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Tilting my head, I peered up at him. His features were smooth, and he was staring again, being so, so watchful, like he really was weighing some part of my soul in his invisible scales, seeing if I was worthy or not.
“You’re tough. You’ll be fine.” It wouldn’t sink in until way later that he’d said I was tough. That he thought that about me.
“You know how to ride a horse?” he asked, like he knew as well as I did that I damn well didn’t. “Do you want to steal people’s laundry from a clothesline too?”
“Friends don’t let friends die. Everything’s gonna be fine. You’ve got something better than that knife. You’ve got me.”
And before I thought twice about it, before I could remind myself that I wasn’t his responsibility, that he was only here because someone had dumped him into my life, I reached out and grabbed the first thing I could: his pinkie.
He didn’t like that, I could tell by the way his eyes suddenly glowed for a split second, but he kept his mouth closed. “No one is going to kill you except maybe me.”
Alex looked at me for a long, long moment. “It annoys me when you’re fucking cute.”
“Incredible, beautiful, rich, and a naturally fit. The world is so unfair.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him glance at me, and his voice was a little funny as he asked, “You think that about me?” “I was talking about your sister.”
I blinked slowly. “Is this hell? Are we stuck together forever?” I whispered. His scowl was monumental. “You’d be lucky to be stuck with me for eternity.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as his gaze moved over my face. A muscle in his cheek might have even moved too. Then he said it, sounding almost disappointed, “You make it really, really hard to not like you.”
The world was a big place, and I’d finally sort of been able to take my blinders off and experience it. And it was pretty wonderful.
“It hurts my feelings that I’m right here, that you’re right there, and you still think that you’re ever going to be alone again.”
But unlike you, I was never lonely,” he explained calmly. I closed my eyes. “Until I was. Until I was on another continent and wondering what you were up to. Until I was in bed, by myself, and I didn’t like it,” he told me.
“There is no place I wouldn’t look for you. Seven miles deep in the ocean. On a planet in a distant galaxy. I would go anywhere for you if someone took you, Gracie,” Alex said, his voice intense.
“What I feel for you, it’s got nothing to do with what anybody else wants or needs. I don’t give a fuck about any of that. That’s what I give a shit about. Being with you makes me happy. I know you know what that has to mean to me.”
I didn’t want life to be the same ever again either. And if I couldn’t trust this son of a bitch, there was no one in the world I would ever be able to.
