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“Why?”
That only gets a shrug. “I have no idea.” He looks down. “I think I blame the cat.”
I’m still feeling like I’ve ate a bad nut. “You know I didn’t mean it. I was just angry and that.”
“But you were angry because I behaved—because I treated you—you were angry for a reason.” He’s focusing very intently on Gollum now. “And not a reason I liked.”
My guts have stepped up from wincing to squirming. “Okay, but I reckon you had reasons to be angry with me too.”
From the look he’s giving me, Jonathan’s genuinely not sure what I mean. Either that or he’s just pretending. And if he is, then maybe I should just let him pretend. Only I don’t want to, because what with the shower, and the firing, and the concussion, I don’t want kissing him to be one more thing that never happened. So I take a shot at the elephant. “You know, because of—what I did.” And then I realise I’ve done a fair bit I’ve done. “With my lips.”
“I wasn’t angry about that,” he admits, with something perilously close to a squirm. “I was…it was hard for me to know how to react.”
“I’m sorry.”
Jonathan turns towards me suddenly enough that he startles Gollum out of his ensofaed complacency and onto the floor. “You don’t have to be.”
“I do. I messed up.”
“You’re injured. And I’m in a position of authority. That makes maintaining boundaries my responsibility.”
He’s sort of right. But he’s also sort of very not. “I’m sure that’s what the HR department would say. Thing is, I think it’s more complicated than that. I really did know what I was doing. And I didn’t feel, like, coerced or anything. I just—I got swept up in yez.”
“Which I shouldn’t have allowed to happen.”
There he goes again. And it probably shows how much I’m losing my grip on the situation that I’m beginning to find it sweet instead of frustrating. “It’s not aboutallowing. You can’t control everything, Jonathan, and you certainly don’t control me.”
“No,” says Jonathan dryly. “Apparently I don’t.”
And for a while we sit there, silent like. It turns out that shooting the elephant in the room just leaves you with a dead elephant, and a dead elephant takes up as much space as a live one, and has a tendency to smell.
Finally, Jonathan comes out with, “In any case, it can’t happen again.”
“No,” I agree, “it can’t.”
But Jonathan Forest, true to form, isn’t taking yes for an answer. “I mean it. We have to be sensible. We can’t let ourselves get carried away.”
“I’m not planning to,” I protest. “I don’t go around kissing everybody I meet.”
“I wasn’t suggesting you did.”
“Seriously,” I protest again, increasingly aware that protesting is something you can do too much of. “I know you’re all tall dark and grumpy and everything. But I can keep my hands off you.” Though now I’m saying it, I will admit that there’s a tiny little voice in the back of my head sayingyeah, but what if you didn’t, though?
“Sam.” He runs his fingers through his lovely, ruffled hair. “This isdifficult.”
It’s not the reaction I’m expecting. I’m expecting him to just keep repeating the same thing to me about nine times like he’s trying to upsell me a protection and service plan. “What do you mean?” I ask.
“Don’t be obtuse,” he snarls, swinging back full Jonathan.
“I’m not being obtuse. You’re being evasive.”
“Well, what am I supposed to say? That living with you is—that you are—that I can’t.” He tries again. “That this is—” And promptly gives up.
I turn to stare at him, not quite incredulous but near enough you can see it on sign posts. “Jonathan, are trying to say that you’re into me?”
“How can I not be?” He flops forward with his elbows on his knees and his brow against his fingertips. “You’ve come into my life like a beam of very annoying sunshine. You talk so much that I miss it when you’re not. You try to fix things I didn’t even realise were broken. You have a dreadful sense of humour to which I’ve somehow become habituated. You care about people so effortlessly it makes me able to put up with them. And then you kissed me and now I…” He lets his head slip further down into his hands. “…I don’t know how I’m supposed to go the rest of my life without being kissed by you again.”
It’s so typical of Jonathan Forest that, even when he’s telling me he likes me, I feel a little bit like I’m being insulted. Or maybe my brain’s just gone there because I don’t know how to process this. Any of this. “Well, you don’t have to,” I say. “I’m right here.”
