SWNOVELS Chapter 36
Azriel’s POV
Why was I so pissed off?
Because if this girl could, on a dime, play me like this, make it feel that real, I was in serious f*****g trouble.
She’d already dinged my armor somehow. She was looking up at me with huge eyes and a trembling l*p asking what she’d done wrong and truthfully, I didn’t know how to answer her because she’d done just what I’d told her to do.
She’d done a masterful job of acting like she wanted to be with me. I felt this guilt sweep through me. I didn’t f*****g like it. I pushed it away.
“Do you really want to know what the difference is?” she asked me.
“Yeah, why don’t you enlighten me?”
I needed a f*****g drink.
Claire’s POV
“I pretended you were the guy I met blindfolded. Mysterious and passionate. Dangerous yet caring,” I said quickly.
He looked at me weirdly for a second, and then it started to dawn on him, I think.
I continued, “ I thought, wow Claire, imagine if this gorgeous man, not a boy, a man, took you on a date? What would that be like? I imagined what I wanted it to be like.”
This wasn’t that hard.
Opening up to someone wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.
“ A nice restaurant instead of fast food. All dressed up. Romantic. I thought about you for days. You were on my mind right up until our trip to Paris.”
I took a short pause.
Because I really needed it.
“ When I met you for the second time, you shattered that image, that fantasy. Shattered it. Tonight, it felt like my life was on the line and I couldn’t lie, couldn’t pretend to like you, not after everything that’s happened. So,” I took a deep breath
“I tried to rewind things. I pretended you were him, the guy I first fantasized about, how I’d thought you might be.”
I swallowed and then continued in barely more than a whisper, “and the date was kind of like I’d imagined and you kind of were like that, too.”
His expression dropped. He was two inches from my face and he just stared at me. He stared at me for the longest time.
I didn’t look away. I just leaned against the door.
Then I finally spoke, “Azriel, please don’t hurt me tonight.” It came out in a flurry of words, almost like two words, his name and then the rest.
He dropped the shirt on the floor and slowly backed away from me, palms up, like I might shoot, then he was at the bar, pouring whiskey in a glass and then he drank it straight in one gulp and slammed the glass on the bar.
I flinched but stayed put. He poured another few inches in the glass and downed that, too.
Then he was staring at me and I couldn’t get a read on him. Finally, he slammed the glass down again and strode over to me.
Here we go. I felt sick to my stomach. I felt like I was gonna throw up.
“Go to bed, Claire. Your reward for this evening’s exemplary behavior is that you don’t have to sleep with me tonight. Excuse me.”
Startled, I stepped away from the door and he left.
I stood, gobsmacked, for a moment, then I walked over to the bar, and poured a bit of whiskey into a glass and I downed it. It burned like a sonofabitch.
I got ready for bed, washing the remnants of my ruined make-up off and putting on his dress shirt from the floor and then I tossed and turned almost all night.
I thought about my friends, about college in the fall, and most of all I pondered the enigma that was Azriel Clarke.
I didn’t know what to make of him, of the events of the evening. I laid there, lost in thought, torn between stressing about my future and remembering the way that k**s on the beach at sunset felt.
Wearing his shirt with his scent on it felt so intimate; it was almost like he was beside me and that scent was of the gentle, insanely attractive man I’d imagined him as at first to me.
Not the gangster, the abusive jerk, the guy who’d kissed me like I’d never been kissed in my life, who’d smiled at me, who’d laughed at the puppy, held my hand while we walked down the beach, carried my shoes.
I fell asleep probably just before dawn so I slept late.
I glanced at the small clock on Azriel’s nightstand and it was 11:30. I sat up and stretched.
I got up, used the washroom, took a shower, and put on his bathrobe, which was hanging up on the back of the bathroom door. It was just the tiniest bit damp around the collar, telling me he must’ve used it today.
He must’ve showered in here while I slept. It felt too intimate wearing it. I got out of it and stayed in just the towel while I brushed my teeth and then dressed in more of Sarah’s clothes and then made my way downstairs and found Rosita on a stool at the kitchen island doing something on her phone and laughing.
“Hi,” I said, hesitantly.
She waved me over and showed me a picture of a bunch of old men in speedo bathing suits with some silly caption below it.
I didn’t even read what it said; I just scrunched up my nose at the image and backed away from her.
She cackled all the way to the single serve coffee maker and brewed a cup for me and then I watched her put in two full and then three quarters of a spoonful of sugar.
Yep, the weaning off had begun. She stirred it and passed it to me,
“Today, I’m going grocery shopping. Anything you fancy let me know and I’ll add it to my list. Tell me what you like to eat. What do you want for breakfast today?”