Page 266 of Across His Line

And it goes right into me. Into the part that’s still on the ice, still hot. Because she’s right. I know she’s right. I wanted to get my hands on somebody all night. I wanted to get my hands on somebody since January, since Berwyn’s office, since every there’s interest and keep playing and nothing matters until June. And five came over the top of Kennebeck and I finally got to.

“You weren’t there,” I say.

It comes out sharp, flat, and hard, the old way, the way I used to talk in a hallway.

I hear it the second it’s out.

She stops typing. She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t go still, not the old still. She just looks at me for a second, with her eyebrows up irritated.

She closes the laptop and gets up and goes to her desk, and sits down with her back to me, and starts taping a mailer.

I sit there on the edge of her bed.

The tape gun goes. Shhhk. She folds a flap. Shhhk.

She isn’t scared. I check. I know what scared looks like on her, and this isn’t that. She’s just done with me. She’s sitting at her desk in my sweatpants at two-thirty in the morning, taping a box, because I was a dick and she’s not going to sit in a bed and listen to it.

And I was. I was a dick. She asked me something true, and I didn’t like it, so I bit her.

Shhhk.

I get up.

“Tess.”

She doesn’t answer. She writes something on a label.

I go over and stand behind her chair.

“What,” she says.

I bend down and kiss her cheek.

She moves her head away. “Don’t.”

I kiss the other cheek.

“Stop.”

I kiss her temple. Her forehead from the side, awkward, over the back of the chair. The tip of her nose when she turns around to glare at me.

“Rafe—”

Her ear. Her jaw.

And her mouth goes. I watch it. She’s trying so hard not to and it goes anyway at the corner, and she pushes at my face with her hand and I kiss her palm.

“This isn’t an apology,” she says. She’s laughing. She’s trying not to.

“I know.”

“Say it.”

I hate this. I hate this so much. I stand there behind her chair with my face an inch from hers, and she looks at me and waits, and doesn’t let me off.

“Sorry,” I say.

“For?”