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Now it was my turn to laugh. “Do I find you sexy? Yes. I have eyes, but they don’t have stars in them. We could have meaningless sex right now. Is that what you want to do?”
He shook his head, slowly. “No. I absolutely do not.” Zeke got out of bed. “Come on. Let’s go run.”
I’d just offered him sex, and he’d turned me down. I opened and closed my mouth. Embarrassment flooded me, and I wondered if I could go and hide under his covers, never coming out again. Why had I done that? I put my head in my hands, and I counted to ten. Maybe I could stop dying of embarrassment after I reached that number. One. Two.
“Layla?” I lifted my head out of my hands to stare at him, forcing myself to meet his gaze because I wouldn’t add coward to idiot on the list of things I’d managed to be before breakfast that morning.
“Yes?” I put my hands in my lap, since I had to do something with them.
“Coming?” He tilted his head. Zeke had already managed to get his shorts on and was going into the closet to get his sneakers, or that was what I would assume.
I nodded. “Yes. On my way.”
I threw the blanket off myself and tried to ignore the fact that he smirked at me on my way out of the room. He was ridiculously handsome with that smirk on his face, and I hated that I thought that. Why did he have to be so confusing? Hadn’t that whole conversation he’d had with me upon waking been about his wanting to have sex with me? How could I possibly have misinterpreted that?
He wanted meaningless sex, and I’d offered it to him.
Men in general were confusing as hell, and Zeke was the worst of them. Seriously.
I was a terrible runner. When he’d suggested we run together, I somehow had assumed the man used a treadmill. Why had I thought that? I wasn’t sure, but I was definitely wrong. Joints aching from running on pavement wrong. I also had almost no stamina or ability to keep up with him, and yet I kept pushing.
Maybe if I had more practice running, my rush down the aisle away from Kit would have been more graceful, or I would have been able to do it whilst keeping my shoes on at the same time. Women did it in movies all the time. They ran in heels. I couldn’t seem to do it very well in my sneakers.
I’d always been able to maintain my weight by not eating very much, and the ability to do that had meant that I didn’t focus very much on getting into shape. Maybe that was why Zeke didn’t want to sleep with me. Maybe he didn’t like how my body looked.
I gritted my teeth. That wasn’t helpful. The trouble with running outside was that however far I went I had to get back. And Zeke wasn’t showing any signs of stopping. I could see theback of his head as he ran a distance ahead of me. I hadn’t exactly expected him to slow down to wait, but I would have liked the ability to throw my hands in the air and say no more, with him actually being able to hear me do so.
Ants crawled on my neck, and I quit walking. They weren’t really ants. I pretty much had to remind myself of that every time it happened. It just meant someone was staring at me intently. I turned around, half-expecting to see people with phones but there was no one there. Just the occasional car driving down the street, and no one seemed all that interested in me.
I had to catch my breath, which meant I was turning around and slowly making my way back to Zeke’s house. I was pretty sure I knew the way, and I had my phone in my pocket if I did get lost.
I loved it when fashion designers put pockets in things. As human beings, we really did need them most of the time.
Across the street was a painting on the wall of a gray building that seemed like it didn’t belong there. It caught my attention, and despite the fact that I was currently showering the ground with my sweat and sounded like I was about to drop dead from how fast I breathed, I crossed the street the first chance it was safe and went to look at it. A clown. That’s what it was. Someone had decorated the wall with the face of a sad clown. It was really cool. The eyes seemed to follow me.
A woman rounded the corner and stopped to look at it as I did. She had long black hair and she wore a purple jumpsuit. I’d never seen one before. The whole look made me smile. I loved when things were unique. There were so few times in life when I could really say I saw something new.
And I was only twenty-two. That seemed too young to be so sour.
She said something to me, and I steeled myself to respond. “I’m sorry. I don’t speak French.”
“Ah, yes, you don’t speak French. Are you American? Didn’t learn it?”
I rubbed the back of my neck. I could say unequivocally that for the first time in a while, this woman I’d run into on the street had no idea who I was. I was just a strange American to her who didn’t speak her language.
That was sort of…fun. “Right. They didn’t teach it in school. I’d like to know it.”
She pointed at the clown. “You like it?”
“I do. He caught my attention. I…I guess he seems very different than anything else I’ve seen in a while.”
She shrugged. “I find him repulsive.”
“Repulsive?” Now that was a strong word. “Why do you find him repulsive?”
“Clowns.”
I wanted to laugh, but I kept myself together. Some people did have a clown thing, and it was real. I wasn’t going to laugh at her. I was pretty sure that she could kick my butt if she wanted to. Even in the purple jumpsuit that looked like it was circa 1990, she was pretty badass.
