“Maybe we should swap when we’re done,” I said. “I’ll go through my box and then pass it to you and you can pass yours to me when you’re done. That way if one of us misses something the other one might catch it.”
“Good call,” Jagger said.
We spent the next half hour mostly in silence, working our way through the boxes in front of us until the buzzer sounded downstairs announcing the arrival of the pizza.
Jagger went down to get it, then came back up carrying a large pizza box.
My stomach grumbled as the smell of warm dough and melted cheese hit my nose, and I got off the floor to get plates from the kitchen. “I’m starving.”
“Same,” he said, setting the box on the stove.
I handed him a plate and we each took two slices of pizza.
“Coke?” I asked. “Water?”
“I’ll take a Coke,” he said.
I handed him a cold can from the fridge, plus a couple of napkins, and we settled back on the floor to eat while we continued working.
“Hmmm,” I said, taking a bite of the pizza. “Tastes like heaven.”
“You’re making me hungrier,” Jagger said, his blue eyes dark and trained on my mouth. “And not for pizza.”
I licked the sauce from my lips “I won’t lie and say I haven’t wanted to be with you.”
“Just me?” A smile teased his lips.
I blushed. “All of you, I guess.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “You should have said something. We’ve been giving you space.”
“Because of Bram?”
He nodded. “Thought you might need some time to process. It was a pretty big mess.”
“It could have been worse.”
Bram could have killed you, dismembered you, hung you from a telephone pole as a warning to others.
Jagger grinned. “I’m very aware of that.”
I took another bite of pizza and chewed, wondering at the wisdom of asking the question that had been on my mind ever since the Hunt.
“Why’d you do it?” I finally asked. “Why’d you decide to hunt me if you knew you’d have to face Bram?”
He finished chewing the bite in his mouth, then took a long swig of Coke. When he was done, his lips were wet, and now I was the one who couldn’t take my eyes off him.
Now I was the one who was thirsty. And not for Coke.
“It didn’t feel like a decision,” he said.
“Explain.”
He nodded, like he was looking for the right words. “In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t really think things through. It’s not really our thing.”
“Taking action without thinking?”
He laughed. “Well, when you put it that way… But yeah, we just don’t live that way. We do what we want to do, what’s interesting, what feels good. If anything, we try to avoid things that require a lot of thought.”