Inevitable: Chapter 18

My phone vibrated as I laid out my notes and book on the library table.

When “Winner” popped up, I smiled at his stupid way of trying to get rid of the old nickname I’d given him. I took a breath to calm my racing heart. “Hello?”

“Where are you?” His voice sounded soft, quiet. “The librarian is trying to kill me with her glare. Seems phones are frowned upon here.”

“Third floor, to your right.”

He didn’t waste time talking, just hung up.

I grumbled about how rude he was and went about setting up my laptop. The low battery had me crawling underneath the table to find an outlet. My hips did not want to wedge themselves between the chair and table leg as I reached further to get the plug in.

“I’ve got to get into better shape.” I grumbled more complaints to myself, now in a sour mood.

That’s, of course, when Jax’s head appeared at the edge of the table. “View looks great from where I’m standing.”

“Crap!” I jerked upward and my head banged into the table, causing my whole body to ricochet just enough to put me off balance. My hip rammed into the table, and I swore again.

Scrambling out from underneath the hazardous area, I glared at Jax. “What is wrong with you? You can’t just sneak up on people like that.”

“Hardly sneaking, Peaches. I was just on the phone with you, and now I’m enjoying what I see.” He chuckled, looking at me like I was pitiful while I rubbed my hip and my head.

He shoved a coffee cup with a lid on it into my hand. “Here, I got you some chai tea.”

I made a face. “I don’t really like chai tea anymore.”

He just nodded like he expected that response. “Sure, Peaches. Just humor me and sip on it, okay?”

Part of me wanted to throw it at him. “Fine, but next time you decide to arrive with tea, try to do it without scaring people into injury.”

He barked out a laugh that overtook him long enough for me to drink him in. Like the first bite of my favorite dessert, pleasure shot all the way through my bloodstream. I’d feel guilty later, but I indulged anyway. My eyes scanned him from head to toe, taking in everything from his messy hair to his casual running shoes. My indulging crossed the line into memories when I saw he wore dark jeans and a fitted light-blue T-shirt.

“You’re not wearing a suit,” I murmured more to myself than to him.

He quirked an eyebrow at me as if I was being silly. “It’s a library, not a conference center. You’re not wearing a dress. Don’t get me wrong, your black jeans looked great from where I stood.”

I should’ve let it go and gotten past it easily but something about being around him, with not another soul on the third floor and him looking just like he used to, wouldn’t let me.

I lost myself in the indulgence and couldn’t seem to find my way out. He reminded me of how we used to be. The sparkle in his ocean-blue eyes slammed into me harder than one of his facewash snowballs ever had. And the memory of him smirking at me just like this years ago as he flirted with me knocked the wind out of me.

I shook my head, rubbing it again. “You always wear suits now.”

The corners of his mouth lifted just a bit. Then somehow, he was right in front of me, like he’d silently crept up to me and maneuvered his way into being only an inch away. He brushed my hands away, replacing them with his. First, he inspected my head. One arm wrapped around my lower back where he slid his hand under my shirt to shift it up enough for his other hand to rub the sore spot on my hip.

As he looked at the reddened spot, he grumbled, “I’m not on TV or in a magazine right now, so I think jeans are fine. I’m sure you don’t always wear black.”

I didn’t answer because nothing mattered but his hand rubbing my hip slowly.

Soothingly.

Nicely.

Just like he used to do.

Each circle would dip under my shirt and then cause my jeans to ride a little lower.

“Peaches, your hip okay?”

My breath picked up, and I licked my lips, trying and failing to not clench my thighs together. With him so close, I was losing myself in his smell, in his eyes, in the way my breath seemed to sync up to his.

When his eyes locked on mine, they dilated, and I was pulled in. The Caribbean Sea now looked dark, stormy, ready to devour. His hands shifted, both under my shirt now, wrapping around the small of my waist, almost encircling me.

As he leaned in, I parted my lips.

The loud vibration and ring jerked me back to reality.

Jax swore and tried to hold my gaze. “Ignore it,” he commanded.

My body screamed at me to listen but I sidestepped.

He growled and pulled his phone out. “This better be good.”

Even the menace in his voice had my knees shaking and weak. I smoothed my hair back and tried to take in slow breaths, tried to calm the ache in me to have him again. I sat and shuffled the papers around, trying to forget what just happened.

I needed to remember who we were today rather than who we were years ago.

He eyed me while listening to his phone call and something in him seemed to snap. “I can’t talk about this right now. I hired you to handle it, so handle it.”

He ended the call and looked down at me. I just moved my textbook to the middle of the table and opened a few windows on my laptop. Clearing my throat, I said, “So, I already reviewed the lesson plan. The professor wants us to create an investment plan and track it for six weeks. I studied some stats, and I figure if—”

“Sweet Sin,” he harshly whispered, planting his hands on the table as if trying to steady himself.

I flinched because I knew what that name signified, what it meant, how much weight it held when he called me by it. “Jax, I wish you’d stop calling me that,” I sighed.

He exhaled, and then his intoxicating voice rumbled out, “When I get as close to you as I did a second ago and I’m tempted beyond reason, it’ll always be what I call you.”

To say I was embarrassed by the fact that I vibrated in my seat across from him just from his confession would be an understatement. I was embarrassed and so angry that I still wasn’t immune to him. I tried to roll my eyes and look uninterested, but I heard the snark in my voice when I replied, “Or what you call me and every other girl you bring up on stage.”

I admit, some sort of sick hope festered in me when I glanced up at him. I wanted to see some sort of guilt, some sort of remorse, or maybe even a sliver of regret.

The evil half-grin on his face didn’t show any shame though. “You want to talk about my Sweet Sin album and tour, I’m happy to, babe. Calling women on my tour ‘Sweet Sin’ is basically a damn memorial to you anyway. I named my album and my tour after you.”

“It’s a memorial to me when you call them a name you once called me and then make out with them in front of millions of people watching on TV?”

He had to be kidding.

“They obviously never meant anything.” He shrugged.

His nonchalance grated at every nerve that had been hurt every time I saw those concerts on TV. That sick feeling in the pit of my stomach intensified as I thought about it. “It meant a little something to me when my ex called other women a name he’d only used when he couldn’t resist me the night before he left. Not only did you use it with them, you used it the same way.”

He balked at that. “I didn’t use it the same way,” he almost growled. “It was a gimmick, good PR, and like I said, it’s a sort of memorial to us.”

“So, if the roles were reversed …”

“What? If you called some guy L.P.?” He smiled. “I’d let them take that nickname any day.”

“If I called them L.P. and then started sucking their face, you’d be just fine with that?”

His gaze narrowed. “Aren’t you already doing that exclusively with Roman?” He sneered the name. “You want to talk about my album and tour? Why don’t we talk about you and him and what you’ve been doing for the last couple of years?”

My eyebrows raised because I knew he was trying to accuse me of something. “I have nothing to hide. If we’re going to talk about that, let’s just add in what happened when you left and why you still go to see the man everyone calls my father?”

An article in Rolling Stone had claimed the man who stood a foot away from me couldn’t be read, that his walls were so high they couldn’t be penetrated, and that he didn’t have a tell known to man. So, the music he wrote was even more unique, giving people a window into the mind of a man so calculated and so elusive the world would never really know what he was thinking.

They called him cold and unconquerable.

I remembered that article because it captured what he hit me with right then. His blue eyes froze over like an arctic storm.

I donned a smile that hopefully looked to him like it was keeping me as warm as a polar bear’s fur under his icy gaze. “Ah, not so talkative now, are we?”

He sat down across from me, ready for war. His gaze drilled into me so brutally, I nearly backed down.

Nearly.

His voice was low when he spoke. “Sometimes, I wonder how your manners and formalities elude you when you say shit like that. I don’t discuss that part of the past with you because it doesn’t change the present.”

I didn’t shrink away from his anger. I just glared back with what I hoped were drills of my own. “Then there’s no reason to discuss what I’ve been doing, right? We’re friends in the present, trying to work things out ‘for Jay.’” I air quoted as my tone turned condescending. “So, the past can be swept neatly under a very large, very thick rug. Right, L.P.?” I sneered the old nickname like a weapon.

He sighed and rubbed his hand over his face. “Jesus Christ, Peaches. Do you want help with this class or not?”

I hummed low at his stubbornness before I shoved my lesson over to him. “I already completed this portion of the investment plan. If you think it works, we can call it a day.”

Really, the help I needed was much more than him skimming over my investment plan but pride and frustration coursed through me.

If he wanted answers, I deserved them too. While he looked over my homework, I secretly tried willing pain into him, willing guilt into him. I literally started hoping for some voodoo or hypnosis power so that I could just get through to him.

“Aubrey, before you know it,”—he didn’t even make the effort to glance up from my work for the reprimand—“you’re going to hurt that pretty face of yours by glaring at me. So, stop it.”

I sighed and repressed my childish retort.

A few more minutes of him studying my work passed. I sipped the chai tea and suppressed a moan when I tasted how good it was.

He didn’t look up or say anything else as time passed. I started to fidget. My work wasn’t bad. It was sufficient, and maybe even good.

I’d spent a tremendous amount of time researching to make sure I made all the right decisions. I wouldn’t admit that I spent extra time on it to make sure he couldn’t insult my intelligence when he looked it over.

So, his lack of positive reinforcement had me trying to distract myself by texting Jay the update he requested.

Even if I wasn’t so sure, Jay didn’t need to know that. He didn’t need to know that I already sparred about the past with Jax and pushed for answers I knew I probably wouldn’t get. He definitely didn’t need to know that Jax still got a rise out of me.

Jax cleared his throat loudly. “You can text later.”

I set my phone down and glared at him.

He slid my papers back over to me. “This is all wrong.”

I waited to see if he would elaborate. I even stared at him with wide eyes. Instead, he had the audacity to pull out his phone and check it.

“Jax, you do realize you can’t just say it’s wrong, right?”

He looked up and gave me a blank stare. “You want a good investment plan. That isn’t one. Start over.”

If I could’ve thrown my papers and laptop in his face without hearing about it from Jay, I would have. “That is not how you tutor someone.” I enunciated each word. “You walk them through it.”

“I am walking you through it. Start over,” he enunciated back.

“This is your problem, you know that?” I tried to rein myself in. I even mentally counted backward from ten to one while I smoothed my hair.

It didn’t work.

“You just think because you’re so damn brilliant that everyone else is too. Then, when they can’t see your logic, you can’t be bothered. Your logic is so obvious to you that you can’t fathom anyone else having another opinion or idea. Rolling Stone thinks you’re so lethal and dominating and blah, blah, blah.”

Stopping my rant was impossible. He tried to cut me off by saying my name.

I didn’t stop, wasn’t going to stop until I was done. I needed this like I needed a thousand-pound weight lifted off my shoulders. “You’re not any of those things. You’re just an arrogant ass who can’t see past his own views, who can’t help anyone else to understand. I mean, would it kill you to elaborate for once in your life? To answer one godforsaken question? I mean, really—”

“Whitfield!” he shouted.

In the middle of a library. Like it was his right.

Startled, my mouth snapped shut.

He pushed me and I let him. Somehow, he irked me just enough to get under my skin, to move past my manners and let the raw, unhinged side out of me.

To my surprise, he started laughing. “I love your sass, woman, I actually miss it. Can you believe that?” His eyes twinkled. “But give me a chance to defend myself.”

His hand slid over to take back my plan. I sighed, knowing I’d overreacted. He didn’t owe me anything anymore, and even if he did, it didn’t matter. I started to apologize, “Look, Jax—”

He stopped me with a look. “Same goes from years ago, Peaches. Don’t apologize for letting me see you.”

His words brought back memories from that day on the lake. I shook my head because I didn’t want him to continue, didn’t want to remember how hard I’d fallen for him that day. Remembering meant this wouldn’t be just us here trying to shake each other from our systems.

“It’s still one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen in this world and one of the only things I can’t seem to live without. No matter how fucking hard I try.”