“Peaches, let me in so we can talk, okay?”
She rubbed her eyes and stepped back.
I walked in and closed the door behind me.
When I turned to her again, she didn’t look up from her phone and typed away to someone else.
“Something important happening on there?”
“Rome said he won’t be back for a while and …”—she cleared her throat again, showing another nervous habit of hers—“that he hopes we can work through some things.”
“How friendly and thoughtful of him.”
She set her phone down on the table a little harder than I’d seen her do in the past. “Well, Jax, he is a good friend.”
“Hmm.” I stepped toward her. “You sleep in all your friend’s beds?”
When she rolled her eyes, I saw a little heat from her temper seeping through that quiet façade.
“How do I get to that friend level?”
Her hands went to her hips. And then, she unleashed. “I just can’t. It is the middle of the night and you, what?” She looked me up and down. Then she motioned to my running attire. “Jog over here to annoy me after you spent the weekend having conversations with my father? Are you completely out of your mind or just a total fucking asshole?”
“Watch that mouth, Whitfield. You used to hold that tongue a lot better. It’s new you can’t do that.”
“‘New’?” Her eyes shone so bright I saw only green fury swimming all around me. “You think me swearing is new! News flash, Jax, everything about me is new to you! I’m a totally new person. The girl you knew years ago broke down and died after a summer of hell and a summer with you. Although, hmm …” She tapped her chin dramatically. “That was pretty much one and the same.”
This anger, this raw emotion was what moved me, moved us, made us who we were. I tried to step up to her, I wanted to experience this outburst as closely as I could.
She stepped back and moved to stand on the other side of the apartment’s small kitchen island. “You think that helping with some class, taking a few little jogs, and trying to make me feel good on a kitchen counter one day is going to change the fact that you and I are oil and water? Or worse yet! We’re like two chemicals that when mixed together create a bomb.”
“Ammonia and chloride.”
She waved her hands at me. “Whatever. I don’t want to be woken up at three in the morning by you after you went and did stuff you knew would bother me all weekend.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and nodded. “Fair enough.”
Her eyebrows went up in confusion. She wanted a fight. I did too. My body buzzed for another battle with her but seeing her let go like this reinforced what I already knew.
“We need to come to some conclusions tonight, Whitfield.”
Her head tilted to the side a little. “I am coming to some conclusions.”
“Are you now?”
She held up a finger. “One, I don’t want you bothering me outside of studying.”
I leaned into the counter, letting her ramble on while I used one foot to slide off one sneaker.
“Two.” She held up another finger but looked at my feet like they were letting out all her steam. “Once this class is over, we don’t talk unless you want to talk about my father. Because quite frankly, until you do, I have nothing to say to you.”
I pushed the other shoe off and shoved them both aside as I started toward her, ready to be done with the counting.
“Three …”
“The only conclusion is you and I are going to keep bumping heads until we get each other out of our systems, Peaches.” I kept my voice soft, trying to coax her into understanding as I cornered her in another kitchen that reminded me very much of the one we were in just a few days ago.
“What?” Her question was a whisper on her lips, so quiet I barely heard it.