Page 21
“You walked in without knocking,” he says, louder. “You didn’t even give me a chance—”
“You asked me to come over for dinner.” My voice stays where it is. His doesn’t. “At seven. It was seven o’clock.”
“That doesn’t mean you get to just walk in and—”
“You gave me a key.”
“I’m not talking about the key, I’m talking about—” He stops. Recalibrates. The reasonable expression makes another attempt. “I just need ten minutes. Come outside with me, let me explain, and if you still feel the same way then fine, but at least—”
“No.”
He moves closer again, and his hand finds my arm a second time, and this time the grip is different — not hovering, not a question. The fingers press into the muscle of my bicep with the pressure of someone who is past asking.
“Evan.” Flat. Quiet. The volume drop. “You’re hurting me.”
“I’m not—”
“You’re hurting my arm.”
He doesn’t let go.
There are people watching now. I can feel it the way you feel a shift in a room — the conversations going slightly quieter in our immediate radius, the attention tilting toward us without quite landing. Evan doesn’t register it or doesn’t care, and I’m not sure which is worse.
“Just listen to me,” he says, and his voice is up another notch, the sober-and-planning version giving way to something less controlled. “You walked in, you made your little scene, you left without letting me say anything, and now you’re here at a party acting like I don’t exist—”
“I didn’t make a scene.” I keep my eyes on his. “I walked in. I saw you. I left. That’s it.”
“You laughed at me.”
“Yes.” I don’t look away. “I did.”
Something crosses his face.
“You want to know what’s funny?” His grip tightens, and I feel it in my shoulder now, a pulling ache, and I am very carefully not reacting to it because reacting is what he’s waiting for. “Three years. I gave you three years—”
“Eight months.”
“—and you walk out like it’s nothing, like I’m nothing, and you can’t even give me ten minutes—”
“Let go of her arm.”
The voice comes from behind me and above me, low and flat and carrying in the way that voices carry when they don’t need to try.
Evan stops talking.
I turn my head.
The blond guy from the hallway is standing two feet away, and he is — I’m revising several things in real time here — considerably taller than I processed from across the kitchen. Six-three, at minimum. The kind of build that comes from years of professional-grade athletic training, all of it currently arranged into the configuration of a person who is not going to move.
He’s looking at Evan.
He is not looking at me.
His expression is the kind of neutral that isn’t actually neutral — it’s controlled, which is different, the way a held breath is different from not breathing.
“Mind your business, Sorensen,” Evan says. He doesn’t let go of my arm.
Sorensen?
