“We have chemistry,” she pointed out.
“A pity kiss doesn’t count.”
Pity kiss, her ass. He’d been as into it as she.
"It's hot chemistry," she leaned forward.
He shrugged. "I had chemistry with my sister-in-law to be. Doesn't mean I acted on it."
Oh wow. Zephyr blinked and processed the fact that she would get to meet someone he'd considered being with.
"Chemistry lies, Zephyr," he went on after dropping that bomb.
"Then what tells the truth?" She tilted her head to the side, curious about his thought process.
"Heart," he stated, no affliction in his voice.
"And what does yours say?"
The unscarred side of his lips lifted. "Nothing. Fucker hasn't spoken in years. It's a dead, scarred piece of useless muscle."
God, it hurt her. It hurt her that he'd built himself a tower with walls so high it had become impenetrable.
'You are hope, sunshine. Hope for a better life.'
The boy who'd told her that clearly lived on the tower, unreachable. But she would scale the walls if she had to, get to the top, and rescue her lover. She would give him hope again if it was the last thing that she did.
His plan to stay away from her wouldn’t work, but she kept that to herself. She would tempt him and seduce him until he gave in. There was nothing more powerful than a woman on a mission. Telling him her plans involved some solid skin slapping probably wasn’t for the best for now.
She raised her glass of water to him. “To chemistries that lie.”
He raised his. "And hearts that die."
Oh boy, he had no idea the CPR she had planned for him.
They went quiet, but companionably. Zephyr took out her ebook reader and pretended to be engrossed in a novel while covertly watching him; he simply looked out the window, lost in thought. The attendant came again with some overloaded sandwiches and Zephyr put her reader down, happy to have an excuse to engage him in conversation again.
“I thought you’d be working on your laptop or something, master of the universe as you are,” she teased, unwrapping her sandwich.
“I can’t read,” he told her simply.
Zephyr paused, completely taken aback. She hadn’t been expecting that reply.
Her surprise must have been evident on her face because he explained. “I didn’t grow up with much money. My ma sent me to school but I dropped out after she passed away.”
“I’m sorry.” She extended her hand and gave him a soft squeeze, surprising him. “You must’ve learned to read by then.”
“Yeah, but when this happened—” he pointed to his eye patch “—reading smaller things got hard. I just stopped after a while.” He seemed to shake himself, watching her curiously with his single eye. “I don’t usually talk about it.”
A little piece of her heart melted. "Your secret is safe with me." She gave him a small smile and watched him look away, clearly uncomfortable at having shared so much. She let him be, noticing now how he slowly peeled the wrapper on his sandwich mostly with his left hand and wondered what little everyday things that most people took for granted he had to work hard to accomplish. Was everything in his house sound-controlled? Did the injury affect more than his vision and memory? His hearing? His sense of balance? She'd seen him fighting and moving well enough but was that natural or something he'd trained himself to do?
Something occurred to her then. “Is that why you didn’t reply to my texts?”
He looked up, putting the sandwich down. “I don't like phones. And I don't text anyone. People who have my number are business contacts. They just call.”
And there she’d thought he’d ghosted her. She needed to be more considerate of his new body, and the ways it affected him. "So I can just call you now?"
He grunted, focusing on his sandwich.