A laugh bubbled and burst out of me while I waited for Grayson to drop the other shoe.
When Grayson stood up, saying nothing, silence spread like storm clouds. I kept waiting for him to talk, to tell me he was fucking with me.
Opposite me, out the window that rose two stories and cut across most of the room, iron-blue waves rippled molten white in the moonlight. One after the other, they dissolved into the black sea, like the humor inside me dissolving into dread.
“Wait, you’re serious?” I shook my head. “I won’t do it.”
“If no one sent you—”
“No one sent me,” I interrupted. “No one!”
“Well, if no one sent you,” he continued, boredom in his voice replaced with annoyance, “then how can the girl who watches me when I’m not looking”—he mocked my breathy voice—“not want my cock?”
Shame ran as if injected by a hot needle through my veins. Before this night, my crush was easy to ignore. Oh, Grayson Crowne is objectively handsome. Only a liar would say otherwise. That beating in my chest when he walks by? Anger. Anger at the way he treats me and my coworkers.
It was easy to tell yourself what you’re feeling is nothing, because someone like Grayson is never going to look at you. You don’t have to worry about the nasty, horned whys of how you could like someone like him.
It would never come true.
He would never look back.
“Don’t you want it to be special?” I attempted.
All he did was laugh.
“I can be of way more use to you than just sex. I won’t even be good at it…”
He laughed. “That, I believe.”
He walked around me, each step lighting a jolt of electricity in my heart. Patterns from the iron-paned glass wall guarding stairs to the second floor darkened the already nearly black wood at my knees in crisscross shadows. I focused on them, not Grayson.
But then he stopped behind me, and only seconds later vicious hands fisted my hair, pulling my head back so I was forced to stare into his burning gray-blue eyes.
“Let’s give whoever sent you a nice story,” he growled into my neck. “So you can go back and tell them how you dropped your panties faster than a whore on prom night. How you begged me to fuck you. How much of a fucking slut you are.”
I should hate this, but his cruel, crude words burned on my flesh and vibrated inside my bones.
“No one is going to believe me if I talk, anyway,” I whispered.
My breath caught, and he dropped me without a word.
I stared at the floor, scalp burning. I know he was trying to call my bluff, to get me to say I had been sent, and my heart broke a little bit for him. For someone who couldn’t believe in anything other than sabotage. I was a casualty of fate, as he’d said. I grasped at straws, something else to change his mind.
“I”—I swallowed—“I, um, don’t you like Lottie?” I croaked. “Why would you ruin that with me?”
In that dark room, his feelings for her had been so earnest, so real. What had happened in the few hours between that dark room and now to make him do such a drastic one-eighty?
“The only thing you’re ruining tonight are my sheets.”
I swallowed all the air in the room at the image.
“But—”
“I think I’ve let you talk enough. Stand up.”
I slowly stood. Grayson regarded me with little less than disgust. Everything about him dripped disinterest, like this was just another boring night.
“Are you some kind of burn victim?” He rubbed his eye, exhaling. “Never mind. I don’t fucking care.” Grayson paused, a finger below his eye resting on his cheekbone, his glare sharp.