When I managed to glance at him mid-kiss, Cross didn't look away disgusted, didn't tense up, didn't react at all. He justcontinued existing against the wall with his drink, and after a moment he turned and said something to the training staff guy again, like he'd had a thought, like I hadn't even registered, and that—
That fucking pissed me off.
Not because I cared. I didn't care. I was twenty-three and I was at a bar and this was a Tuesday and I absolutely did not care what Nathan Cross thought about any of it.
Somewhere around midnight I had agreed to a body shot off a stranger's collarbone, which I was recording a zero percent chance of regretting in the morning. Then the guy with the good shoulders said something in my ear. Something about a table.
Sure.
With the music turned up and half the team doing something on the dance floor that wasn't technically allowed in public, I climbed up on a table.
It just seemed like the right move. The moment called for it. The whole room turned toward me the way rooms did, the way they always did, and I gave them what they came for, arms out, grinning, saying something that got a roar out of the crowd, feeling the noise in my chest like a second heartbeat.
My head swam.
Just for a second. Just a small tide-going-out feeling, the lights a little too bright, the music a little too loud, and I shifted my weight and caught myself and it wasfine,it was absolutely—
"Get down."
Cross. He was right there, at the side of the table, which meant he'd been moving toward me before the table situation, before I'd climbed up.
No one else had noticed him appear. The party kept going around us.
"The table can hold me," I shouted over the music.
He said something I couldn't hear.
"What?"
"I said I'm not concerned about the table."
I looked down at him from up there, which was a new angle on Cross. Cross from above, Cross with the bar noise and the lights and the whole room going insane around him, still completely still, still looking at me like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at. Something hot and sharp moved through my chest that I converted immediately into something simpler.
"Right," I yelled back. "You're not concerned about the table." I spread my arms wider, gave the room more, felt the noise spike in response. "You're only concerned about the team's asset."
Something moved across his face.
Something that arrived fast and left faster.
I was too far up and too loud and the lights were too bright for me to read it correctly, and then it was gone and he was just Cross again, standing at the foot of my table looking up at me.
"Get down, Wesley," he said.
Not loud. But I knew what he said.
I got down.
Cross stepped back to give me room and then didn't move, which meant I was stuck in the small pocket of space between him and the table and the noise, closer than I wanted to be. The bar smelled like alcohol and sweat and, under that, faint and completely unwelcome, clean soap.
Cross didn't move back. That was the thing. He'd stepped forward to give me room to climb down and then he just stayed, which meant we were close in a way the situation didn't strictly require. We were close enough that I could see the blue of his eyes in the low bar light, close enough that I was aware of my own heartbeat in a way that had nothing to do with the music.
He was looking at me.
I was drunk enough that my system for handling Cross's full attention had gone slightly offline. The noise and the heat of the bar made everything feel closer than it was, or exactly as close as it was, and I couldn't tell anymore which one it was, and I was finding it difficult to care about the distinction.
"You're compensating," he said. Low. Just for me.
I could feel it when he spoke. That close.
