Page 231 of Sorrow & Strangers

Max looks down at me and smiles. “You look brighter,” he says, his voice low, almost intimate.

“I do?” I shift toward him and accidentally move closer, falling into the dip of the couch.

“Your eyes,” Max says with a nod.

“My eyes?” I ask, tipping my head.

“They’re less dead.” He winces at the last word as it leaves his lips.

My lips twitch, but my stomach also twists a little. Are they less dead because I’m healing? Are they less dead because of the stranger? I have a feeling it is both and that they are intrinsically connected.

“You look different.”

“I feel the same.”

“Try that on someone who doesn’t know you as I do,” Max says, shaking his head.

I smile and tuck my hair back. “I’m just healing, Max.” Though that feels wrong when I say it.

Max leans into me a little, his arm shifting to rest a little weight against my shoulders, and then he relaxes, and we just sit there for a while in comfortable silence, watching the game. When I see Alice and Rafe glancing at us, I straighten a little, but the movement shifts me more into the couch, and more into Max.

I glance up at Max, and my gaze collides with his. The urge to kiss him is nearly overwhelming, to seek the safety of our friendship. Max clears his throat and looks back at the television. I blush, feeling embarrassed that I ever had that impulse, but desperation claws at me to prove to myself that I don’t belong to the stranger. With the stranger, the line is always so completely blurred, but not with Max. The line is clear with Max. My feelings for him are strictly friendship.

Once the game ends, Max stands up and stretches. “I should head back to the gym.”

I tell him goodnight and hurry upstairs to my room as Rafe sees him out, not wanting to deal with the interrogation from Alice and Rafe. I know it’s coming, but if I thought I would have a reprieve, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The stranger is in my room, pacing like a caged lion, and I watch him for a moment before slowly closing the door behind me. His gaze swings to me, and I can feel the anger radiating from him. I press my back against the door.

“What happened to being alone?”

I cross my arms over my chest. “Alone? I didn’t ask to be left alone?”

“You said nothing sexual,” he says, the muscles in his jaw feathering with how tightly he is clenching it.

“Yes.”

“Yet you’re cuddling up with that boy,” he growls, his body thrumming with anger.

“What?” I ask, blinking again. Were we cuddling? Not technically.

“Does your no sex boundary apply to everyone or just me?” he hisses.

“You know the answer to that,” I hiss back.

“Didn’t appear that way,” he snarls, moving closer.

“Did I fuck him?”

“You almost kissed him.”

Shit, he saw? I feel the heat of a blush warm my cheeks, and I struggle not to drop my gaze.

“Or am I misinterpreting?” he asks, narrowing his eyes at me. The spell plays over his shoulder, and I see Max and me in the kitchen leaning into each other.

I don’t look at him, watching it play over and over. “And if I had kissed him?” I ask. “You and I aren’t together.”

“So your request is only for me?”