How to Date the Guy You Hate by Julie Kriss Page 0,61

known how to stop wanting him.

Everything about me turns you on, he’d said to me once. I felt my throat go dry. It wasn’t just that I found him sexy; to me, in some fundamental way, he was sex. Every other time I’d done it had disappeared from my memory. He was the only definition of sex I knew. The only one I wanted to know.

And now I’d finished it. It’s just a blow job, that’s all. Cowardly words, terrified words. Words that finished things.

We were on the interstate now. I looked at the clock on my phone and realized we’d been driving for an hour and a half in silence.

I took a breath. Of all the things I owed him, there was one thing at least I could do. He’d been looking out for me, in his aggravating way, when he’d made me leave Cape Cod. “Thank you for getting me out of there,” I said.

Surprise crossed his expression for a brief second, then was gone again. “No problem,” he said evenly. “You hungry?”

“Yes.”

“Me too. We’ll stop quickly, though. We can get a long way by midnight.”

We stopped at a roadside place, and when I returned from my trip to the bathroom, I found him sprawled in the driver’s seat of the car, his knee on the gearshift, the map in his lap. His expression was a bit more relaxed.

“Are we lost?” I asked, sliding into the passenger seat.

“No,” he said. “The turnpike is ahead. I’m just figuring out which way I’m going.” He turned the map, frowning, not looking up at me. “This map is no help,” he said. “Can you check on the GPS?”

“I told you, I don’t do GPS.”

“Use mine.” He tapped the passcode on his phone and tossed it to me.

It felt a little weird, holding his phone. Intimate, like I’d felt when he’d packed my underwear. I tried for a tentative joke. “Still no dick pics on here?”

Jason went still, and his gaze rose to mine. He seemed to think it over, and then he said, “Not enough megapixels, man.”

So. A truce, then.

It was kind of a funny line, and his delivery was dead on. I swallowed a smile. If we hadn’t left, we’d be suffering through a meal right now, counting the minutes instead of sitting at a roadside diner, on our way to wherever we wanted. I hadn’t thanked him enough. I’d said it, but he hadn’t quite bought it. I was trying to think of a way to say it again when his phone buzzed in my hand.

A text. The notification came up in front of me, unasked-for. Charlotte. Where are you?

I stared at it for a long second, my chest tight. There was no way he hadn’t heard the buzz of the phone, so I said, “Um, you have a text.”

“Ignore it,” he said.

“It’s Charlotte.” My voice sounded strangled. “Do you want to know what it says?”

“No.”

I looked up at him. He glanced up from the map and held my eyes. The relationship may not have been good, but he’d spent four years with her. There had been some kind of intimacy, some kind of draw that could still be there. But there was no guilt on his face, no quick startlement, no wish for me not to see. He didn’t care that I knew she was texting him. And he didn’t want to know what she said.

Something knotted in my chest loosened. Jason dropped his gaze back to the map, and the memory of our night together in the hotel came back to me. How he’d told me that he hadn’t been able to do anything right for her, least of all sex. How it had taken him four years to realize the problem wasn’t him.

I fit the pattern. I was another girl who had decided he couldn’t do anything right. A woman who rejected him in bed and out of it. Someone he’d never please.

I’d put up my walls, and he knew what that meant. He’d seen it before, after all. He’d lived with it.

I was too nice. I overstepped. It won’t happen again.

I hadn’t just rejected him. I’d shut him down right after we’d done the most intimate thing possible to him, the thing he thought might mean something. It had meant something. It was just something that made me paralyzed with terror. But he didn’t know that. He knew that Charlotte had shut him down for four years, and that I’d just done the same.

The phone