Foreboding settled in her, making her bones ache.
Indy stood up abruptly, holding her palms up as if trying to ward him off—though he made no move toward her. He looked as if he was relaxing, in fact. Standing by his windows while the summer breeze blew in. Enjoying the lovely day, not eviscerating her.
Not turning her inside out with every word.
“This has all gotten way too intense for me,” she told him, fighting with everything she had to keep her voice from shaking. “And I told you, I’m not about that.”
“I am unsurprised to hear this.” Stefan shrugged in that way of his that was not, in any way, a gesture of uncertainty. Somehow, when he shrugged it was aggressive. A decisive critique—of her. “Maybe you should ask yourself why dark alleys do not scare you. Why men with guns do not stop you. But intensity makes you run.”
Her lips felt blue. She couldn’t feel her own face. But she still tried to fight. “Maybe you should ask yourself why you think it’s okay to dig around in someone’s life without permission. Then use it as bait.”
“I have never pretended to be a good man, Indiana.” His voice was harsh. But something about the way he was looking at her was kind, and it made her want to give in to the sobs she could feel inside, threatening her ribs. “I never promised you anything at all, except a time and place. This is not a redemption story. I do not require your forgiveness. Did you believe that you might meet me as you did and I would be anything at all but this?”
“I’ve never given any thought,” she managed to say.
His blue eyes lit up with an unholy glee. “Liar. But it is not me you lie to, I think. It is yourself.”
Indy had never been so grateful that she packed light as she was then, with all that emotion surging around inside her, making her feel misshapen with it. Because all she had to do was pick up her little pack from the floor and shrug into it, then gaze at him almost sadly.
“I get that there’s this big movement for everyone to act as if what they really want from life is to be known,” she said. “To be wide open and vulnerable so that any passing stranger can take a glance and see exactly who they are. If you want to talk bullshit, that’s what that is. You think you know me because you looked through some social media posts and hacked my information? You don’t. You don’t. I don’t perform, but I also don’t think that the sum total of a person is a collection of photographs. Carefully curated photographs at that.”
Stefan didn’t look particularly impressed with that speech. “I’m not following. First you were a puddle. Now you cannot be discerned through the pictures that you post. Surely both cannot be true.”
“I have no interest in being psychoanalyzed,” she bit out. “If I wanted a therapist, I’d get one. And knowing me, I’d probably sleep with him. That’s how I roll.”
“I know how you roll, Indiana. I know you use sex to hide from your life, not to embrace it.” His smile lanced through her. “I told you—I know everything.”
“Then you already know what I’m going to do, don’t you?” She was finding it hard to stand still when she wanted to run. But she made herself do it. “That’s handy. It means I have no need to tell you myself.”
“You will storm out.” Stefan sounded almost bored—unless she looked at the way his eyes blazed at her. “Though I expect you will do it slowly. An easy, carefree little walk so I’m not tempted to jump to the wrong conclusions. So that no one could suggest that you are having an emotional response. And off you will go. I expect to a bar, where you will surround yourself at once with men who do not challenge you. Who will fawn all over you, buy you drinks, tell you that you’re pretty. And if you let them, give you those empty sugar-high orgasms you like so much. But not for long, because there’s always another cock to ride, is there not?”
Her whole body jolted with every word he said. Indy could hardly see past the strange heat clouding her gaze. She had given up on her breath. She either seemed to be panting, or holding what air she could inside her, and either way, she felt... Unhinged.
“Do you think that you’re the first person in my life to try to run me down so that I’ll do what they want me to do?” she managed to ask.
“I’m not trying to influence you one way or the other,” he said with a laugh. Still lounging there as if he not only didn’t have a care in the world, but as if none of this was getting to him. She was falling apart, but none of this was touching him at all.
“You can’t really believe I don’t know what I want, can you?” she demanded, though she knew she should have already made her exit.
Again, his shattering blue gaze moved through her like a storm, making her wish that he would shout, flip a table, punch a wall—do something to indicate that this was as ruinous for him as it was for her. That it mattered to him that he was ripping her apart.
That I matter to him, a voice inside said, and she didn’t want that. She didn’t want to feel these things. She didn’t want to feel.
“I imagine you want any number of things,” Stefan said with all that quiet intensity that had ruined her from the start. “But I know what you need. And so do you,
