Before I knew it, she was starting to put her clothes on, dress herself like she was some quick fuck for me. She’d never been that with me, no matter how much I’d led her to believe that when it came to similar things in the past. I was well aware I’d messed a few things up before, and looking back, I was definitely not proud of that. I reacted with fear a lot when it came to her. My default sometimes and Royal was right. When it came to women, sometimes I was just scared to hold on too tight to them. Anything could be taken away, a harsh reality I knew.
“Everything all right?” I touched her back, her clothes back on, and I didn’t like that. I pinched at her top. “You’ve been different since we got back from your mom and Ben’s.”
She barely spoke to me in the car ride back here, normally so talkative I couldn’t get her to slow down. It balanced well with me since when it came to conversation, I’d rather listen than be a part. Anyway, after we got back here, I’d started to talk to her, but once we’d realized her dorm was empty, I had a one-track mind. I’d poked at her for her body, and then, well, no conversation. I hadn’t thought it weird at first.
But now, she was getting up. She turned. “Want a drink? I want a drink.”
She didn’t wait for my response before leaving the room, and lifting my eyes, something did feel wrong. I got up myself, quickly tossing away the condom before putting my clothes back on and following after her. I found her back out in her dorm’s common area, head dipped inside the fridge. I lounged against a wall in the kitchen. “I feel like something’s going on. You mad at me? Mad I took up your mom’s invite for dinner?”
Yeah, I had taken it because it’d seemed she hadn’t wanted me there. But then again, that was our dynamic. I poked, bugging her, and she ran her mouth, bugging the shit out of me. We didn’t work unless we were arguing or handling each other. Greer stayed in the fridge, her sigh hard. “I just want a drink.”
“Okay.” Pushing off the wall, I helped her, taking the bottle of juice from her when she rose with it. I served her, then served myself, the pair of us taking it back into the common area.
Plopping on her couch, I took her with me, putting my juice on the coffee table and reaching for my controller. I queued up a game since I kept the system over here, playing around Greer’s body for a while. She drank her juice, leaning back into me, and eventually, she was looking up at me. She looked so sad it actually pissed me off. Why was she sad?
What the fuck did I do?
It was crazy I even cared, so different now, but seeing her sad truly did piss me off. I didn’t think I had done anything, which meant something outside of me did something to her. That’s what pissed me off. That I might have to do something about it and hurt someone.
“What’s going on?” I asked again, and though I let the game play, my attention was on nothing but her. Her when she put her cup down and eased her arms around me, her when her body shook again and I wasn’t even fucking her. Worried now, I put the controller down. “Greer? What the fuck? You’re kind of scaring me.”
“I am scared,” she said, and at that moment, I realized she was crying. Fucking crying, with tears in her eyes. The sheen made them starkly blue, and she squeezed them. “Knight…”
What. The. Hell? Everything had been fine before we came here tonight and I rose up, taking her with me.
She shook her head. “I… I just need to talk to you about something.”
Dread, like harsh to my core. Girls didn’t say that shit unless something was up. I just never cared about that before, girls easy. A dime a dozen, but it was never easy with Greer. It was fucking harder, and I worked so hard not to be who I usually was with her. In fact, it pulled at me so much every day. I wanted to be abrasive, a jerk. It was just my MO because feeling things, feeling this was the harsh opposite of the good feeling. You couldn’t get one without the other in a relationship, hence why I always stayed the fuck away from them.
I folded a hand behind her back. “Talk.”
Instead, she reached over and grabbed her phone, showing it to me. “I got an email from my psych professor.”
That’s what this was? I smiled a little. “You get a bad grade or something?” I knew she took all this shit way more seriously than me, but what the hell? “They’ll be other ways to pad your grade. If you want I can even talk to…”
Then I read the conversation, an email he’d sent her. It talked about what a good job she’d done on her term paper. Shit, yeah she had. I helped her.
But then I read on, scanning as it came to the part about things that had nothing to do with her, things that had to do with my family and me. I lifted my gaze, my eyes narrow. “You told him about my mom?”
“I took lots of notes at the nursing home.” Panicked, she waved her arms. Her face had shifted into at least three variations of cherry red, her palms going to her teary eyes. “He thought it was fascinating because he used to work with coma patients.
