I blamed our history again as I felt my stomach get yanked to my throat. I grabbed the bottle and spun around to crowd her fast enough so she didn’t back away. “This is a big drink for a small girl.”
She stepped into my chest, reached those light as a feather fingers to the bottle to unscrew it, and then chugged.
Her bright green eyes bored into mine as she took her time with each gulp. Her pouted lips hugged the rim and her throat craned back. The gulps were small but each one was there to taunt me and with her gaze on me, she did a good fucking job.
“Enough,” I snatched it from her.
She smirked and her pink tongue slid out slowly to wipe the whiskey from her upper lip. “I know how much liquor I can handle, Jax.”
“I know how much liquor you should be handling.”
“Really? And how much is that?”
“None. At. All.”
She scoffed and turned to grab the bread out of the toaster. As she buttered it, she mumbled, “You don’t make the rules for me.”
I leaned on the counter and crossed my arms. “Peaches, you follow rules before there are ever any rules that have been made.”
The butter knife shook a little in her hand. She kept her head down and said, “I wanted to fuck you in my fuck-buddy’s apartment and then proceeded to spend the night drinking the liquor my homicidal father used to drink. You would be surprised with my lack of rules, L.P.”
My jaw tightened at her swearing but I let it go. “Macallan was his drink of choice?”
The butter knife flew into the sink and emerald eyes sent beams of pain my way. “What? You want to ask him about it next time you visit? I’m surprised you’ve never discussed with him the alcohol he used to get so drunk on. God, the way it just sits on your tongue and in the air like stagnant filth …”
When she took a breath in, I heard the shakiness. I heard the pain.
The problem with me being so close to her was I remembered every fucking feeling I’d tried to bury. I remembered and felt the war she waged in herself because it was the same war inside me.
We hated to love each other. It meant we had to dredge up the memories and the past. We had to be reminded of our demons because we triggered them in each other. It made us the enemy for one another and we fought like hell to tell ourselves we couldn’t love that enemy. And we ended up hating ourselves for doing just that.
I couldn’t blame that on history. That shit was solely on me.
Ignoring the boundaries I wanted to set, I took her face in my hands.
“Your eyes are the exact same color as his.”
She squeezed them shut like what I said physically pained her.
“And the difference in them is fucking staggering.”
They shot open, curious.
I continued. “His eyes are empty, dead. Your eyes burn with the fire of life, baby. They’re wild, sometimes, like a caged animal when you want to break free of some shit standard you’ve set for yourself.”
“Jax …” she whispered like she wanted me to stop.
I just shook my head and kept going. “They sizzle when I touch you, like I’m heating you up. I get lost in every damn feeling you hold in them.”
“I can’t do this.” She started to back out of the kitchen.
“Can’t do what?”
“This!” She motioned between us. “You and I aren't meant to be anywhere near each other. We can’t be friends, and we can’t work through whatever is between us. No one is supposed to go through what we did and then be able to live in sync with each other, especially when you add my father, the arsonist, to the mix.”
“Isn’t that what specifically makes it so we can live in sync? We’re the only ones who know what it's like to go through that trauma and survive.”
Her shoulders slumped, her little mouth turning down just enough so that her bottom lip jutted out even more. She stared out the kitchen window as if hoping to find some spark of hope there.