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“You’re in love with me,” I revealed.
Smacking him across the face with a dead rodent would’ve earned me a less severe reaction. His entire face twitched.
And. It. Was.Delicious.
“What.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t see it earlier,” I said, my voice laced with as much genuine-sounding sincerity as I could muster. “And clearly you’re not handling it very well, so… we can talk about it if you’d like.”
Adrien’s gaze was darting all over my face, no doubt trying to figure out whether I was just pulling his leg or if I was actually a crazy person. The skin under his eye feathered.
“I mean… there are better ways to handle your feelings than…” I held up my cuffed wrists. “First you send your entire security team to track me down, then you lock me in your office, then you find a way to force me to spend as much time with you as possible, and now this.”
His visible disgust was soup for my withered soul. I couldliveoff his hatred.
So I forged on ahead. “Like… this is thesecondtime you’ve had me locked in a room, and this time with real handcuffs. Combine that with the fact that you made me beg the other day, and this whole thing is starting to read like a generic mafia romance book. And, like, to each their own, but that’s not really my genre of choice. I like fuzzy blue aliens with big horns and bigger d—hearts. And Ireallylike cinnamon rolls. Both the food and the dudes, but especially the dudes that can bake the food from scratch.
“So, in conclusion, I’m gonna have to ask that you relax and take it down a notch. And if we want to stop by the bakery down the street after our run for some cinnamon buns, I wouldn’t complain. Unless they had raisins in them. Then I would complain a lot.”
Adrien did another one of his slow lizard blinks, trying to figure out what the fuck I was rambling about. In his defense, my expression had been kept smooth, serious, and appropriately concerned. I hadn’t broken character once.
“You could have just asked me out on a date,” I told him. “I mean, obviously I would have said no, but at least it would have saved us both a bunch of time. I never really understood the whole ‘boy likes girl so he pulls her pigtails to get her attention’ thing.” I crossed my legs, smiling back at him.
I thought I’d managed to stump him. Because for a solid ten seconds, he didn’t so much as blink. But then he said, “You know your left nostril flares when you bullshit?”
Um… since when?
“No, it doesn’t.”
“It does. And you tilt your head to the other side.”
“I don’t—”
He waved a hand and cut me off. “I don’t care. We’re running late, let’s go.”
The pun hadn’t been intended, and he ignored me when I pointed it out.
* * *
I was offered a string of embarrassed apologies by bearded Thing One and Thing Two as they fumbled to take my cuffs off.
But I wasn’t feeling all that forgiving this morning.
As promised, Adrien’s one-liter water bottle was handed over to me the second we stepped outside, and then we were off.
It was brutal.
I despised every painful, breathless second of the twenty-six-minute run.
But I did it.
My lungs were filled with fire, my muscles were burning and stiff and quivering, and I swear I could taste the metallic tang of blood in my mouth, but I fucking did it. I kept up with Adrien. (Mostly… save for a few meters by the end.)
I didn’t know which one of us was more surprised that I actually managed to do it. Me or him.
He kept casting sideways glances at me every time I pushed my legs enough to catch up to him after falling behind, and I thought I caught a quick glimpse of genuine disbelief when we finally reached the end of the route. But by that point I was mostly trying not to hurl or pass out, so I tossed his water bottle on the grass and collapsed beside it, fighting for oxygen.
He hadn’t reached for the stupid thing once. It was still full.
