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“No, I’m—I didn’t mean to—”
“You didn’t do anything I didn’t want you to. If I made you—”
“No, it’s my fault.” Piper blinked like she was surprised by her statement.
Leo opted to play it off. “If you want to take credit for this, I am totally fine with that.”
“Okay, we’re equally at fault.” Piper scoffed, and the color returned to her face as she pointed to the handle of the shower door. “Get out.”
Like someone had lit a fire under his ass, Leo sprinted from the bathroom in a way that would have made Usain Bolt proud, panting when he made it to the bed as he flopped, wet and facedown into the mess of sheets. He was in trouble. This couldn’t keep happening, and sex was only part of the problem. It shouldn’t feel so good to watch Piper succumb to her own fingers while thinking about him. He shouldn’t be watching her sleep like some weird-ass stalker. She was Piper! The girl who had so wrongly misinterpreted him from the moment they had met. Who was a fake. Emotionless. Who purposely smiled at everyone but him.
The same girl who had a breathtaking smile when it was real and looked like a dream when she came.
Twenty-Seven
PIPER
The tap tap of Leo’s finger against the steering wheel was setting Piper’s teeth on edge. Beyond the extremely uncomfortable reality of having to road-trip the rest of the way to Archwood with someone she both hated and had now hooked up with, Leo was blasting the Jaws soundtrack through her stereo. The chances she was in the car with a serial killer or someone equally horrendous, like a person who didn’t use their blinker to switch lanes, were low, but never zero. The song wasn’t the stereotypical insidious shark attack song that everyone knew, thank God, but it was still eerie.
“What’s next? ‘Baby Shark’?” Piper grumbled.
“Not a fan of extremely popular and universally liked movie scores?” Leo asked, his voice laced with condescension.
“You’re right, I should one hundred percent be constantly listening to the soundtrack my brother sings when sneaking up on me in a pool,” she deadpanned.
“I am happy to change it to Gladiator,” Leo offered. Piper knew he was joking, but she also didn’t feel like testing him given that he probably really did have the score to a battle scene queued up on his phone. How fitting. Gladiator might actually be the perfect soundtrack to their entire relationship.
“What about Titanic?” Finding a middle ground was one of her best skills when it came to mediating for other people—she’d even solved a few of Thea and Yuri’s spats that way over the last two years—but when it came to battles of her own, she typically found herself backing down. Unless it was Leo.
“I didn’t know you were such a Céline Dion fan. Or maybe you just want to be painted like a French girl.” He switched lanes, and Piper’s back went ramrod straight as she jabbed her finger in his direction in horror.
“Oh my God! Use your blinker!”
“There’s no one on the road,” he argued.
“Can you see the future? Do you have eyes on all four sides of your head? No. You do not. There could always be a car that you don’t see. And how hard is it, really?” Piper repeatedly flicked the air up and down with her hand to simulate how easy it would be to just turn a blinker on and off.
Leo chuckled. “Is that how you like to touch yourself?”
The car went dead silent except for the famous shark theme song that decided to make its debut through the car stereo at the exact inopportune time of Leo’s comment. He quickly tapped the pause button on the dashboard screen and cleared his throat, gripping and ungripping the steering wheel. Piper’s face heated, and she refused to look in his direction, choosing instead to look out the window at the excessive amount of trees that made up the Oregon landscape.
“I, uh, you—” Another clear of his throat, and Leo seemed no closer to relieving them of this painful conversation.
“Use your blinker,” Piper said under her breath.
“Yeah.” Leo bobbed his head with excess enthusiasm. “Absolutely. You’re right. Sorry.”
Instead of responding, Piper hit the play button to drown out the silence between them. As the Jaws theme played through her speakers once more, all it did was make everything more uncomfortable. She was held hostage by thoughts of Leo on his knees, looking up at her from the floor through dark eyelashes. Maybe she was the real shark in this car, but Leo was something worse—someone who made her lose control of her emotions. Every inch of her skin felt branded by his touch even then, just sitting beside him. That cliché phrase in romance novels where someone let out the breath they didn’t know they had been holding—that was her, except she had let out some inner vixen she wasn’t aware had been dormant for, well, forever. Whatever it was, it needed to go back where it had come from.
“What’s the play here?” Leo had reverted to his normal confidence, and she turned her head in his direction, furrowing her brow.
“What?”
He gave an exaggerated sigh. “Are we pretending we didn’t hook up, or are we going to be mature adults about this?” She should have known he wouldn’t just stay quiet.
“I don’t know,” was the only thing she could think to say. “You seem to have a plan.”
“My plan was to pretend it didn’t happen. Fuck being mature.” Leo chuckled lightly and caught her eyes for a second before turning back to the road. She could feel the corners of her mouth tipping up. Occasionally, he was funny. She’d give him that.
