If I acknowledged the truth, I would panic. So instead I was going to believe this was all I wanted from her. Just seeing her was enough. Hearing her laugh made my f**king day.
“Hey,” she said with that smile from heaven as she stepped back and let me inside her apartment.
“I got the pad Thai you like,” I said, holding up the bag from the Thai place down the street. After watching her make those sweet little moaning noises as she ate it the last time I picked it up, I decided I needed to watch her eat it again.
Her eyes lit up, and she clapped her hands and bounced on her feet like a little girl. Women who looked like Blythe were not supposed to be so damn cute. Seeing her get excited over food made me want to feed her three meals a day.
“I made sweet tea just like you showed me. Come, taste it. I think I got it right,” she said as she hurried to the kitchen.
Two nights ago she had said she loved sweet tea, but she didn’t know how to make it, and buying it was too expensive. So I’d taught her how. You would have thought I was brilliant by the way she watched me and asked me questions. It was as if I was conducting a science experiment. Another thing about Blythe: she made me feel important. Needed. Like I was a part of her life that she relied on.
That felt f**king good. Too good.
But I was not addicted. I didn’t care what Green said. Blythe was not an addiction. I hated that he had started accusing me of that.
I sat the bag down on Blythe’s kitchen table and followed her to the bar where she was filling up a glass of ice with tea from the gallon-size plastic pitcher I had brought her when I taught her how to make sweet tea.
“Taste it,” she said with excitement dancing in her eyes.
If this tasted like shit, I wasn’t going to be able to tell her. Not with her looking like that. Hurting Blythe was something I was incapable of. I would lie to make her smile. I had done just that last week when she had made me a grilled cheese and burned it. She had seemed so worried about what I thought, so I swallowed every last bite like it was the best thing I had ever put in my mouth.
Preparing myself for the worst, I picked up the glass and took a drink. The sweet taste was just right. She had nailed it. No bitterness in the tea—the perfect blend of ice and sugar. Grinning, I set the glass down and smacked my lips. “Perfect, love. That was f**king perfect.”
“Really?” she asked, her eyes shining brightly.
It was times like this all I wanted to do was scoop her up and kiss her until we were both stripping off each other’s clothes. Fuck. Shit. I was not going to think about that again. I had to stop thinking about her naked.
She was the kind of girl you had a relationship with. Not the kind you f**ked because you couldn’t stop lusting over her. She was also becoming important to me. To my sanity. I needed her. And f**king her would ruin that. This thing we had—I couldn’t ruin it. I had never had this before, and it was too important to mess up.
“Really. Fill up my glass, and let’s go eat,” I told her as I turned away from those eyes and went to get plates out of the cabinet.
“You want a fork?” I asked her, already knowing the answer. She had attempted to eat the pad Thai with chopsticks last time, and it had been a disaster.
She laughed and nodded.
I grabbed us both a fork and headed to the table to fix our plates. This was what I wasn’t willing to lose. I had never had a place where I felt like I belonged. This wasn’t the kind of friendship I was used to, and I loved it. I woke up every morning thinking about what I would bring to dinner and what we would talk about. Things would happen during the day, and the first person who I wanted to tell was Blythe. In the short month since she had moved in, she had made herself the most important person in my life.
Fuck.
I turned around to see her grinning at me like I’d hung the moon, and my heart clenched. No. This was wrong. I wasn’t that guy. She needed to see the real me. The me I was when I wasn’t here eating dinner with her and talking about our days. She was looking at me with . . . oh, hell no. She was looking at me with something more.
I set the fork down and stared at the table. I had to remind her. She had to remember who I was. I was only worthy of her friendship. She had to remember we would always be just friends. This need I had for her company was confusing her. It was in her eyes. Those big beautiful eyes were so expressive and trusting.
Fuck. Fuck. Shit!
“I, uh, I’m running late. I gotta run. Didn’t look at the time. Sorry, but you have plenty of pad Thai you can eat. Uh, yeah, I’ll see you . . . later,” I rambled. Panic was in my voice, but I couldn’t help it. Backing up from the table, I forced myself to smile at her, but I didn’t look in her eyes. I couldn’t. I turned and got the hell out of there.
Protecting Blythe was my original intention. Someone needed to protect her, but damn it, I hadn’t protected her from me. But there was still time to show her what she had forgotten during our cozy dinners. I was Krit Corbin. I was the lead singer in a band and I f**ked women. Lots of them.
Chapter Six
BLYTHE
No one’s sweet tea was that bad. But I couldn’t figure out what else I had done. Krit had left my apartment like he couldn’t get away fast enough. That was two weeks ago, and he hadn’t been back since. That night, and every night since then, his parties had been going until late.
I used the iPod he left me and, luckily, it worked. I was able to sleep, and only occasionally did loud banging on the ceiling wake me; it made things rattle in my apartment. Other than that, I was okay.
I stood at my door for an hour last night trying to work up the nerve to open it and go upstairs to see Krit. Maybe I should apologize for something, but I didn’t know what that would be. I had made sweet tea. He had liked it and gotten our plates. Then . . . then he suddenly left. I had thought it was odd, but I believed him that he was running late and hadn’t noticed the time.