Page 29 of Always Been His

“I know,” I grumble.

Iris rolls her eyes again, lacing her fingers with Dom. “Come on Dom-Dom, let’s get you away from the party-pooping stalker.”

“Yeah, both of you keep your hands where I can see them and enough space for Jesus,” I call out.

She sticks out her tongue as she leads Dom away.

I watch her drag him into the crowd in front of the stage, and the second the back of her head disappears between two of Dom’s Brown buddies, the part of me that has been holding it together for the last two hours collapses inward.

I’ve been thinking about, avoiding, and obsessing over Sienna for over three weeks, and even though I told her to stay away from me, I cannot stay away from her. Every morning I am up at 5:58, because she comes downstairs at six, and if I’m leaning against the counter when she gets there it gives me ninety seconds of being in the same room as her before she remembers we’re supposed to be avoiding each other. Every morning I’m in running clothes I don’t always need, because the run gives me an excuse to be out of the house when she leaves the kitchen, so the whole thing doesn’t look like what it is. Every morning, I spend thirty minutes before Iris wakes up just sitting in peaceful silence with Sienna. It’s the only time I can act like we’re still secretly texting, fighting, and fucking, like we did for two years after that night on the beach.

I can act like she never hurt me and I never hurt her. A part of me even believed that by now we’d be together, out in the open, living in some beach house in Malibu like she always dreamed. The commute to Maine twice a week would be a bitch, but that’s what private jets are for.

I look down at my watch. Twenty to midnight.

Tonight was supposed to be the first time since she came back that we would have an excuse to get close to each other, and she isn’t going to arrive until the party is almost over.

“Well.” A voice drifts over my shoulder. “I never thought I’d find you pouting at a party.”

Annie.

She slid up next to me at the railing without my noticing, which is a massive feat given that I’ve been jumpy as a deer all night. She knows I’ve been ducking her calls for a month, and she knows why, even if she is pretending not to, and the muscle under my ear is starting to tick. She hasn’t done anything wrong tonight. She hasn’t been mean to anybody. She hasn’t been clingy in front of strangers. She has been her standard amount of attractive, her standard amount of attached, and the worst part of this whole thing is that the standard amount hasn’t changed while my tolerance for it has hit zero. I don’t have an appetite for any girl anymore, and if Annie is pissed at me for that then she should probably convince Sienna to go back to California.

“I’m keeping watch on my sister and Dom,” I say, nodding toward the crowd.

“Look at you, being a big strong security guy,” she purrs, close enough to my ear that her breath catches the hair at my temple.

Her palm spreads flat across my thigh, the same way she has put her hand on me a hundred times in two years. Her fingertips play with the waistband of my jeans.

“Someone needs to stay sober enough,” I huff, peeling her hand off me and setting it down on the railing.

“So, you can’t have a little fun with me?” She leans closer, the dark green satin of her dress brushing my forearm.

“You called me eleven times this week, Annie.” I drain the last of my drink.

She sighs. “You never returned my calls, and I know men are visual creatures. I thought you might want to see what you’ve been missing.”

Her hand slides down the front of her own body, slow, deliberate, dragging the satin tighter against her ribs and her waist and the curve of her hip on the way down. The dress is low-cut with a slit running up the side of her thigh. Her dark hair is curled, half-pinned. Her lipstick is the same red she has been wearing the entire time I’ve known her. She drags her palm along the dip of her waist and lets it rest under the curve of her chest, her chin tipping at me, her mouth a small slow smirk.

I am not drunk enough for this.

I should be five drinks deeper than I am to deal with Annie Wheeler doing the slow tour of her own body at the railing of a rented bar in front of forty people I’ve known since I was a kid. Instead, I’m two whiskeys and a tequila in, and the only girl I’ve wanted to look at in the last three weeks isn’t here.

“I’ve seen it before.” I shrug. “I know what I’m missing.”

“Don’t be a dick, Gray.” She pushes my chest with both hands.

The side gate clicks.

I don’t turn my head. I refuse. I’ve been disciplining myself for the last sixty seconds and I am not going to break my own rule in front of Annie. I keep my eyes on Annie’s twisted face.

“I’m not being a dick. I’m being honest.” Well, maybe I am being a dick, but I can’t focus on anything else tonight. “But you know my rule about touching.”

I’ve had this rule since I was a kid. Esme used to say I came out of the womb with my arms crossed. I do not like being touched by people I haven’t decided are allowed to touch me, and even then, I don’t like it casually, in public, in passing, in front of strangers. A low-frequency hum starts up the back of my neck whenever somebody I’m not close to puts a hand on me without warning, and the hum has been going on since she returned, rings louder. Ever since the morning the only woman who has ever been allowed to put a hand on me without asking walked into my house wearing pigtails and a crop top.

Annie has been on the okay list for two years, but she has dropped off the okay list. She does not know it yet, but she’s about to.

She doesn’t say anything for a second. Her fingers run up my arm again anyway, sweeping under the cuff of my shirt the way they used to before we left her apartment in the mornings. I move my arm. She moves her hand to my chest. I take her wrist and lift it off and set it down at her side. She lets out a small laugh that has nothing happy in it.