was dealing with. He could never know he was a potential mate. If no one else knew, he certainly couldn’t.
I can play this off. Drunk, living with an attractive man, of course I would hit on him once, and I feel terrible. I’ll apologize to him tomorrow. He doesn’t need to know it’s not just that. He never has to know.
I looked at myself in the mirror, seeing the resolve in my own face.
Tomorrow, I could fix this.
First, I had to sleep and sober up.
I was up later than normal, groaning as I groped to hit my alarm. My room wasn’t cold, so I was able to roll out of bed without feeling too sluggish and made my way into my bathroom, looking for a bottle of painkillers I normally kept on hand.
As I took two, I thought about the night before.
It’s been years since I got that drunk. What the hell was I thinking?
Needless to say, it was going to be a night I would remember for a long time and a cautionary tale about why I slowed down my drinking habits years ago. It had been shortly after Cassius walked out, leaving behind our unhealthy relationship. I knew I had needed the wakeup call.
Throwing on clean clothes, I walked into the living room, smelling breakfast even though it was three in the afternoon. I walked quietly into the kitchen, but he knew I was coming. Raphael looked up the moment after I entered even though I hadn’t made a sound.
“Sorry about last night,” I said, tapping my hand on the counter anxiously. “I was drunk—”
“I get it. It’s fine,” he said, looking back down at the eggs he was making. “But…” he sighed and shook his head. “Never mind.”
“Okay. I just don’t want things to be awkward. You still have to live with me for eight more months, and I didn’t want you to think I was actually trying to jump you or something.” I wasn’t sure where to go from there. If he was cool, I should have been cool, but for some reason, I wasn’t. I wasn’t cool in the slightest, which really annoyed me.
“Do you want bacon?” he asked softly, looking over at me again.
“No thanks,” I said with a snap he didn’t deserve, regretting it immediately.
“What?” he demanded, his chocolate eyes narrowing.
“Nothing.” I walked around him to get to the fridge and pulled out a breakfast shake. I hoped it would settle my stomach without needing to eat anything more. Before I could bring myself to leave the kitchen, I turned to him and tried to speak without hostility, keeping myself from being aggressive. “What were you going to say?”
“Nothing,” he answered, keeping his eyes on his food.
“Don’t bullshit me. I came out here and apologized, but you’re obviously holding something back.” I wished there wasn’t a little bit of desperation in that, but Raphael was so good at keeping himself locked off from me, and it was driving me up the wall. I finally had the chance to hear what he was thinking, and I knew I wasn’t going to.
“It’s nothing,” he repeated, no anger in his words, but there was a definite feeling he wanted me to drop it. “You propositioned me last night, then you freaked out. You were drunk. I get it. It happens. No harm, no foul. What else I was thinking is my business.”
“Fine.” I turned and walked out again, opening the shake. Going to the patio, I fell into a seat, soaking up the heat of the sun. In the winter, it didn’t get much warmer than the sixties, but it was better than nothing.
I wanted to be angrier than I had any right to be. He was allowed his own thoughts, but the immature part of me wanted to get a little saw, open up his head, and figure out what he was thinking, going directly to the source.
I hate this. I hate that I even fucking care. I hate biology.
I stared at my view from the wraparound rooftop patio and sighed heavily.
4
Chapter FOUR
“I’m going to the gym,” I called out after the sun went down. I had spent the entire day reading on my patio to avoid Raphael, my biological urges, and the frustration that came from both.
“Okay.”
I knew he was in the living room, reading printouts about species he probably found on the database. I printed out dozens of them, anything I thought he might run into. He spent at least four to five