Chapter 6

Kimani

Roan took his phone from my hand without a word.

He did not look at me when he took it. His fingers closed around it and he turned and walked out of my room and I stood in the middle of the floor and watched him go and the door did not slam, it did not close with any kind of drama, it just shut with a quiet click that somehow felt worse than if he had slammed it.

I stood there for a moment trying to decide what that meant.

Roan did not do things without intention. Everything he did was deliberate, measured, considered, which meant walking out of my room without looking at me was also deliberate and measured and I was supposed to understand something from it. Whether it was anger or something quieter and more complicated than anger I was not entirely sure.

I sighed and rubbed my face with both hands and told myself I did not have the emotional capacity to decode Roan King on top of everything else today.

I changed my clothes slowly, pulling on something that satisfied Jaxon's very strong opinions about what constituted a decent outfit inside a private residence, and I went downstairs.

They were already in the living room with the posture of two people preparing to leave. Jaxon had his keys in his hand and was saying something into his phone and Roan was standing near the door with his jacket in his hand and his eyes somewhere across the room that was not me.

"I stepped out to make a call," Roan said to Jaxon, easy and flat, answering the question Jaxon must have asked at some point while I was upstairs. His voice was completely normal. No edge, no heat, nothing that would signal anything to anyone who did not already know there was something to signal.

I had to give him that. He was very good at this part.

"Kim baby, mom called me back, she's on her way home so you won't be alone for long." Jaxon crossed the room and pressed a kiss to the top of my head. "Be good. Take your supplements, not just the chocolate."

"I know," I said.

"I'm serious."

"I know, Jaxon."

He squeezed my shoulder once and then turned back toward Roan and said something about a meeting on Tuesday and they moved toward the front door together and I stood in the living room and waited.

Roan walked past me.

He did not look at me. Not a glance, not an accidental brush of eye contact, nothing. I was standing four feet from him and he walked past me like I was furniture he had already accounted for and did not need to acknowledge further and I felt it in a place that was entirely too central to my chest for something I was supposed to be okay with.

The front door closed behind both of them.

I stood in the quiet of my living room for a long moment.

Then I went and sat on the couch and ate three chocolate bars back to back and felt sorry for myself in peace.

✦ ✦ ✦

I unblocked him that same evening.

I did not make a thing of it. I just went into my phone and removed the block and put my phone face down on my nightstand and told myself I was going to sleep and not think about whether he would text. I thought about it for approximately two hours before I fell asleep. I woke up the next morning and checked my phone before I was fully conscious and there was nothing from him and that sat in my stomach the entire time I was getting ready for class, this low, persistent ache that I did not have a clean solution for.

He knew I had unblocked him. He had to know because he had access to my phone in ways that I was still processing the full implications of. So his silence was not accidental. He was choosing not to text me and I had to sit with that and act like a normal person who was fine and go to campus and attend my morning lecture and not feel like crying in a university hallway.

I was not entirely successful.

The lecture was fine. I retained maybe forty percent of it because the other sixty percent of my brain was occupied with frost blue eyes and a question I had been turning over since yesterday. Whether I was actually going to do it. Whether I was going to take the challenge he had dropped on me right there in my bedroom while his hand was inside me and Jaxon was at the bottom of the stairs.

Make him hate me.

The idea of it felt ridiculous and also, quietly, terrifying.

I was walking the hallway toward my next class with my phone in my hand, checking it for the fourth time since I sat down in my last lecture, when I heard my name.

"Kimani!"

Ashley's voice cut through the hallway noise the way it always did, effortless and bright and carrying, and I turned to find her already in motion, weaving between people with her bag bouncing on her shoulder and her whole face lit up the way Ashley's face got when she had something to say and could not say it fast enough.

She reached me and threw her arms around me and lifted me off my feet completely, which she always did because Ashley was taller than me and used it without apology, and I made a sound of protest that she ignored.

"I missed you," she said, setting me back down and holding me at arm's length to look at me. "You look like you slept weird."

"I was sick," I said. "I'm still recovering."

"You look fine to me." She looped her arm through mine and we started walking. "What's wrong with your mood though? That's not a sick face, that's something else face."

"I'm fine," I said, and I said it in the tone that meant I was not going to expand on it right now and Ashley knew that tone well enough to leave it where it was. "I'm just tired and I have the chemistry test next week and I have not looked at the material seriously in two weeks so I'm behind and I'm stressed about it."

That was true. I was studying nursing and I was in my second year and chemistry did not get kinder the deeper into the program you went, it just found new and creative ways to make you question your choices. The test next week was a real problem that existed independently of everything else and I was using it because it was available.

"Okay but listen," Ashley said, because Ashley always had something she needed to get to, and she steered us toward the door of my classroom and we sat down at two seats near the back because I had exactly ten minutes before this class started. "Something happened today and I need to talk to you about it."

I looked at her. "What happened?"

"My professor gave me this project." She was already making the face, the one that was simultaneously excited and conflicted, and I knew that face too because Ashley only made it when something good and something inconvenient were happening at exactly the same time. "A real one. Like a legitimate project, this could actually go somewhere project."

"What kind of project?"

"An interview." She sat forward in her seat. "My professor somehow got access and she assigned me to interview the richest man in the country. Like a proper sit-down, formal interview. The kind of thing that could actually put my name somewhere if it goes well." She paused. "You know how long I have wanted to do something like this."

I did know. Ashley had wanted to be a reporter, an interviewer, something that put her in front of a camera and behind a story, for as long as I had known her. It was the kind of dream she talked about with her whole chest, never embarrassed about it, never tentative.

"So what is the problem," I said. "This sounds like exactly what you have been waiting for."

"It's scheduled for tomorrow," she said, and her face collapsed into something painful. "And tomorrow is Landon's game."

I looked at her.

She looked back at me.

I understood that Landon was a significant factor in Ashley's life. I also understood that Ashley had a once in a professional lifetime opportunity sitting in front of her and was actively considering sacrificing it for a college basketball game and the proximity it provided to a boy she had not spoken to properly in three months.

"Ashley," I said.

"I know," she said immediately.

"This is your dream."

"I know."

"Your professor got you access to interview the richest man in the country and you are considering…"

"I know what I'm considering, Kimani, that's why I have the face." She pressed her fingers to her temples. "Landon's games are important to me too and you know why."

I did know why. I was choosing not to validate it right now because I loved her too much to let her make a decision she would regret in six months for a boy who did not know she existed.

"Who is it," I said instead. "Who is the richest man in the country right now?"

Ashley dropped her hands from her temples and gave me the specific look she reserved for questions she found obvious. "Is Roan Lexian King not the richest man in the country?"

My stomach dropped so fast it nearly took the floor with it.

Roan. The interview was with Roan. Ashley had been assigned to sit down and formally interview the man I had been secretly dating for a year, the man who was currently not texting me, the man who had left a mark on my neck yesterday and told me to make him hate me.

I pressed my hand flat on the desk in front of me and kept my face very, very still.

"Kimani." Ashley reached across and put her hand over mine and gave me the look. The important question look. "Can you please help me with the interview?"