AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Seeing her, his body loses all tension for a second before catching up with what sent him running from the hotel in the first place.
‘Jules! Wait.’
She pauses with her door open, then turns slowly and watches him walk over.
Every step towards her wraps a band of tightness around his chest. She’s not smiling at him. Hasn’t even said a word.
Fuck. His gut lurches. He did that. He made things awkward between them. Two days of sex they’ve survived fine, but one moment of emotional vulnerability and he flees, screwing it up. By his own rules—their own rules—he’s got two days left of the fling and then things have to go back to normal. He wants those final two days.
She shifts on her feet and glances inside her room.
Shit. Now he’s got to say something. He doesn’t even have the marshmallows as an apology token, since seeing Braden threw him for a loop and he forgot he’d planned to buy them.
‘Hi.’ It’s a clunky opener.
‘Hey.’ Jules tucks her hair behind her ears and looks into her room again.
She wants him to leave.
Well he doesn’t want to leave. Not like this, with awkwardness in the air and not having seen her smile since his bed earlier.
‘Do you want to grab dinner together?’
Jules’s eyes widen at the tactless question, surprise clear before her emotions hide away. It’s like a light dimming.
His gut sinks. He should want her to say no. He’s got his presentation tomorrow and this was meant to be his night off to rehearse, but the weight around his chest won’t go away until he gets them back to where they were before he ran.
He waits, feeling like he’s standing in front of a storm about to eat him whole. ‘Please? I want to apologise for earlier.’
‘You don’t need to.’
‘Explain, then,’ he offers recklessly. He doesn’t want to explain. He doesn’t want Jules to know how screwed up his thinking was. He only wants to get rid of the weird tension between them, clear the air.
Unfortunately, that gets her attention. She stills and her head tilts to one side.
‘Okay,’ she says after a beat. ‘Dinner would be great.’
***
Cameron takes them to a Thai restaurant below street level a few blocks away from their hotel. The hostess greets them and leads them to a small, round table along a side wall, with a softly glowing light cube in the centre of the table.
Jules takes her seat and looks out over the restaurant. The warm glow of the light emphasises the length of her neck and swoop of her cheekbones, and turns her brown hair golden.
His throat goes dry while his palms get clammy. It feels like a date.
He waits for the slamming door of denial but it doesn’t come. He’s got bigger things to worry about, like how to explain to Jules why he acted how he did without telling her the full story.
They had a stilted conversation on the way over and now there’s silence between them. He doesn’t know what the absence of her nervous babble means but it can’t be good. At least he can read her expression again, thank god, though he hates the wariness in her tight eyes and the way she’s avoiding looking at him. Her spine’s stiff, too, and her hands are folded tightly together on the table.
‘Jules?’
She turns to him, blue eyes cloudy in the dark room.
‘I’m sorry for walking out earlier. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
‘You didn’t.’
Her gaze skitters off his face and he frowns. ‘I thought we agreed to be honest with each other.’
