Of course I wouldn’t have. I’d learned my lesson well before I got my marching orders, but did that change the last year of my life? No. And it didn’t change everything I had done before then.
“Would you, Seth? Would you have done it if you weren’t made to?”
I closed my eyes and my response was barely above a whisper. “No.”
She squeezed my hands. “It’s terrible. I’m not going to lie and say that it isn’t a big deal, but I know you. You did what you had to do, not because you wanted to. There’s a difference there.” She paused as her hands slid up to my wrists. “I ran over a squirrel once.”
Blinking open my eyes, I drew back as far as she’d let me.
“What?”
“I ran over a squirrel the second time I ever drove a car,” she repeated. “I also hit a deer. And when I was seventeen, I clipped a cat. Before I left for college, I backed into a dog.”
“Gods,” I muttered.
She nodded, lips drooping at the corners. “His name was Buddy and it was a golden retriever. Like, the most friendly of all dogs.”
Oh my gods.
“And the owner’s five-year-old kid saw it. Buddy survived, but I’m kind of like a mass murderer when it comes to animals and me behind the wheel.”
My lips twitched. It wasn’t funny. I had to keep telling myself that. “Babe, that’s not the same thing.”
“I know.” She shrugged. “But still. I’m not happy about it, but it seriously made me feel like an animal serial killer. Like somehow that was my destiny. To kill all the furry, four-legged friends.”
I stared at her. No matter what, she was so…so mortal.
Josie bit down on her lower lip as she worked her hands up to my elbows, her thumbs pressing on the insides. “I have deeper, darker secrets.”
“You do?” My voice was low, rough. The constriction in my chest was lessening. “Did you cut off the heads of your Barbies or something?”
She laughed softly. “No, but I did cut their hair and tried to dye it with markers.”
“Of course,” I murmured.
Rising onto her knees in front of me, she tightened her grip on my elbows, and I was absolutely helpless to move. Made powerless by a girl who thought she had darker secrets than me. “I wished, more than once when I was younger, that I had a different mom. That’s pretty bad.”
I found myself leaning toward her. Our faces separated by scant inches. “I think most people would sympathize with that.”
“Maybe. I’m just pointing out that no one is perfect, especially me.”
Josie was the closest thing to perfect I’d ever met, and she had no idea. The realization was a shot to the chest. When had this happened? When had I gone from being a one-man show, always alone with nothing meaningful, to having this right in front of me, in me? I closed my eyes as I dragged in a deep breath. I don’t even know why I said what I did. Then again, I didn’t know why I’d told Josie all the things I had before. “I don’t feel that way.”
“What?”
When I opened my eyes, she was staring at me with those big, blue ones. “When I’m with you, I don’t feel like a monster. I forget.” And that was the damn truth—a scary truth. “I forget all the things I’ve done that make me not deserve this.”
Josie didn’t respond, and for a long moment, she didn’t move, but then I felt her soft lips brush my forehead. The gentle, chaste touch shocked me, and I jerked back, staring at her. My heart pounded like a jackhammer.
Her smile was hesitant, but her grip on my arms was strong. “You’re staying with me,” she said, flushing pink as she ducked her chin. “It’s settled, like it or not.”
Then she sort of climbed up, forcing me back against the headboard and onto my ass, her movements awkward and shy as she looped her arms around my shoulders. I stiffened as she wiggled down, getting herself comfortable in my lap. Once situated, she grabbed my arms and folded them around her.
All I could do was stare at her, but as seconds turned into minutes, and as my muscles began to relax, I stayed with her.
CHAPTER
26
“YOU RUN like a girl.”
I scowled at Seth’s back and huffed out, “I am a girl.”
“Doesn’t mean you need to run like one,” he called out, hitting the main pathway that led around the academic buildings.
This time I made a face that didn’t last long, because I felt like I might pass out. Luke had bowed out on the afternoon run. Not that I blamed him. A cold snap had dropped the temps into what felt like lung-freezing territory and I couldn’t feel my face.
I hated running.
However, I did not hate the view in front of me.
Long, lean muscles flexed under his deep-gray thermal. My gaze dropped to his butt, and I almost tripped. I could seriously stare at his body all day. It was a work of art.
But my attraction to Seth ran deeper than the physical. He was still that puzzle I’d only barely begun to arrange. Like I’d gotten all the outer pieces with the straight sides lined up, but the meat of the puzzle still needed to be pieced together. Those moments when he was unbelievably kind, or when he was patient during training, or when he stayed with me when I’d turned into a hysterical mess, or when his guard completely slipped, and I saw the teasing, easy-going nature that I knew was at the heart of him—all of them had lured me in.
I wanted to get inside his head. Maybe that was some of wanting to study psychology left in me. Maybe it was just Seth. I didn’t know.
It had been two days since I’d seen Apollo and had a minor mental breakdown, and two days since we kissed. There hadn’t been any more of that, but Seth hadn’t left the last two nights. He stayed, and I guessed that was progress—frustrating progress.
I had gotten somewhere with him that night. I knew that, but I also knew there was so much more than what he’d shared with me. And I couldn’t help but think back to what Erin had said, to how Deacon and Luke behaved around Seth.
There was more.
The strange—but becoming more and more familiar—feeling unfurled deep inside me as we passed the library. Without meaning to, I slowed down, and then I just stopped in the middle of the pathway, unmindful of the brutal wind whipping through the statues and olive trees.
My gaze crawled up the long, wide set of marble steps beyond the veranda, and to the heavy, unmoving doors.
“Hey.” Seth had circled back to me, his body blocking the wind. “You okay?”
I nodded. “Yeah, it’s…” Shaking my head, I smiled up at him. “Never mind.”
Rays of sunlight caressed his high cheekbones as his brows knitted. “What?”
Glancing back up at the library, I shrugged. “It’s just… Every time I see the library, I don’t know, I want to go inside.”
“That’s weird.”
I laughed as I pressed my chilled hands together. “I know.”
“You haven’t checked it out with the guys?” Seth grabbed my hands, capturing them between his. “Gods, your fingers are like ice cubes.”
My gaze drifted from the library to him. His head was bowed, and shorter strands of his hair had slipped free, brushing his cheeks, as he rubbed his hands over mine. It was such an intimate thing to do that I didn’t want to respond at first. “No,” I said quietly. “Neither of the guys is keen on the whole library thing.”
“Neither am I.” He shifted closer, still concentrating on my hands.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
He peeked up through long, thick lashes. “I’ll have you know I’m practically a genius.” I snorted.
“You’ll pay for that,” he warned lightly. My fingers were all kinds of toasty now. “So, you want to check it out?”
“What? The library? Don’t we have to run eight more miles or something?”
Seth chuckled. “Joe, you can’t run eight miles.”
Yanking my hands free, I smacked his arm. “You just wait until I’m a demigod. Then I’ll run hundreds of miles around you. And don’t call me Joe.”