not sure.” Which meant he’d lost track of reality too. That I’d made him forget who he was.
Was it wrong for me to love, just a little, that I could do that to him?
His eyes shifted back and forth between mine.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Light-headed. What exactly happened?”
“We made love.”
I frowned. “I know that.” Eloquent. My middle name.
“Soul Complements,” he said, as if that covered the rest of what I should know.
He stepped out of the shower and I stepped out with him, unthinkingly needing to stay in contact with him, to move in tandem with him, to be no more than inches apart from him.
He handed me a towel. “We fell . . . fell too far into each other. Magic drew us in, and we didn’t let go.”
I took the towel and stayed where I was while he purposefully took two steps away. The need to follow him and limit the distance between us was still there, but it was fading. I dried myself off in silence.
He rubbed the towel over his hair, and mopped off, the towel wadded in his hand. He shook the towel out, and wrapped it around his waist.
“What did we do wrong?” I asked.
“We lost control.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I said.
“Too far, too long, and we won’t want to be who we are without also being the other person.” He said it without emotion, as if he were reciting a textbook. “We’ll lose ourselves. Lose what we are as individuals. That’s a problem.”
He was right. I wanted that closeness, that awareness of every inch of him. Wanted him, wanted us, bound together, burned, melded by magic. There was a power in it. I could sense it, could almost taste it. A power I’d never felt before.
And knowing I could never have it again, that we should never have it again, made me hollow and empty, even though he was only a few steps away, and closer to me than any man in my life.
“You don’t think this will happen every time, do you?” I asked.
“Every time we have sex, or every time we take a shower?” He smiled.
I knew he was trying to change the mood, push away the seriousness of what had just happened, of how bad it could have been. I tried to follow his lead, to let go of the fear.
“I don’t think the shower had anything to do with it,” I said. Yes, I sucked at letting go of fear.
Zay shrugged one shoulder. “I wouldn’t say it was entirely innocent. All that warm, wet water touching us everywhere. And the soap definitely had ulterior motives.”
I wrapped the towel around me, tucking it tight at the top. “That career in comedy? Walk away now, Jones.”
“And give up on my dreams?” He gave me a grin, and carefully avoided touching me while he picked up his jeans and shoes and carried them into the bedroom.
I rubbed my hands over my arms, needing contact, needing his touch, but firmly staying right where I was. Zay could make jokes. I’d just do what I always did—endure.
Zay had been staying with me enough lately that he had a spare change of clothes and a dresser drawer of his own.
“I’ve always thought if the magic thing didn’t work out,” he called from the bedroom, “I could give comedy a try.”
Comedy. Right. The last thing Zay had on his mind was a career in stand-up. “I thought you had the whole ice-polo thing to fall back on.” I dug in the drawer beneath the sink and pulled out my brush.
I could do this. I could be just me. See me being just me? I was hella good at it.
“I like to keep my options open,” he said. “You know how the girls love an athlete with a good sense of humor.”
I left the brush on the sink and put on the void stone necklace again. Magic settled in me, taking the edge off my discomfort. I walked into my bedroom. Zay had already put on his boxers and jeans. He was half bent, digging through the laundry basket for a T-shirt.
I was done pretending. “So this magic and Soul Complement thing. You think we’ll be okay?” I asked.
He stood, the T-shirt in his hand. “I have never once doubted us. Not once.”
I walked over to him. He had slipped back into expressionless Zay, Zen Zay. He wasn’t giving off much in the way of body language except for patience, and I was