He waited a moment before his grip on her strangely tightened a little bit, pulling her back a little closer into his embrace. "I'm fine."
"Are you drunk?" she asked, even though she knew he must be.
"Just a little bit," he told her.
Silently, she disagreed. Any amount of alcohol that got him that close to her could not possibly be just a little bit.
"Do you know where you are?" she asked him.
Chuckling low in her ear, she attempted to ignore the goose bumps that rose up on her skin as he whispered, "My apartment?"
"Yep," she responded just an octave too high. "And do you know who I am?"
"Julie Kingsley," he responded, his voice still slightly amused, but so quietly and so close to her damn ear that she was tempted to stop asking him things.
"Okay," she said. "I was just making sure you were…okay."
"Don't see why you care," he answered. "I am the biggest asshole in the world to you," he said, yawning.
This was true, she conceded. But… in all fairness, she wasn't doing very good things, and when he used to actually speak to her he had told her that it wasn't her he disliked, but the things she did.
"You think I'm a bad person," she said, and it wasn't a question.
"No," he responded.
"But I do bad things," she said, narrowing it down a little.
"Yes. But everybody does bad things."
Smiling wryly in the dark, she thought about that for a moment. He had a point, of course. Everybody did bad things, but as Julie thought over the bad things she had done recently –from living in a loveless relationship with Jack to moving in with her married lover and getting knocked up—she thought she probably did more than her fair share of bad in too short a time.
Then again, there were people like Jack who could do all that in one night.
"But not everybody gets knocked up by a married man, and that's why you hate me, right? You think I'm an adulteress, which I guess I am, and a whore, which I'm really not."
"I don't think you're a whore," he disagreed. "I think you fucked up with Matt, but… maybe it wasn't on purpose. Sometimes I have to try too hard to not like you, and that's…not good," he said, his sentence trailing off as he yawned again.
Honestly, that news made her brighten a little. "Really? So it doesn't just come natural to you, like breathing or blinking?"
"No," he responded. "It's a learned behavior. Some kind of conditioning—I don't remember, I took psychology too long ago."
"Classical?" she guessed.
"Maybe. I'm too…tired and drunk to keep talking to you right now."
"But I like you this way," she blurted. "I don't feel like you hate me so much."
"Then I need to stop talking," he stated.
Frowning in the dark, she glanced back at him over her shoulder. "That's not very nice."
Then he did the strangest thing; he smiled a little and leaned forward, kissing her on the forehead, then he rested his head back on the pillow and said, "Good night, Julie."
She was startled, but she didn't want him to go to sleep. He had spoken to her more in that few minutes than he had in the whole past week, and he was actually being nice to her, too. Well, for the most part.
"Aaron?"
Groaning a little, he muttered, "Yes Julie?" into the pillow.