Page 60 of Crave

He said it as if he’d done me a great favour. A meaningful one. Then he inhaled and drifted around my room, eyes scanning over everything. My books, the neat little rows of order I tried to pass off as stability, the framed photos pretending my life wasn’t coming apart at the seams. He touched the mantelpiece. The edge of my desk. Light, casual brushes feeling far too curious. And far too intimate for a man who was supposedly here to collect nothing but intel or cash.

“I could mistake that gesture.” I tossed my phone back onto the desk, aiming for cool and landing closer to brittle.

“Hmm?” Razor leant closer to my graduation photo, the one where Ollie had his arm slung around me as though he’d loved me.

He hadn’t.

He’d loved the suit I’d bought him.

I turned in my chair, hooking an arm over the backrest. “You deleting Grindr… that could suggest you don’t want me under another man.”

Razor laughed. Low. Genuine. Dangerous. “Or maybe I don’t want you getting over your ex.” The humour drained from his face in a heartbeat. “Considering the fucker owes me.” He stared me down with velvet-brown eyes I wanted to die in. “And you’re the one stuck right in the middle of getting me what I want.”

Always in the middle…

But whatever playful current I’d been clinging to snapped clean.

Note to self: Razor wasn’t out. Not even close. And whatever it was between us wasn’t flirting. Not safely, anyway. One wrong word and that glint in his eye turned from heat to something far sharper. And would probably lead to another punch to my face.

So I did the sensible thing.

I shut up.

He meandered over to me, sat his bulk on the edge of my bed and leant back on his hands. “What’s all that?” He jerked his chin at my laptop, the books spread out around it.

“My dissertation.” I said it with all the misery it deserved. Painful and heavy.

“What the fuck is a dissertation?”

A laugh escaped before I could stop it. I thought he was joking. In my world, not knowing that word was unthinkable. Education, academia, it’s bred into us like entitlement. But the look on his face wasn’t mockery. It was genuine curiosity.

“It’s a really long essay. Research. For my Master’s.” I cocked my head. “I take it you didn’t go to university?”

He barked a laugh. “What do you think?”

“Well, you run a profitable enterprise, do you not? Business studies graduate, perhaps?”

“Would that have taught me how to prevent cashflow disappearing off my line?”

“Possibly.”

He snorted. “What’s your subject, then?”

“Criminal Justice and Law.”

Razor widened his eyes. “You’re a law student.”

“Master’s.”

“You’re a master of law?”

“I will be. When I finish this. Criminal law.”

“Huh.”

There was an irony even he could’ve put into words. For all his lack of formal education and the privilege I’d been drowning in since birth, he’d clocked it instantly: me, studying a justice system built to grind men like him into dust, and him, sitting on my bed, the living, breathing embodiment of every “case study” I’d ever dissected. We were a paradox in motion, both of us too aware of the lines we were crossing.

“And what’s your dissertation dissecting?” he asked. “How to get away with thieving off thieves?”