strangers, you creepy asshole,” Alex snarled. “It happens again, you’ll need a surgeon to get your phone back for you.”
The guy nodded and scurried away.
Alex turned to their audience, his expression still made of violent angles. “Move the fuck on, or you can be next.”
The little crowd dispersed.
Lia sat on the bench, now the audience to the flipped scene, and remembered that Alex Di Pietro was not her friend. He was, first and foremost—he was only—a Pagano man. Her father’s man. He was in her life for no other reason than that Papa’s world made her world unsafe.
Because there weren’t two worlds, as much as Papa wanted to make it so. He did what he did in the world she lived in, the only world there was, and it made her unsafe. So unsafe she had to quit school and cower in his castle.
Alex was not a friend. He was her bodyguard.
Her chest cramped with another bout of tears, but these, she managed to hold off.
Her bodyguard came back and sat beside her. A five-act play’s worth of emotions rioted on the stage of his face—anger at the guy who’d tried to take their picture, and probably at the other gawkers as well, protectiveness and sympathy for her, shock at what they’d done. But amidst all that, underneath it all, she thought she saw traces of the desire that had impelled him to hold her so tightly, to surround her, to cover her, to kiss her wholeheartedly. To kiss her like he really liked her, really wanted her.
Desire? Or simple lust? There was a difference, she thought. Lust was lizard brain, nothing but physical need. Desire was more human, more connected.
It didn’t matter. Alex was her father’s man, not hers.
“You okay?” he asked, because it was his job to make sure she was.
Lia nodded.
His eyes kept hold of hers. “Lee, I’m … sorry. I shouldn’t’ve—”
“I know,” she said, holding back her disappointed sigh with all her will. “It’s okay.”
“You sure?”
“Sure.” She attempted a smile. Judging by his reaction, it wasn’t one of her better performances.
But he let it go. “Okay. You want to go back to your apartment?”
“No. I want to see Harrie and Kayla. We’re meeting for coffee. And then I want to tell Professor Gottschalk that I won’t be reading for White Christmas.”
A quick twitch narrowed his eyes—it wasn’t the first time Lia got the impression he didn’t like the chair of the theater department. Gottschalk was hard on his students, it was true. But he was just preparing them for a difficult life in the arts. Artists needed thick skins to survive an artist’s life.
Not that that life was in Lia’s future anymore.
Alex stood up. “Okay. Let’s go, then.” He offered her his hand.
Lia stood without his help.
~oOo~
Lia, Harrie, and Kayla usually met for lunch on Mondays and Wednesdays, but when Lia asked in their group chat if they could meet for coffee earlier instead, they both agreed, after the usual friendship questioning about whether there was something wrong, or something good, going on to change the plan. In the chat, Lia was nonchalant, assuring them that everything was okay and she just had some stuff going on at lunchtime today.
They made a plan to meet at ten-thirty, but since the registrar had gone so quickly, and even with the impromptu dramatic tableau of a couple in love she and Alex had made, Lia was at the coffee shop just after ten. She hadn’t had anywhere else to go, or enough time to do anything else, so she’d just gone to wait.
Alex was there, too, of course, but he took a seat in a far corner, where he could watch her from a distance.
There was always somebody watching her, and she’d gotten used to it. So much so that she sometimes completely forgot about it. But now, with the feel of his kiss—his lips, his tongue, the scruff of his beard—still making her face tingle, and the embarrassment still making it hot, Lia felt his attention like a physical weight. Or like a tether, pulling her attention to him constantly.
Unable to remember the last time she’d eaten, she bought a pumpkin muffin with her coffee, intending to tear it in half and limit herself to no more than that. But once she was seated, with Alex’s gaze pressing into her back, her appetite died away entirely. Instead of eating the muffin, she simply dismantled it, arranging neat little clumps around the small white plate.