Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 62

Chapter 62

DOMINIC

I drove back to the hotel, lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling.

The room was quiet. The city outside was quiet There was no reason for me to still be awake.

I was still awake.

She kept coming back. Not in the way that annoyed me, not the way a problem returns when you have not solved it. She came back the way a song does, the way a smell does, without warning and without permission and with a completeness that made everything else feel slightly less real.

The office. The table. The way she had looked at me afterward, still catching her breath, her eyes asking a question she had not

put into words yet.

The car.

I laughed quietly at the ceiling. That woman was going to be the end of me.

But it was not only that. It was not even mostly that. It was the way she had talked to me in the closet when I told her about my parents, the way she had not filled the silence with sympathy I did not ask for. It was the way she had fed me dinner with a straight face and pretended it meant nothing. It was the way she had stood on that stage in the red dress and looked at me across the whole shocked room like I was the only fixed point in it.

She excited me in a way I did not believe was possible.

I had spent years believing that what I felt for most things, the low-grade interest, the mild satisfaction, the controlled appreciation, was simply what feeling things felt like for a man like me. Seraphine had not changed that. The women before Seraphine had not changed it either.

Celeste had.

I turned my head and looked at my arm. The dressing she had applied was still intact. I needed a doctor to look at it, just to be safe. Infection was a real risk and I was not interested in being taken out by something as undignified as an untreated graze wound.

I thought about her face when she had stayed beside me in that room. The way her hands had moved, careful and focused. The way she had tried not to let me see that she was frightened.

I had been frightened too.

Not for myself. I had been in dangerous situations before. My body knew how to respond to danger and it had responded without asking my permission.

I had been frightened for her.

The thought of her being hurt had done something to me that I was not prepared for. I had not wanted to show it. If she sensed too much from me, if she felt the weight of what I was starting to feel, she might pull back. For her this was a game. A revenge. A delicious, satisfying reversal of everything that had been done to her. I was a tool she had chosen well and was using effectively

I was fine with being the tool.

I just needed to make sure the tool did not develop feelings that complicated the arrangement.

What if my call came at exactly the wrong moment? What if she was in the middle of something and her phone rang and Julian saw my name?

I set the phone back down.

Then I remembered she had given me her old phone. She had turned it off before handing it over and told me she had gotten a new one. I had asked why and she had laughed and said she did it for the fun of it, for the thrill of having a second phone that Julian did not know existed, for the pleasure of operating on a frequency he could not tune into.

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