Page 16 of Ice Cold, Red Hot
They weren’t wrong.
All I wanted was to not care. To not feel like every single move Celeste Moreno made affected me somehow. It was like her very existence was jostling the atoms that impacted mine. We were connected.
I knew it was true, but I didn’t want it to be.
Part of me thought if I ignored her, made her hate me, then the connection would break. But if she was going to start dating pasty grad students like Ethan Calloway, I knew I wouldn’t be able to ignore it.
CHAPTER 9
CELESTE
What the actual fuck?
First he doesn’t know who I am. Then he won’t leave me alone to move on.
Shepherd was pushing my buttons and it needed to stop.
My plate was already full. I’d started working more hours in the counseling center. I had undergrad loans to pay off, and the thought of coming out of school with mountains of debt kept me up at night. (Literally, since that was when I did remote counseling).
Nat commented on it the next morning when we finally got a chance to have coffee together and I could barely keep my eyes open.
“Girl, you’re going too hard. It’s the beginning of the year. What are you going to look like in May?” She stirred her coffee and leaned back in the kitchen chair next to the window looking out the back of our building. She was the picture of a well-rested college student, perfectly balancing school and life. Of course, Nat didn’t have towork on top of everything else. The way she grew up meant she didn’t have much to prove. Life was good for her, and I didn’t hold it against her. But we were different that way.
“I don’t have much of a choice,” I told her. “The counseling is remote, so I can do it from here, and they always need people on the overnight shifts.”
“News flash. That’s when you’re supposed to be sleeping.”
I blew across the top of my mug. “Yeah…”
Nat’s eyes widened and she sat up straight suddenly. “Speaking of sleeping… I heard the front door slam last night after Evan and I went to sleep?—”
“That wasn’t sleeping. I could hear you.” I laughed. Nat and Evan had become a fixture. A very sexually busy fixture. It didn’t bother me—I couldn’t hear them from my room. But last night, I’d been in the living room a while, trying to calm down after Shepherd’s bizarre intrusion on my date with Ethan.
“What was that all about?”
“The door slamming?”
“Yeah.” Nat leaned forward, giving me her I-can-tell-this-is-good stare.
“Mostly Shepherd.” I explained what had happened on the curb out front, about Shepherd inserting himself for no reason into my date.
“What? Oh, my god, he’s obsessed with you.”
“What? No he’s not.”
“Um. That behavior right there? That’s called jealousy.”
Was it? I couldn’t figure the guy out. I hadn’t mentioned the night I’d bumped into him in the lounge, when he’dpulled me so close to him I could feel exactly how well he remembered me through his jeans as it pressed into my hip.
“So if he’s obsessed with me, why does he act like I don’t exist most of the time?”
“Because he’s a dumbasss. But that little stunt? That was pure jealousy, babe.”
I hated the way my body tingled at the thought of it, at the idea of having any power over Shepherd whatsoever.
“And how did Ethan react?” Nat asked.
I thought about Ethan for a second, working to will my body to respond the way a single thought of Shepherd set it off. “He was pretty relaxed about it. I mean, he looked annoyed, I guess.”
