Page 31

And then I rolled my eyes. Because even pink-cheeked and wide-eyed, he was still way more attractive than it was fair for him to be.

Probably even more so, if I was being honest.

God, he sucked.

“Do I?” I eventually responded to his statement, because being a pain in the ass and giving him shit for it was a far better option than finding myself stuck, analyzing why he’d said those three words in the first place.

He raised his eyebrows at me, and I raised mine right back.What are you going to say about it now?I taunted him with a look.

He bit down on his bottom lip and smiled, and before I knew what the hell was happening, I was completely submerged in Greyson’s pool.

He’d thrown me in. He’dactuallythrown me in.That shit!

I broke the surface with a smile; I couldn’t help it. “You’re going to regret that,” I said, and immediately dove for him. I threw both of my hands over the top of his head, attempting to shove him under, but it was a useless effort. He just laughed and simply grabbed my arms, placing them back down at my sides.

I met his eyes, watching his lips curve into a smug smile while already mentally plotting another attempt—maybe I should try to shove him down by his shoulders instead—when I noticed the small scar on the bottom of his chin. I’d never seen it before.How had I never seen it before?

I reached out and traced the short line of it with my finger. “Where’d the scar come from?” I asked.

His eyes immediately darted away. “Just some childhood accident,” he said, shrugging. He was trying to remain unaffected, but I could see the way that his breathing had picked up. And the way he was repeatedly squeezing his right hand into a tight fist beneath the surface of his pool.

He was lying.I wasn’t sure what to make of that. But something inside of me urged me to dig deeper, because I knew there was something there to find. I think I’d known that for a while now.

I turned my hand over for him to see, water dripping down my arm and back into the pool. “This scar here,” I said, pointing at the faint line on my pointer finger, swallowing down my fear and the magnitude of this moment I’d somehow found myself in. Because it wasn’t lost on me that I was about to share something with Greyson that I’d never told a soul. My heart was pounding, my hands shaking subtly. “I split it open on the corner of a wall once. When one of my mom’s boyfriends shoved her into me.”

He lowered his head slightly, his jaw clenching. He still wasn’t looking at me.

“And this piece of lead,” I continued with a deep breath, pointing at the tiny grey speck at the center of my palm. “Is from when her drug dealer stabbed a pencil into my hand…” I swallowed again, forcing the unexpected—and unwelcome—onslaught of tears away this time. “To teach her a lesson when she was late on payment…

“Joke was on him, because she didn’t care,” I finished. I wasn’t sure that last part was even audible, but the way Greyson looked at me then, his eyes pinned to mine with understanding, I knew he’d heard every word.

My heart was pounding even harder than before.What did he think of me now?

I slid my hand over my throat, feeling my pulse throbbing beneath my palm as time ticked by. As I watched him—thinking, breathing, swallowing, his Adam’s apple dipping down and back up again and again.

Was I way off base? Was he silently judging me behind those green eyes of his? Was he going to say something? Anything?I was starting to feel like I’d made a huge mistake. Like I’d overstepped a boundary that Greyson clearly wasn’t ready to cross with me yet, until…

“It was always an ‘accident’,” he said, and I swear I could feel the walls between us slowly crumbling. “‘I didn’t see you there,’ ‘I didn’t mean to push you that hard,’ ‘I was angry; I wasn’t thinking straight.’It was never about the fact that he was a drunk, or the fact that he was an asshole even when he wasn’t drinking.” He shrugged. “So, I got this…” he pointed at the scar on his chin, “the night everything changed, and my dad finally drug his sorry ass to rehab.”

My stomach turned. I never would’ve guessed that any part of Greyson could match a part of me so closely, yet there it was. The hurt and pain that hid beneath our surfaces. “I’m sorry. That’s shitty,” I said quietly. It was the only thing I could think to say.

“Yeah, me too. About your mom. I had no idea.” He looked down at me, meeting my gaze. “Guess that’s something we have in common then, huh?” He laughed darkly.

“Yeah,” I said, my tone echoing his mood entirely. “Adults suck.”

“Adults suck,” he agreed, and our backs hit the wall of his pool.

We stood there, side by side, letting everything we’d shared with each other sink in. I guess we’d both learned that lesson early on…that adults were full of shit. That the preconceived notion that they have it all together and know what they’re doing, was total bullshit. Most of the time they were more screwed up and confused than we were, they were just a hell of a lot better at pretending they weren’t.

“Is that why you don’t drink?” I asked him after a while.

He nodded. “Yeah. Doesn’t really appeal, you know?”

“Yeah, I get that,” I said, and he scooted a fraction closer, his arm bumping mine in the water. I’m not even sure he was conscious of it—this physical need to be closer that he seemed to be unaware of.

But I knew it, because I felt that need, too. Every time I was with him. It felt like there was this invisible string tied around my heart that was attached to some unknown part of Greyson—his eyes, his heart, his mind, I didn’t know exactly. Maybe all of it. Probably all of it. But it pulled me in, closer, and closer, and closer every day.

Silence stretched out in front of us as we stood there in the water, and I couldn’t stop my mind from wandering. From worming through the last hour of conversation and analyzing what all of it meant. What he’d shared with me, what I’d shared with him, the three words he’d accidently said before we took a turn for the dark and ugly.