“Uh huh.” He watched me as I took a bite of bacon. “And he likes you, obviously.” He gestured to me. “Because you’re you, and hot as hell. Any man in his right mind would want you.”
I wanted to ask if he wanted me, but that would be crossing another line we’d drawn years ago. “You’re sweet,” I said, tucking a stray curl behind my ear. “But yeah, he says he wants me.” I bit my lip, wondering how much I should tell him about my relationship with Auden. If we were going to get firmly back in friends territory after our recentepisode,it was probably best to lay it all out there. “He wanted to have sex with me last night—”
He started coughing and covered his mouth with his hand before reaching for his juice. “Sorry,” he said, holding his hand up. “Went down the wrong way. You were saying?”
I frowned at him. “That he wanted me to go back to his bus with him last night.”
He was glaring at his plate when he asked, “Did you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
That was the million dollar question. “I guess I just wasn’t feeling it.” I took a sip of coffee. “And that’s the problem. I should be feeling it. Auden’s great. We had amazing chemistry—”
“Yeah,” he said, between clenched teeth. “The best you ever had. You told me.”
Sometimes I forgot Knox wasn’t one of my girlfriends and guys were sometimes weird about that kind of oversharing. Not the guys in his band, of course. I was good friends with all of them, and could say anything to them about sex. But Knox was a different story. He always got a little weird when I talked to him about the guys I’d been with. Just like I shut him down whenever he talked to me about the girls he took home. Weird, I’d never really thought about that before.
“What are you thinking?”
Because I rarely censored my thoughts with him, I blurted, “Sex.”
He rolled his eyes. “For the love of God, can we get off sex?”
I smirked. “Why? You still wishing you hadn’t woken up alone?”
He pinned me with those light blue eyes. “You have no idea.”
Wow. Intense. “So yeah, back to Auden.” Because that seemed like the only safe place we had to go right now. “I like him. He likes me. We’re good together. So I can’t figure out my problem. Why am I holding back?”
“What the hell do I look like, Dr. Phil?” he snapped.
My jaw dropped. Knox wasn’t the moody or brooding type. He was fun, carefree. Always up for a good time. The guy I went to when I needed a laugh. Or a hug. He was someone who always gave me advice about relationships, so why was he shutting me down all of a sudden?
“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I don’t mean to be an asshole, but seriously Ce, I was thirty seconds away throwing you over my shoulder and draggin’ you into my bedroom not more than ten minutes ago.” He bit his lip as his gaze dropped to my breasts. “Tearing your clothes off and takin’ you places you’ve never been before. So forgive me if I’m havin’ a hard time thinkin’ of you with someone else right now.”
I was tempted to fan my face, that’s how hot I was. Take me places I’d never been before? I had no doubt he was a man of his word and it was taking everything in me not to rise to his unspoken challenge. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…” What? What had I done that was so terrible? I didn’t mean to piss him off. I guess I’d missed the memo that stated we weren’t allowed to talk about this shit anymore.
“You have nothing to apologize for.” He covered his eyes with his hand. “This is me. All me.”
“Knox, what the hell’s going on here?”
“Damned if I know.”
There was a long pause before I said, “Maybe I should go.”
His hand seized mine before I could move. “Don’t. Dammit, I don’t want you to go. I just…” He sighed. “I don’t wanna talk about him anymore. Can we talk about something else? Anything else?”
He seemed tortured, and I didn’t know what the hell I’d done to bring this on, but since I wanted to resume some sense of normalcy as much as he did, I said, “Wanna come with me to see my parent’s day after tomorrow?”
He chuckled, making me smile. “You think if I’m there they’ll be on their best behaviour?”
Knox knew my parents well enough to know their best behaviour was bat-shit crazy by most people’s standards, but I still loved them. And put up with them. In very, very small doses. “At least you can act as a buffer,” I said, nudging him with my foot under the table. This felt better, like we were back in familiar territory. “Come on, don’t make me go alone.” I was in full-on pout mode now and I knew Knox couldn’t say no to that.
Two things he couldn’t stand: seeing me pout or cry. And I only resorted to one or the other when absolutely necessary. When I was really desperate I resorted to both.
He groaned, but his lips were twitching when he said, “You know I can’t say no to you.”
