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“The sun is so bright here,” she says.
“Definitely more intense than back home,” I reply, playing my part as I continue to wrestle with whether or not to mention her strange behavior.
“So, you and Jesse are mates, huh?” she asks, throwing me off-balance once again with the abrupt change of topic.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I say, choosing to be purposefully vague.
“That’s so cool.”
That’s it? She isn’t going to ply me with dozens of questions over what it means to have a mate-bond? I know Jasmine gave her a brief explanation of the term’s meaning, but Steph should be drilling me for more info. She should be, but she isn’t.
Why isn’t she?
I swallow thickly, and instead of dwelling on her apparent disinterest in learning more about vampire mates, I switch topics to one of the other issues that’s been bothering me.
“You mentioned my red bikini earlier…” I say, letting the words trail off.
I see her shrug in my peripheral vision. “You look hot in it. I don’t know why you decided against it.”
I push myself up, propping my weight on my hands behind me as I stare down at her.
“I didn’t decide against it, Steph. I didn’t wear it because it doesn’t exist anymore. We burned it in your Aunt Bernadette’s fire pit. Don’t you remember?”
I know she remembers. She loves to tease me about the infamous nip-slip incident, and brings it up regularly. And we always laugh about getting shitfaced on cheap wine and burning the damned suit to ashes.
“Oh, shit,” she says with a laugh. “I totally forgot about that.”
Her words would be believable if I hadn’t been studying her reaction. I didn’t miss the slight stiffening of her muscles or the almost imperceptible pause before she relaxed and laughed it off.
I don’t know what’s going on with her, but I no longer have any doubt––something definitely is going on with her.
“We talk about it all the time, Steph,” I say, deciding to bite the bullet and call her out.
She waves a hand in the air nonchalantly. “I know. I guess with all the excitement of being here with you and hitting the beach scrambled my memory.”
“So much that you remembered me owning a red bikini, but forgot the horrible nip-slip incident and its subsequent destruction?”
She turns her face toward me, her mouth curling down into a frown. “Why are you making such a big deal out of this?”
“Because you’ve been acting weird since you got here!” I say, my voice rising with a mix of anger and panic.
“I’ve been acting weird?” she snaps. “What about you? Keeping secrets and trying to hold me captive in that room? It’s like you don’t even want me here.”
“You know that’s not true,” I say, my voice lowering with desperation.
I do want her here. But I want the real Steph, not this weird version of her that feels like a stranger.
“Don’t think I didn’t see the venom in your eyes when you saw me with Jesse this morning,” she adds. “Jealous, much? Jesus, I was just talking to him.”
“You weren’t just talking, Steph, and you know it,” I say darkly, all the ire I felt this morning welling back up inside me.
“What did you think I was doing?” she asks, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Enticing him? Don’t blame me because you’re feeling insecure. It’s not my fault you shot way out of your league with this one.”
I rear back, pain slamming through me as if she’d physically struck me. I can’t see her eyes behind the dark shades, but I know if I could, there’d be no trace of the Steph I know in their hazel depths.
Because the Steph I know would never say something so hurtful. Not to me.
“Listen, I think we both need a minute to cool down. I’m going for a swim.”
