I fight the urge to smack him. “You are the most stubborn human alive!”
“And you’re the most annoying!”
“I hate you!” I scream into his face.
“Good!” he roars back. “I hate me too.”
Losing my battle with self-control, my hands fly out, shoving his shoulders roughly. “God damn you, Archer! Youasshole!”
He doesn’t even try to deflect my hit. He absorbs it like water into a sponge, rocking back with a slight wheeze.
For a silent beat, we glare at each other — our rising tempers colliding like two broadswords. His voice is a soft timbre, grating against my frazzled nerve-endings.
“You feel better, now?”
“Yes, actually.” My nostrils flare on a sharp exhale. “I do.”
“Then do it again,” he eggs me on. “Go on. I deserve it.”
Without stopping to consider how twisted this whole thing is, I shove him again, lashing out with all the wounded pride pent-up for weeks inside my heart.
“Jerk!”
He nods in agreement, accepting the blow.
“Coward!”
I shove him once more — harder.
Too hard.
He stumbles back into the wall of the house, cracking his head with a painful thud.
Shit.
I fly forward, concern sparking through me at the thought that I’ve actually wounded him. But he doesn’t look injured. He merely leans against the stone, moonlight slanting across the chiseled angles of his face. He’s breathing like he’s just run a marathon, his mouth slightly parted. And he’s looking at me as though… as though…
I freeze.
His gaze is half-lidded, tracking my every infinitesimal movement. Reading me almost by memory, a book whose pages he’s turned a thousand times. His face is stripped clean of the indifference he’s been wearing like a shield, empty of all his earlier anger. And I’d swear on my life, the emotion simmering in his eyes isn’t hate.
It’s something far scarier.
Something that electrifies the very air we’re breathing in uneven gasps.
I take a faltering step toward him, bringing us within arm’s reach of one another. A dangerous proximity for two people balanced as we are on the edge of a razor-blade. Which way it’s about to cut, I can’t say.
Friend.
Enemy.
Or… perhaps something else entirely.
“So you hate me, huh?” he whispers in a hollow voice.
I take another step.
The final step.