sitting there. Think of the damn devil and he will appear, or whatever the saying was.
Jonah Hema Collins wasn’t the devil, but I couldn’t say he wasn’t much further down the list than the red guy was on people I would rather never see.
How the hell had he gotten inside again?
I reminded myself for about the hundredth time over the last couple of days that there wasn’t anything the Fucker could say or do that would hurt me. There was nothing that would change my life too much. There was nothing that could happen that I couldn’t fight, because I would if I had to. I came from a long line of people who were really good at fighting. And that gene hadn’t skipped a generation with me.
The man I’d known hadn’t seemed like the kind of person to do something shitty… but everyone changes. That, and I wasn’t sure I had even gotten to know him that well in the first place, from the way he’d turned out in the end. You know, like an asshole.
I was going to be an adult. I was going to keep allllll this shit to myself and punch my pillow when I got home. That’s what I was going to do. Be an adult, even if a little part of me died from forcing myself to be decent since it wasn’t like that came all that naturally to me.
If I couldn’t make it until then, there were a couple bags right outside my office I had access to.
Seriously, who the hell had let him in?
“Good morning,” the man sitting in the chair said as he turned his head to look at me over his shoulder, like he had either heard or sensed me coming in.
He could take his morning and shove it up his—
There went my speech. But I wasn’t doing this for me, was I? Damn it.
“Hi,” I told him, giving him my best Lurch impression.
I rounded the edge of the desk, knowing my hip was just a few inches away from his elbow as I did it. It wasn’t a big room, but it wasn’t that small either. It was just that he wasn’t exactly what anyone would call a small man unless it was Andre the Giant we were talking about.
Jonah the Asshole didn’t wait until I was seated to say, “I’d like to sign up for a membership.”
Was he trying to piss me off? I wanted to ask him. I would have, if I had known I could get the question out of my mouth without going back on the promise I made myself. Because unlike some people I knew, when I said I would do something, I did it. I didn’t disappear—
Stop.
If you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all, Luna would tell me. But she had never warned me how fucking hard it was to live up to that. And I definitely didn’t have a single nice thing to say about any of this. Especially not for this asshole in my office who was busy looking at me with a clear, guileless, totally earnest and open expression as he gazed at me over his shoulder.
And that just made me madder.
He wanted a membership here? Okay. Fine.
I pulled my chair out, lowered myself onto it carefully and then rolled it forward once more. Then and only then did I look up at him at the same time as I reached out between us, taking in that face that was almost model-gorgeous. Almost. Except he had been too busted up over the years to be something so… basic.
Fortunately for me, it didn’t take much effort to remember that maybe I wasn’t going to be a complete asshole, but that didn’t mean I had to like him. Or that I had to be nice. Just… polite. Out loud. The things I thought in my head were a different story.
Fuckface.
And it was with that thought that I watched as he scooted forward in the seat he had taken without permission or an invitation and reached out with that big, big hand. I watched in slow motion as his fingertips—long and with signs at the joints that said that nearly all of them had been broken at some point—brushed over the back of my hand so gently it might have been nice… if I didn’t borderline hate him.
For the rest of my life, I was going to blame the fact that he genuinely surprised the shit out