take our seats for landing. Then I found myself wishing the toilet had a damned seat belt. But it didn’t, so I left the safety of the locked door and took the first available seat, which wasn’t anywhere near the couch where Zoe sat strapped in, staring at me in complete confusion.
I kept my eyes forward and promised myself that’s where they’d stay in regard to Zoe. No more flirting. No more stolen kisses. Definitely no more touching. All that soft skin needed to stay over there, out of my reach, for her own good.
Right. I could do that for her.
If I could give up drinking, then keeping my hands off Zoe Shannon would be a breeze.
Oh, who was I kidding? I was completely fucked.
10
ZOE
Nixon had been in asshole mode for an entire week. He was snippy, cold, and gave one-word answers every time I asked a question. I wasn’t stupid—I knew what had happened between us on the plane was the reason. I had my own issues about it, but I wasn’t taking them out on him.
He also wasn’t sleeping, which I knew because the tea packet I left out next to the honey on the counter every night was always used and disposed of by the time I woke up. He wrote every morning, and by the afternoon, his mood was even worse than the day before, which made our afternoon hikes anything but fun.
His writing notebooks were full of chord progressions, tablature, and even a few scattered piano bars here and there, but there was nothing solid. It was like he’d written sections of thirty different songs, without completing a single one of them.
I’d never really seen his writing process, so I wasn’t sure if that was normal for him or not, and I wasn’t about to call Jonas or Quinn and ask, so I left him to it. When I wasn’t with Nixon, I was online, scouring the internet for a band I could bet my career on.
Today, I’d fallen down a YouTube hole and stumbled onto a new band that—as luck would have it—looked to be based out of Seattle, which would be convenient if Nixon ever saw fit to take us home, or hell, if he’d just send me at this point since he could barely stand to be in the same room as me.
Besides, it couldn’t be that hard to find someone else to keep him on the straight and narrow when he was doing a fine job of it all by himself.
Go figure, I’d finally let myself erase the lines between us completely, thrown caution to the wind, and he’d thrown up a wall big enough to be seen from space. It didn’t take a mathematician to put one and one together and see that Nixon hadn’t liked something about what had happened between us on that plane.
“Are you ready?”
I startled, then fumbled for my water bottle as I knocked it off my desk. Thank God the cap was on. “I didn’t realize it was already five,” I muttered.
“It is.” He leaned against my doorframe, crossing his arms over his chest.
I hated that he looked so damned good. Hated that all he had to do was enter a room and my temperature rose. Hated that he’d flipped the switch back on to my sex drive only to make it perfectly clear I was no longer something he wanted. Hated the fact that I appeared to be the only woman on the planet who turned him off by getting turned on.
Mostly, I hated the way he’d completely frozen me out. I’d given in on that plane, thrown my better judgment out the door without a parachute, and this was the result? Even worse, there was nothing I could do about it. He left the room every time I tried to talk to him, and it wasn’t like I could just say, “screw this,” and leave. I was stuck with Nixon, no matter how badly I wanted him, or how big of a jerkface he was being.
This was my own personal crucible, and my pain tolerance was maxing out.
His eyes narrowed slightly on my computer screen, and I slammed it shut. “Do you want to drive?”
“Sure.” He turned and left.
“Good talk,” I muttered, taking an extra second to run a brush through my hair and locate my shoes. By the time I grabbed my coat and made it to the garage, he was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel.
It took exactly nine minutes