Page 109 of His Reckoning

Which means she’s been gone for almost three hours. Three hours is a perfectly reasonable length of time for a date.

I know that. I’ve been on enough of them.

Dinner, drinks, and conversation. Maybe a walk. Maybe he kissed her goodnight.

My jaw tightens. I push the thought away immediately.

What Kayla does on a Friday night has absolutely nothing to do with me. She’s not my girlfriend or my responsibility.

She’s a guest who needed somewhere to stay while she moved out of her apartment. That’s it.

And yet … I turn and pace back across the room again.

When that guy showed up at the door earlier, something happened that I didn’t particularly enjoy.

The way he looked at her or how she smiled back. How she leaned casually against the doorframe, like she was completely comfortable with leaving with him.

I stop in the middle of the living room and exhale slowly.

This is exactly the kind of reaction I don’t tolerate from myself. Jealousy is inefficient. Jealousy makes people reckless. They make people do stupid things, which is why I’ve spent most of my adult life avoiding situations where those reactions might appear.

Kayla, however, seems determined to destroy every system I’ve built. Because in the time that she’s been living here, she has managed to create more chaos in my routine than most people manage in a year.

She argues, challenges everything I say, and refuses to be impressed by anything. For some reason, she looks at me like I’m the one who’s unreasonable.

I walk into the kitchen and grab a bottle of water from the fridge. I lean against the counter and stare toward the front door.

My brain immediately offers an image I didn’t ask for.

Kayla sitting across from that artist at some dimly lit bar, laughing, leaning forward. Listening to him talk about paint and emotional landscapes or whatever the hell he does.

Maybe he’s walking her home right now. Or maybe— I set the bottle down harder than necessary.

No. Enough. This is absurd. Kayla can go on as many terrible dates with artists as she wants. It has nothing to do with me.

Except, apparently, it does. The second I saw her in that dress earlier, something in me stopped behaving rationally.

She looked good … and the way that guy looked at her, like he’d already decided he was going to take her home, didn’t sit well with me.

I push off the counter and start pacing again because there’s another problem, I’ve been trying to ignore all evening.

The kiss.

I told myself it was a mistake, a lapse in judgment. Something that happened because we were standing too close and arguing, like we always do.

But if that were true … I wouldn’t still be thinking about it days later.

And I definitely wouldn’t be standing here right now, wondering if some guy just kissed the same woman I’d kissed in my kitchen.

My jaw tightens again.

I stop pacing. For the first time all night, I allow the thought that’s been hovering in the back of my mind to surface completely.

I can’t take this much longer.

Watching her write.

Watching her argue.