The hostess looked at me, surprised, but I couldn’t bring myself to explain. I turned before I could make things worse and headed for the stairs without looking back, because now I knew, and knowing felt worse than wondering ever had.
Chapter Five: Let’s Talk It Out
I lay in bed staring at the ceiling and replaying the whole thing until it stopped feeling like a scene I had walked into and started feeling like a disaster I had personally built with my own two hands.
This was bad.
Not just awkward bad, either, although it was definitely that. It was the kind of bad that kept getting worse the longer I thought about it, because now Jonas knew I had gone snooping through his private life, knew I had shown up at the club, knew I had stood there watching him like some pathetic creep before turning around and running the second he saw me.
And if he told my dad, I was screwed.
Yes, I was a grown woman. Yes, technically I could go wherever I wanted and make whatever stupid choices I wanted. But being a grown woman and being able to afford life were two very different things, and the only reason I was still in school at all was because my dad was paying for it. My classes, my apartment, the version of my life that still had some chance of ending in a degree instead of me dropping out and pretending I had meant to do that all along. If he got pissed enough to stop helping me, I didn’t have some backup plan tucked away somewhere. I had a part-time job, summer classes, and exactlyzero interest in finding out how fast my whole life could fall apart.
I dragged a hand over my face and groaned into the quiet of the room.
Maybe he wouldn’t say anything.
Maybe he’d let it go.
Maybe he’d come home, go upstairs, and act like none of it had happened, and then I could spend the rest of the night coming up with something halfway believable to say if he brought it up tomorrow.
I was still clinging to that stupid hope when I heard the front door open.
My whole body went tight.
I stayed frozen on the bed, listening to the quiet sounds of him moving through the apartment and trying to guess from the pattern of it where he was headed. Every second that passed without him coming to my door made me feel a little better, right up until I heard his footsteps stop outside my room.
My stomach turned right back over, because clearly he was just standing on the other side of the door trying to decide what to do with me.
Just forget about it I thought.
Please, please, please.
Then he knocked.
Not hard. Not angry. Just enough to make it impossible to pretend I hadn’t heard him.
“Can we talk?”
I closed my eyes for a second.
There went that plan.
“Yeah,” I called, though it came out thinner than I wanted it to.
I pushed myself off the bed and opened the door to find him standing there looking exactly like he always did, calm andput together and annoyingly unreadable. If he was angry, he wasn’t showing it. If he was disappointed, he had hidden that too. All I got was the steady weight of his attention settling on me for a second before he stepped back and nodded toward the kitchen.
“Come with me.”
I followed him down the hall with my stomach in knots, already bracing for the worst.
He moved straight to the kitchen and leaned back against the counter like this was any other conversation we’d had in this apartment, like I hadn’t just shown up at his sex club and watched him put his hand in another woman’s hair. The thought hit me again so fast I had to shove it down before it could make my face do something embarrassing.
“Do you want a drink?” he asked.
I blinked. “What?”
“Water. Tea. Something stronger, depending on how you think this is going to go.”