Page 23 of We Burn Beautiful

He slapped my hand away from his face. “Stop that. Stop it.” He stood up, pulling another water bottle from his oversized smock pocket. “You’re delirious. Drink the dang water and pull yourself together.” He turned around and walked down the loading dock slope leading to the stockroom.

When he reached the doors, he shoved his palms into them, sending them flying open with a crash. Rhonda let out another shriek as boxes toppled down around her.

Once the truck was finally unloaded, I made my way to the break room, looking for Gray. He was sitting in a chair, sweat pouring down his face, and he had his head resting against the wall with his eyes closed.

“Knock-knock.” I rapped my fingers against the break room door.

He kept his eyes shut as he told me to close the door. Once it latched, I sat across the table from him, cracking open another bottle of water.

“Well, that was certainly something. Sorry for almost dying in front of you.”

“We need to talk.” His eyes opened and found their way to me.

“Uh-oh, Kent’s in trouble.” I laughed. And then I stopped laughing because the expression on his face was serious. “Wait, am I? For nearly fainting?”

Pointing at my still shirtless chest, he said, “You can’t do that. Not here.” He peered over my shoulder as if he expected someone else to be hiding behind me. “This isn’t a whorehouse.”

“Did you just call me a whore?”

“Those comments out there, about the sucking thing—you can’t say stuff like that. And all of the touching has to stop, too. This is my team. My career. I’ve spent twenty years building it, Kent.”

“Do you know what I spent the last twenty years doing?”

He held his hand in front of his chest, telling me to stop. “No. We’re not going down that road again. This is serious. It isn’t a chance for you to have another pity party.”

“Another what?”

“It’s not always about you. You act like you’re the only person who’s been through stuff, but you’re not. You’ve been out of this city longer than you were even in it, and now you’re just coming in, making things—”

“Making things what? What exactly am I doing to you? It sounds like there’s something you want to get off your chest.” I held my arm out to the table like a showcase model onThe Price is Right.“By all means, lay it out there.”

“I have a life here. One that I enjoy. It might not be fancy like yours, and I may not have been to bigwig events like the Republican National Convention—”

“First of all, I was a Director of Finance for a hotel chain, not some millionaire jetsetter living it up in the lap of goddamn luxury. Secondly, if you ever insinuate that I’ve stepped foot inside a Republican event again, I will literally fight you. I’m not joking. I’ll deck you right in the face. I don’t play when it comes to politics.”

He rolled his eyes. “This is my life, and I’ve worked dang hard to get to where I am.”

“Oh my God.” I leaned forward, banging my head against the table. “Just say what the hell you’re trying to say. I swear to God, you talk in circles, but you get nowhere.”

“Stop flirting with me, Kent.”

“Flirting? You think I’m—You want me to stop … I don’t know how many times I have to tell you.” I enunciated every word to make the meaning crystal clear.“I—am—not—here—for—you. I—do—not—want—you.”

He shook his head. “I’ve seen it. Rhonda’s seen it. Everyone working the dang line today saw it. You were staring at me like you wanted to mount me. And you were looking at my butt the day you started. You tried to feel me up in my office and then pretended to grab a picture when I pushed you away.”

“What the hell? Are you composing a dossier of my dirty gazes?” Realizing I’d essentially just admitted to eye-fucking him, I course-corrected. “Not that I’m giving you dirty gazes, you arrogant little shit. And anyway, what about you? You were looking right back at me. Your eyes didn’t leave my nipples for ten minutes on the loading dock, dude. You stared at my dick like you wanted to devour it in the restroom that first night.” I stared at his eyes, which were now focused directly on my nipples. “My eyes are up here, Grayson.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He darted his gaze around the room, searching for God knows what. “You were overheated. Your mind must still be playing tricks on you.” Before I could object to his bastardized retelling of the morning’s events, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the two bent sticks of gum I’d given him earlier. “You’re saying you don’t want this, but guess what? I don’t either. I never did. You always did this. You took the smallest things and made them into something lurid in your mind.”

“Something lurid in my mind? Do you want to talk about lurid? Because we can.” I stared at him. Defiantly. Deliberately. “Do you?”

His entire face went white and he locked his gaze on a very interesting, laminated OSHA job safety sign that was hanging on the wall.

I slammed the side of my fist on the table. “Answer me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No. I’m sorry, I know that you’re struggling with me being back—I can understand why that’s difficult for you, what with the wholehappy heterosexualact that you’re trying to pull off—but I’m not going to let you sit here and make it seem like I imagined what happened that night.”

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