I look at him. He looks back, with those pale eyes and that infuriating stillness and the corner of his mouth doing the thing it does that is almost a smile and isn't quite. The honest answer is that I am not terrified, which is the part I find most alarming. I am annoyed, and I am very aware of the lack of distance between us.
Chapter Six
Victor
She doesn't retreat.
That's the first thing I notice — she's held her ground through this entire conversation, chin up, green eyes sharp, and she hasn't moved an inch. I'll give her that. Most people step back when I step forward. It's a reflex, biological, the body understanding something the brain hasn't processed yet. Alex understands exactly what I am, and she's still standing there with her hands at her sides and her jaw set like she's decided that moving is the thing she's not going to do.
So I move instead.
One step, two, slow and deliberate, and she tracks me the whole way and still hesitates to retreat, but when the choice is my body against hers or stepping back, she finally yields. Until her shoulders hit the brick wall behind her, and there's nowhere left to go, and she realizes it at the same moment I plant my hand flat against the wall beside her head. She looks up at me. Hereyes are very green and very angry, and underneath the anger, there is something else that she is working extremely hard to keep where I can't see it.
I can see it.
Her pulse is moving at the side of her throat. Fast. Faster than the cold weather and the conversation accounts for. I don't look at it for long because looking at it for long is a problem, but I note it the way I note everything — completely, without sentiment, and file it in the place I've been building for her since the storage room at Onyx when she stood in my jacket and told me she wouldn't sleep with me, and her face said something entirely different.
"Did you miss me?" I ask.
"Don't flatter yourself," she says.
"That's not a no."
"It's a no," she says. "It's absolutely a no."
It isn't a no. A no doesn't come with a pulse like that, visible and rapid and honest in the way that bodies are honest when the mind is busy performing something else. A no doesn't come with hands pressed flat against the brick behind her like she needs something to hold onto. I find I appreciate her stubbornness even when it's working against her, which it is, comprehensively, right now.
"You've been thinking about me," I say.
"I've been thinking about how to avoid you." Her voice is steady. She has an exceptional voice — harmonic, controlled, even, it almost never gives her away. Almost. "There's a difference."
"Not much of one," I say. "Either way I'm on your mind."
The flash of pure frustration across her face is something I feel in my chest, and I find it unreasonably satisfying.
"You need to leave me alone," she says. "I haven't said anything about what I saw. I'm not going to. You've been following me for six days and I haven't done a single thing that should concern you, so back up and leave me alone."
"I know you haven't said anything," I say.
"Then we're done here."
"We're not done." I lean in — not enough to close the distance between us, just enough to make her aware of how much of it exists and what I could do with it. The cold air between us thins further. "Because I can't know what you'll decide tomorrow. I can't know if something shifts — if someone offers you something that makes staying quiet feel less valuable than it does right now. I can't know if you're patient enough to wait for the right moment and the right leverage." I hold her gaze and let the words settle. "You understand my position."
"Yes," I agree. "It is."
I watch the color deepen along her cheekbones, and I let myself look at it — really look, because she's pressed against a wall in a narrow alley and there's nowhere for her to redirect my attention to. She is extraordinarily difficult to look away from. She has been from the first moment in the club when she looked directly at me and kept looking, and didn't perform fear the way frightened people usually perform it. "So let me be clear. I will be watching you. Everything you do, everyone you speak to, every decision you make — I will be there. You will not be able to look over your shoulder without finding me." I pause. "Consider it a standing arrangement."
"That's not—" She stops. Swallows. Starts again. "That's not a life. You can't just insert yourself into someone's life like that. That’s not how people work."
"I'm not doing it because it's convenient, trust me on that.”
"Then why?—"
"Because I find myself curious," I say simply. “People rarely intrigue me, Alex."
She stares at me like I've spoken in some exotic language she wasn't expecting me to speak. The pulse at her throat keeps its elevated pace. This close, I can feel her breathing, and they're nowhere near as steady as her voice.
She is close enough that I can see every small thing happening on her face — the frustration, the alarm, the thing underneath both of those that she has been managing since the storage room at Onyx when she told me she wouldn't sleep with me and blushed furiously while she said it. She's been managing it for six days. She's very good at managing things. It hasn't worked.
