“Maybe I just wanted to be distracted,” I suggested. “Trust me. Sex with Bradyn is very distracting.”
“I’ll bet it is,” Kaimi said. “But forgive me going a little psychologist here, but I doubt you’d go to someone you don’t trust when you’re emotionally vulnerable.”
I scowled. “‘Emotionally vulnerable’?”
“I know you don’t like that phrase, but even big-bad you can have emotions and be vulnerable.”
“Come on.”
I could hear the smile in Kaimi’s voice. “I love you, Nyx, but you’ve got issues when it comes to people.”
I snorted. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“All right,” she said. “You called me because you wanted me to tell you that you shouldn’t trust Bradyn or that it was pointless to start anything with a guy when he lived hundreds of miles away.”
“I didn’t do–”
“Let me talk now.” Kaimi rarely cut people off, and it surprised me enough that the words stopped in their tracks. “That might not have been exactly what you were thinking, but I know you, Nyx. Better than you know yourself most times.”
She wasn’t wrong.
“You don’t let people close, and you wanted me to give you an excuse to push Bradyn away, so you didn’t have to face the fact that you have feelings for him. Feelings that are more than wanting him to fuck you senseless.”
“Dammit, Kaimi.” I leaned my head on the back of the couch.
“I know you don’t like hearing any of this, but you and I promised we’d never lie to each other. Not about the important shit.”
When I didn’t respond, she didn’t keep talking. Instead, she let me think. She really did know me, because if she’d tried to push or even tried to keep explaining the same thing over and over, I would’ve gotten pissed and just ignored everything she’d said.
I didn’t know if it was a personality trait I would’ve ended up with if I’d had a normal childhood, or if it’d just come from spending so many years having people tell me what to think and believe, but when people got too pushy, it made me want to push back.
Push back like Kaimi said I was doing with Bradyn because he was already too close to me, and I didn’t want him to get any closer. Even if that was true, though, I wasn’t sure it made a difference. Maybe if we lived near each other, I would have a ready answer, but that wasn’t how this went. I could use distance as an excuse, but if Kaimi was right, this wasn’t the sort of thing that’d just go away.
I either had to deal with this shit or face the fact that I’d never have anything more than those random hook-ups at the club.
Shit.
Fifteen
Bradyn
I loved my work. I really did. All the difficulties that came with doing documentaries – people who didn’t want to talk, weeding out lies and truth, bad weather, bad food, bad hotels – none of those things could keep me from doing what I was meant to do. It wasn’t some type of mystical destiny or fate thing. Just that I was one of those fortunate people whose passion and skillset happened to match up.
Learning what I had about Nyx’s case, I was more determined than ever to finish my documentary. Even though I didn’t know all the details of what sorts of things my family was being investigated for, my gut said that our two investigations would end up with a lot of the same information. Nyx wouldn’t have to worry about hiding things from me or breaking her clients’ confidentiality if I figured it out myself.
Being in the loop wasn’t my main reason to step up my own research skills, though. I’d let myself get distracted over the last few weeks, and I couldn’t do that. If I truly wanted to have a relationship with Nyx, a real relationship, I needed to find a balance. I’d had girlfriends in the past, and there’d always been a period at the beginning where I’d found myself thinking about them when I was doing other things – the ‘honeymoon’ phase – but I’d never had a problem maintaining work or just normal life stuff.
Nyx was different.
She invaded every part of my life. No matter what I was doing. Like how I’d been washing my dinner dishes last night when I’d glanced toward her cabin and wondered if she’d gone to the house for dinner. If she and the Huxleys had talked about me. What she’d been thinking about the things