All Broke Down (Rusk University 2)

I’m wearing a silky button-down shirt with no sleeves and a complicated bow tied at the neck. I’ve got my hair back in a long braid again, and a high-waisted skirt that goes almost to my knees and does a much better job of covering my legs than those shorts I’d worn Friday. I made a conscious effort to dress for the way I need to behave today.

Appropriately.

I ring the doorbell, and then try not to think about the fact that I’m sweating through this stupid silky shirt and the strappy heels on my feet are monstrously uncomfortable, and I’m dying a slow, torturous death in the thong I wore to prevent panty lines.

Dressing appropriately sucks.

I wait a minute. No one answers, and I’m beginning to fear that I’ll have to do this all over again later tonight or tomorrow after I talk to Dad, provided I’m still free to do what I want.

I ring the doorbell again, and then raise my hand to knock for good measure, but before my knuckles meet the wood, the door is ripped backward and I hear a gruff, “What?”

I hear his question, but my brain is a little stuck on the fact that Silas is wearing only a towel around his waist and is dripping water all over the floor. I open my mouth to say something, anything, but then I get distracted watching a bead of water slope down over one pectoral muscle. He has a massive geometric tattoo that starts on his shoulder and continues onto his chest. I watch that same bead of water cut through the black lines of his tattoo and escape into the valley down the middle of his abdomen.

Then it falls below the line of his towel, and I’m just standing there, staring at the one part of his body that’s covered, and if there was an ounce of supernatural ability in me, that towel might have accidentally fallen to the ground.

But alas, I am not supernatural. Though his abs might be.

I’m still staring at his crotch when he asks, “You need something?”

“Oh!” I snap my head up, a blush exploding across my face. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to keep . . .” That’s probably one sentence I’m better off not finishing. “I didn’t mean to.”

He lifts an eyebrow, and for the first time, I really look at his face. I expected the bruise on his jaw to be healing by now, turning ugly shades of green and yellow, but instead it looks even darker than it did Friday night, and bigger maybe. But that’s not what really troubles me. It’s his eyes.

They remind me of what my eyes looked like after Henry and I broke up, like I’d just found out that life was a game, and I’d been playing on the wrong board for years.

Not sad, per se. Lost.

“You okay?”

He raises his eyebrow again, grips the door with one hand, and resituates his towel with the other.

I don’t glance down at the towel. Or his magnificently sculpted chest. Because that would be awkward. I absolutely don’t . . . won’t do that.

Aw crap, I’m awkward. For several seconds. Several long seconds.

“Dylan.”

My eyes fly to his, and I expect an eyebrow, perhaps a cocky grin, maybe some dirty, dirty words.

But he looks tired.

“You’re not okay,” I say because I just know. This is not the same guy I met a few nights ago.

He takes a deep breath. “What do you need? Did you leave something?”

“Uh, no.” I lift up the envelope in my right hand. “I’m just here to pay you back. And to say thank you again. So, um, thank you.”

I hold out the envelope, and he stares at it for several long seconds, then his eyes raise up to mine.

“You want to come in?”

I hesitate. Because I want to. In the same way that I wanted his hands on me Friday night. The same way I wanted his mouth . . . the things it did and the things it said. I hadn’t been able to stop hearing those words all weekend. I dreamt about it. I imagined what else he might have said if we’d kept going, and I woke sweaty and needy and so, so pissed it wasn’t real.

I might not have taken measure of the situation Friday night, but I’d measured far more than twice since then. I’d thought about it almost constantly. But I still wasn’t sure that was a bridge I needed to cross.

It’s like there are two wills inside me, and each one insists the other isn’t real. Part of me thinks that this is all just some emotional reaction, a self-destructive break of some kind. I need to go home, grovel at my father’s feet, figure out what went wrong, so that I can fix my life.

The other half of me insists that I don’t need fixing. That the reason things with Silas feel so right is that things with Henry never were. That I was just doing what was expected of me like I’ve always done.

But shouldn’t I try to live up to people’s expectations? I can’t just let go of that. What kind of person would I become then?

As I stay silent, warring with myself, something in Silas’s already weary expression starts to fray further, and I step right over the threshold just to make it stop.

Of course, a normal person says yes when they’re invited inside. They don’t step in before the person at the door has a chance to move back. Now I’m less than a foot away from that distracting chest of his, and with his hand braced on the door he’s looming above me in a way that makes my girlie parts roll over and play dead.

I start to step away, and my heel hits the raised threshold, and I stumble back. I would have fallen on my ass right outside the door again if Silas hadn’t reached out and caught my arm.

“Uh, thanks. And sorry.”

He turns and heads into his kitchen. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a back that muscled in real life. There are all these curves and slopes that I wouldn’t have expected, and I have the sudden urge to trace them with my finger, feel where one muscle gives way to the next.

“I’m starting to think those are your two favorite words.”

I come back into focus and close the door behind me. Then I follow him cautiously into the kitchen.

“You want something to drink?” he asks.

Tequila sounds appropriate for this situation.

“Just water is fine,” I say. “Thanks.”

He shakes his head and pulls two glasses down from the cupboard. “It’s just tap. That okay?”

I nod, but he’s not looking at me, so I voice my answer instead. There’s not an ice machine in his fridge, so he grabs ice for my glass from one of those plastic cube maker things. He fills his own glass up with milk and then comes over to join me at the table.