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The silence that followed made him search for her expression in the feeble light. Her eyes wide, her mouth open, she looked stunned.
But Christian was tired of all the tangled threads in his head. Tired of pretending, even with himself.
The past was a gift. Even if he forgot it again, it had brought him here, to this moment. It had given him Priya and Jayden and that meant he would never lose it completely again.
Ever. Not as long as he had them.
“And then when I asked you to sit down and help me figure out the hole, you said—without quite looking at me, in that prim voice—that it was six thirty already. And then you turned to Jai so sweetly and asked if he would please take you home before your mom started freaking out.”
“You know she would have done that,” Priya burst out, half outraged, half laughing.
He dipped his head, grinning. “I know that now, yes. But back then... In that moment, I thought you were the most brilliant and yet the most naive girl I’d ever met. You didn’t add up.”
“So you kept poking at me and that whole year you tormented me...” she joined in, shaking her head. “‘Pree, do you want to get your mama’s permission to go to the club with us? Pree, do you need a pity date for the prom? Pree, do you want a juice box? Pree, shall I be your babysitter this evening? Pree, you’re such a chicken, a scaredy-cat, a Goody Two-shoes, a doll in a glass case...’ Oh, my God, you used to drive me so...mad.”
Christian groaned and rubbed a hand over his face. Even as his mouth curved up. “I was such a jerk. No wonder you hated me.”
“I never truly hated you. I thought I did, yes, for a long time.” She smiled now and shifted toward the edge of the bed, that girl he’d once known shimmering in that smile. Memories inked across her features, illuminating that gorgeous face. “But can you blame me? You were an insufferable, arrogant, privileged, puffed-up brat, so full of your invincibility that you made me want to draw blood sometimes. Especially those hours-long coding sessions you forced on the three of us...”
Christian barked out a laugh. “Hey, brilliant ideas were born during those sessions.”
“At what cost? I wanted to punch you in your face so many times, mess up all that perfection just a little.” She covered her face, laughing, shaking. Tears shone in her brown eyes and she wiped a hand roughly over her eyes. “I didn’t even know I had such a violent streak until I met you. God, if we didn’t both love Jai so much, if he hadn’t made us behave, and tolerate each other and work with each other... And you?”
Christian stilled. “What about me?”
“What would you have done if Jai hadn’t been there to call you off? I have a feeling you’d have ripped into me.”
He shook his head, wondering if she could hear the thundering roar of his heart. The words hovered on his lips, screaming to be let out. But whether she was ready to hear them or not, Christian suddenly knew that he wasn’t. That he might never be ready to tell her.
Not now. Not when he still couldn’t trust his own mind. Not when that guilt and grief remained as painful threads that vined around his chest.
It was his last layer of armor against her. His final thread of self-preservation.
“I used to find immense pleasure in getting a rise out of you, yes,” he said hoarsely. It was all he could have of her back then—that anger, that dislike of him, that near-violent reaction to his poking—and he’d been okay with that. Her honesty, her outrage, the simmering temper beneath the shy facade—they had belonged to him. Only him. “In pushing you as far as I could. No one called me an arrogant jackass until you. At least not to my face.”
“Nothing compared to my own naiveté... It took me some time to appreciate what you did for me,” she said, pulling the ground from under him. She rubbed a hand over her face, her mouth bitter. “Too long, if you ask me.”
Christian swallowed. “What I did for you?”
Her fingers twisted the duvet, her gaze flickering down to hide from him. “You made it so easy to dislike you, you provoked me so much that I didn’t even realize until a long time later. Not until I lost you.”
“What, Pree?” he demanded roughly, desperate for any little nugget.
“You treated me like you treated everyone else, Christian. You pushed me and annoyed me and you...bugged the hell out of me but beneath it all... You didn’t treat me as less than anything I was.”
The vulnerability in her tone made him angry on her behalf. Even as he still felt confused about where she was going with this. “Why the hell would I? You had a razor-sharp mind and a tongue that matched it if you were provoked enough, beneath all that shyness you wrapped around yourself.”
“It was so unnerving in the beginning—not to be coddled and treated like I’d break at any slight pressure. I didn’t know how to act toward you, so I pretended to dislike you to an extreme that wasn’t possible. It was easy to convince myself of that because you hated me anyway.”
“No, I didn’t,” he said, jerking his head up.
“Oh, just own it, Christian. You really didn’t like that I was becoming a part of your life. I was there at work, and in your personal life, disrupting your relationship with Jai. An annoying third wheel... You were so possessive of him, I started showing up just to annoy you. Jai wouldn’t agree with me, but I knew. And then when he and I got engaged, you made it clear I wasn’t good enough for him. Let’s count all the ways you made that crystal clear, shall we?”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s okay to admit you were wrong about me,” she said with a teasing laugh. “I wasn’t this glorious back then,” she said, gesturing to herself.
He grinned, even though he knew how wrong she was. How truly naive she had been about what he’d found attractive. “I asked you to come work for us.”
