“Why?” he asks, impatient.
“Because I thought Reed would know where you —”
“Jesus,” he growls. “Whydid you want to find me?”
Oh right, that.
“Because I wanted to talk to you,” I whisper, “and you blocked my number.”
His eyes narrow. “And that didn’t clue you in that Ididn’twanna talk to you?”
“Well, yeah,” I say, biting my lip.
He watches me bite my lip with almost a glare. “But you decided to stalk me anyway.”
I let my tingling lip go. “I wasn’t stalking. Thisisn’tstalking.”
“Yeah, no. This is pretty much stalking 101.”
“So, fine.Okay. I was stalking. But only because I wanted to tell you things.”
“What things?”
Letting out a deep breath, I look into his angry but beautiful dark eyes. “That we’re friends.”
“What?”
“You and me.” I swallow. “We’re friends now.”
He stares at me for a beat or two. “How’s that?”
“Because we’ve made progress.”
“Progress.”
“Yes.” I nod. “In the p-past few days.”
Again, he studies me for a few seconds. “What kind of progress?”
“Well,” I clear my throat, blushing under his intense gaze. “For one, we don’t make each other sick with hate anymore.”
“We don’t.”
I blush harder. “No. And you’ve been helping me. With my problem. And protecting me and keeping an eye on me. And we saw that movie together the other night. Plus we text and I know you call it a work phone but sometimes I just text you to talk to you and I think —”
“Yeah, you do.”
I dig my fingers in his neck. “I know you hate texting.”
“Yes.”
“But sometimes…” My heart’s racing really fast now. “Sometimes I just want to talk to you.”
His jaw tics as he stares and stares at me.
“And now you’ve blocked my number.”
Even though I’ve only essentially had this phone for a little over a week and it was only last weekend when I started texting him just for the hell of it, it still felt like a loss.