“I hate you,” I say.
“You love me. Tragically and completely. I am essential to your emotional survival and we both know it.”
“You are essential to my migraines,” I tell her.
“Same department, different floor.”
The apartment smells like coffee, toast, and Cassie’s vanilla body spray.
A half-eaten piece of toast sits abandoned on the coffee table beside her mug because Cassie starts things and gets distracted by whatever internal drama has been running through her head.
She follows me and stands in the middle of the living room, arms folded, eyes entirely too sharp for this hour.
“I am trying to be respectful,” she says.
I turn and stare at her.
She lasts three seconds.
“Fine. Respectful is boring and fundamentally not my brand.” She points at my neck with one finger. “Did he bite you or try to repossess you? Because that mark has the energy of a man filing a claim.”
I press my hand over it. “Stop looking at it.”
“I can’t. It’s looking back.”
“Can you just, for one minute, not be you?”
“Absolutely not. You would miss me immediately and we both know it.”
I groan and sink onto the couch.
The moment I do, my body delivers a comprehensive, entirely unhelpful reminder of exactly what I did last night and this morning. My thighs ache. There is a deep, low soreness that makes my stomach flip and my face heat, accompanied by the undeniable evidence of a man who took his time and was fully aware of what he was doing.
Cassie notices the way I shift. Her eyebrows rise. “Oh.”
I point at her. “Don’t make that noise again.”
“That one was legally binding.”
“Cassie.”
“Tell me what the sex was like.” She drops onto the couch beside me, close enough that personal space has never survived contact with Cassie, and today is no exception. “You had sex. With The Man. The myth. The walking bad decision with prison shoulders and a face that should come with a formal warning.”
I stare at the ceiling. “I should have waited until you were out before I came home.”
“Absolutely not. I have been awake since six, cultivating questions, and I deserve answers.” She pulls her knee up onto the cushion and turns to face me fully, which means this is now an official conversation, whether I like it or not. “You came home walking like that and you expect me to just make tea and mind my business?”
“I am not walking like anything.”
“Oh, honey, you sat on a soft couch like you’ve been in the gym, working muscles all this time.”
My face burns. “It was just sex.”
Cassie stares at me for a long moment.
“Firstly,” she says, “nothing with Zane Rivera has ever been just anything and you know it. Secondly, that hickey is filing for permanent residency on your neck. And thirdly.” She pausesfor effect. “How big is his cock now, because prison clearly did something to the rest of him, and I am asking for science.”
“Cassie.”
