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“I checked your…” I give her lower region another nod.

I see her hand coming a mile away but do nothing to stop the hit. My head doesn’t so much as budge as the inside of her fist—and maybe a bit of her wrist—collides with my cheekbone.

“I really need to teach you how to punch.”

After she goes to spit out the contents in her mouth, she returns shaking her right hand.

Here we go again. Except this time, I don’t have anything frozen. And I’m not leaving this room right now.

Kota stalks me into the bathroom, crowding my back more and more menacingly with each step. If this were under any other circumstance, I’d laugh at how adorable she’s being.

“You checked my what, Khaos?”

“Your bottoms,” I tell her while running a washrag under the coldest water her faucet can manage.

The gasp she releases is the first appropriate reaction she’s given.

“You saw my—”

“I looked but I didn’t look, okay?”

“Those are the same word.”

“Different meanings.”

“Different tenses!”

“You’re telling me that if I had a snakebite right here…” With my dry hand, I pinch where my thigh and groin meet. “…and I asked you to look at it, you’d really be checking out my dick at the same time?”

“Of course not, but I didn’t ask you—”

“Because you couldn’t!” I snarl right back, all that rage from last night resurfacing. “You were too drunk to know what the fuck anyone was doing to you, including me. I’m telling you the truth when I don’t even have to. You had no idea I peeked in your bottoms. None. And not just because it was only for a split second. You were out.”

Finally, I spot a flicker of fear.

I soften my voice to add, “I saw what I needed to and nothing else. Believe me, of all the ways I’ve imagined seeing you naked, checking to see if you were raped was not one of them.”

Her voice is just as low when she says, “Well?”

“Well, what?”

I take the hand she hit me with and wrap the cold rag around it.

“Do you think I was?”

“No. But like I said, I didn’t get that good of a look, so you should probably check yourself.”

Eyes on our hands, she nods.

“What if I was on my period?”

I imagine that possibility—if I’d seen blood when I looked down there. Honestly, a period wouldn’t have even crossed my mind. If I saw red, I would’ve seen red.

Once again, the same word, meant two very different ways.

“Then I would’ve set the house on fire and locked the door behind us.”

She glances back up at me. “Why?”