By lunch, his moodfrom the day before had returned with a vengeance. He skipped lunch and headed back to the cabin, where he stretched out and read twenty pages he didn’t really see in a book he’d lostinterestin.
When the door creaked open, he didn’tlookup.
“I brought you a sandwich,” Priya said quietly. “I bribed the kitchen and they found you some roast turkey breast. And there are twobrownies.”
“You didn’t need to do that,” he muttered, putting the book down. “Thankyou.”
She sat on the other side of the bed and fluffed her red sundress after she handed over the brown paper bag. “Do you want metogo?”
“No.” He didn’t know what he wanted. It was probably time to admit that, although the idea made him feel vaguely ill. He dug into the sandwich instead, and afterhe ate it, they split thebrownies.
“Have you ever wanted something—or someone—that didn’t fit inyourlife?”
He thought it had been a decent opener, but from the alarmed look she shot him, he knew it was the oppositeofthat.
She worked her jaw from side to side. “Uh…yeah.You.”
He deserved that. He nodded. “That was how I felt last year. When we met, it was like ajolt out of the blue. I didn’t know what to do with how much Iwantedyou.”
“Sorry for the inconvenience,” she muttered, and he swallowed his protest. This wasn’t easy to say. He didn’t know why he’d thought itwouldbe.
“How much I wanted you grew after we said goodbye,” he admitted. “I watched you on TV every chance I got. Which wasn’t that often, because as you guessed yesterday,it was a shitty tour. Some of them are. This one was the worst I’d been on, and then two SEALs on the next team coming in were injured, and I was asked to stay longer. An extra four months, in the end. And the only way I could survive that and do my job was to shuteverythingout.”
“I didn’t have any claim to you.” She said it carefully, because they both knew he’d hurt her. She’d wantedone. Hell, he’d wanted her tostakeone.
He still did. But wanting something didn’t just magically make the barriers in the waydisappear.
“Maybe you were right when you said thiswouldn’twork.”
“I said that before we slept togetheragain.”
“I know. And I don’t regret that.Butnow…”
“But now that it’s the end of the week, and real life is on the other sideof our lastearly bedtime, you don’t think you can handle the thing that you came here to convince metotry?”
When she put it like that, he didn’t come off too well. “I’ll always want to be yourfriend.”
Her eyes glittered as she shoved off the bed. “I don’t want tobe your friend. Maybe I don’t like you very muchrightnow.”
“Irealizethat.”
She searched his face,her mouth twisting into a disappointed frown. Then she nodded. “Right. You realize that. Ha. Okay, well, I’m going to go find somewhere else to sleep tonight, becauseyou moved into my fucking cabin. You’re unbelievable, Grady. Really something fucking else. Have a nicefuckinglife.”
