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Either way, I was so engrossed in watching the water and the sky, and listening to the crickets and the birds, that I didn’t notice Adrien approaching until he was about a foot away.
He sat down beside me and dusted off his hands, trying to rid them of the wet grass. It was going to be all over our damp butts when we got up.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a while. “And I’ll talk to Alba too. I… really, Sanchez, I didn’t know. We only ever talked about work stuff.”
I peeled my attention away from the soft warmth of the sunrise and met his gaze. His eyes really were an unbelievable shade of wild green, and their surrounding lashes were so thick, I wondered how he could blink without getting them all tangled up.
“You’re staring again,” he said quietly, a smug smile tilting the side of his mediocre mouth.
Okay, you know what? “You keep saying that like you’re not staring right back.”
The little smirk expanded into a full-blown dimplefest, and it made my blood pressure spike so hard I had to look away.
“And now you’re blushing,” he teased.
“I’m not blushing. I’m turning red because looking at your face infuriates me.”
He was sitting on my right side and couldn’t see my left nostril. Not that I was lying.
He let out a dark chuckle. “Is that what it is?”
“Yes.”
“Which part angers you, exactly? Is it my mediocre mouth or my lopsided dimples?”
“Both. And your eyes are weird.”
He snorted.
I looked down at the damp grass my fingers were mindlessly playing with. “I’m sorry too,” I said quietly. “About Halloween. And about the glitter. I didn’t… mean for it all to blow up the way it did… with the investors and the media. It was a lot.”
I could feel him watching me as I struggled through the insufficient apology. And I thought he was going to push for more, but instead he nudged my knee with his knuckles.
“I think we should call a temporary truce,” he said. “Just for the duration of this trip.”
I eyed him suspiciously. “What does that mean?”
“Do you not know what a truce is, Sanchez?”
“Bye.” I started to get up.
Adrien chuckled as he grabbed my arm and pulled me back down. His sizable hand circled my upper arm with ease, which made me think of another unexpectedly large part of his anatomy. I could feel myself tinting pink all over again. With anger, obviously.
“I’m being serious. What if we started over? We don’t have to be friends or anything, but I’d like for us to at least be civil.”
I thought about it. “And I’d have to be nice to you? Like all the time? Not just in front of your family?”
A flash of a dimple. “That would be ideal, but I won’t hold you to it. I’m just asking for us to… take the aggression and animosity down a few notches. Mostly because I’m ninety percent sure that if we keep going down this path, you’re going to kill me in my sleep on night three.”
I sighed. “And then I’ll have to go to court and stand trial. It’ll be a whole thing. Lawyers are expensive as hell too.”
“The life sentence will also be a bummer,” Adrien agreed. “I bet they don’t have any cinnaman-bunor horny blue alien books in there. I bet it’s all highbrow literary fiction.”
He knew full well it was cinnamon rolls and blue alienswithhorns, and I refused to acknowledge the wordplay.
“A nightmare,” I said.
“They’ll probably make you read it as punishment. And then you’ll have to write five thousand words on all the motifs and shit you found.”
