couldn’t unsee the rawness in his response in the moment. It was more than just being afraid for a few days when he was a kid. He was afraid now.

I didn’t make these decisions to protect myself...

Yes, he had. He did things to protect himself. One of them was not sharing things like this with her. She was so convinced that she knew almost everything about them because they were best friends. Because they had been this whole time. Because they knew each other so well. But what she had said to him the day of the wedding stood. She felt like he knew her better. She had never hidden things from him.

They pulled up to the house and got out. She retreated to her temporary lodgings and got her clothes on. Because what else was she going to do? They had to just keep going. She had to keep going. Because this whole moment was so incredibly uncomfortable. Thepolar plunge had been the least uncomfortable part. As a metaphor, she supposed it stood.

She got on some sweats and by the time she emerged Justice was also wearing sweats. A pair of gray sweatpants and a tight black T-shirt. She did her best not to do a visual tour of him, and then he took a kettle off the stove and poured some hot water into one mug, then another. “Hot chocolate,” he said. “As promised.”

Did he really have things like a kettle because of her? Was his kitchen really this orderly because of her?

Suddenly, this man that she had been so confident she knew seemed like a whole puzzle to her. And her reactions to him didn’t feel any clearer. Okay. She could be honest. She was feeling attraction.

No. Not attraction to him. It was just a heightened aesthetic appreciation of his masculine form because she had been thinking about sex and she had been preoccupied with it. And what she knew about Justice was that he was an accomplished lover. Rumors suggested this and...

She wanted to grip her head and growl. But she wasn’t going to.

“Yes,” she said.

“I have mini marshmallows.”

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