In fairness, he sometimes behaved the same with her. They could both be a little bit territorial. It was just that they were so close. It was just that they were best friends. And right now she needed him. So much.
He was here. Asher wasn’t here, because she didn’t want him to be. She never wanted to see his ferrety face ever again. That should have been her first clue that something was amiss. He was a little ferrety. Justice had said that, in fact. Very early. But, given thefact that Justice had never been in a relationship, she didn’t think that his opinion had mattered.
Perhaps she should have listened to what she had thought of at the time was a rather shallow evaluation of someone. Nonetheless, the idea of Justice going out and being with someone else right now when she was alone upset her, and while she knew that was not fair, especially because she was contradicting her own internal musings, it was still how she felt.
“I was up feeding cows, if you must know.”
“Now I don’t know if you would tell me.”
“I would tell you. I’m not embarrassed.”
“You’ve been taking care of me. And I feel like this is probably cramping your style.”
“I’m not Asher,” he said, doing what Justice did with her, always cutting straight down to the heart of it. Often before she even could. “I don’t consider you an inconvenience or a barrier to my sex life. I’m taking care of you and staying with you because I want to. Okay?”
“Well, it doesn’t have to... I mean, I don’t want to run into a woman here...”
“I don’t bring women back here.”
“You... you don’t?”
“No.”
“But it’s so nice. I mean, the room I was staying in needed some work, but your room is very nice. And now that we have my bed in the guest room...”
“I don’t bring women here,” he said. “I don’t know why that’s hard to believe.”
“Because it just looks like the kind of place that you bring women to.”
“I don’t. Do you know why? If I brought women here then they would want to spend the night. Worse, I would feel obligated to let them. It’s not neutral territory. If I go to their place, they can throw me out, or I can see myself out.”
“You don’t... you don’t spend the night with people?”
“No,” he said, looking at her like she was crazy.
“I don’t know that,” she said, spreading her hands. “Why would I know that?”
“I’m not really sure why you know it now,” he said.
“Because I feel... I feel naive. Which isn’t fair. I was in a relationship for eight years. Half the time he was gone, and he and I had... Our connection was so based on this vision that we had for the future. Our theoretical future. It was so... cerebral, I guess? That doesn’t even feel like the right word. It was companionable. We wanted all the same things. I really, really valued that. There was something calling about him. There was something... comforting. And now I’m starting to think that was a shelter, and I shouldn’t have been hiding in it. Because he wanted something else.” She stood there, feeling wounded. Baffled. “He was out fighting a war. You would think that he would want something stable waiting at home. You would think that sex under gunfire wouldn’t take precedence.”
Justice let out a long breath and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I hate to break it to you. But I think sex under gunfire makes a lot of sense. Trauma bond and all of that. Intensity.”
He looked at her then. Really looked at her. Hisblue eyes felt hot, burning into her, and she didn’t care for that. Because it was a little bit too much. She also didn’t want to peel back the layer to get beneath the top of what he had just said. It was all a little too close to the bone.
Trauma bond.
Yeah, that felt...
Well, like something the two of them might share.
“But you don’t even spend the night with people,” she said.
“BecauseIdon’t want intensity,” he said. “I want to have fun. I don’t want to be navigating weird morning-afters, and I don’t want to know anything beyond the girl’s name, okay?”
She rolled her eyes. “There has to be a middle ground.”
“I am not a man of middle grounds, Rue, so I can’t help you there. I do assume you need a little bit of help with the bank today.”
