My whole body flushed with heat.
That was when Trethan turned to look at me, locking me in his gaze, drawing me stumbling toward him.
“Like what you see?” he asked, smirking at me and cocking his hips at an arrogant angle.
I blushed brilliantly, still moving hesitantly toward him, feeling as awkward as a newborn colt. For a moment, I wondered if the whole thing had been a show. If he’d somehow known I was there and planned the whole thing. But no, his back had been to me the whole time. He couldn’t have known.
Trethan took a step toward me and wrapped his fingers around my hips, pulling me close, just as I’d imagined he would. He looked down at me with something dark and heated in his gaze, and I wondered for a second if he was going to kiss me.
Instead, he merely licked his lips slowly. I helplessly tracked the movement with my eyes, a breathy noise issuing from my lips. Trethan smirked and raised an eyebrow at me.
It was enough to have me pulling away from him, putting a safe distance between us again and gulping in air as though I had just run a marathon. I wasn’t sure whether I’d taken a breath since before I’d watched him dump the pitcher of water over himself.
“We’re not…” I began shakily. I couldn’t finish the thought. I didn’t even know what I was trying to say. We weren’t what? Dating? Fucking? Of course, we weren’t, and he already knew that. It went without saying.
He was still smirking at me. “You feeling okay?” he asked casually.
I nodded dumbly, still staring at him. Then, I shook my head, trying to regain my wits. “Don’t do that,” I scolded him. “You had your chance, and you missed it. We’re just friends, remember?”
He continued to look amused. “Am I doing something other than being friendly to you right now, sweetheart?” he asked silkily.
I rolled my eyes. “You know exactly what you’re doing,” I said tartly. I couldn’t keep my eyes from trailing down his chest again. The water had mostly dried off now, other than where it had soaked into the tops of his jeans, hanging low on his hips. But I could still picture those droplets in my mind and could still imagine running my fingers down his skin.
I shivered again and looked back up at him. Instead of looking cocky, there was something else in his gaze, something troubled. “Do you think people can change, Vanessa?” he asked. From the raw note in his voice, I could tell that there was something deeper to what he was asking. Something beyond the two of us.
I frowned at him, wanting to prod him, to find out what he was really asking. But even though we’d agreed we were friends now, it wasn’t my place to ask. There was too much history there. Anyway, it was easy enough to guess what he was asking about.
Did I think the fact that he had quit doing drugs had changed some things about him? Sure. But he was still fundamentally the same person deep down, wasn’t he?
He was still arrogant and still thought that he could get me to sleep with him, as a matter of course. And he drank and got into fights. He might have a better work ethic now, but he was the same.
And for all that I had matured since I’d gone to college, for all that I liked to say that I was over him, there was still that same attraction there, and I still had the thought that I might act on it if he gave me an opening.
In so many ways, we were exactly the same as we had been a few years ago. The conversations may have changed, but not much else.
I shrugged. “I’m not sure,” I said finally. I didn’t want to tell him flat-out that I thought he was just the same as the smoked-out guy I’d known five years ago. But I also didn’t see much to suggest otherwise.
From the hurt expression that came across Trethan’s face, you would have thought I had stabbed him in the heart. He turned away from me, nodding grimly. Without another word, he got back to work. I wanted to say something else, to take it back, but I didn’t know what to say. Instead, I went to find Dad, although some of the excitement from that morning had worn off.
Chapter Eleven
Trethan
I spent most of that day thinking about what Vanessa had said, that she wasn’t sure she believed people could change. I tried to come up with examples that would prove her wrong, but I couldn’t even come up with a list of many people who’d tried to change, let alone people who had tried to change and were successful at it.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if I had changed. People always said that when you grew up, you’d come to resemble your parents. Maybe I’d been kidding myself and everyone around me when I’d thought that quitting drugs would somehow make me a different, better person.
Someone pounded on the door, drawing m
e from my thoughts and the pot of water boiling on the stovetop. I went to answer it.
It was Brent again, but this time, he looked beaten up rather than just nervous. He pushed past me and into my apartment before I could say anything.
“Hey, man, let me hang out here for a while,” he said, belatedly tacking a “please” onto the end of the sentence.
I stared at him for a moment, and then shut the door. I moved toward him. Blood ran down the side of his face. He tried keeping the wound turned away from me, but he couldn’t hide it. I reached out to touch the blood next to his eye, trying to figure out the source of it. He flinched away.
“Hey, come on, man!” he said indignantly. “This shit hurts enough without you sticking your fingers in it.”