“Why are you doing this?” I asked her. “Didn’t we talk about this before?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “But when Michael said…when he just assumed I was bought and paid for…it just made me realize the people who have known you the longest probably know better than I do.”
“Fucker,” I snarled. “I should have kicked him while he was down for saying that shit to you.”
“It’s true though, isn’t it?” She turned her eyes to me, and my chest tightened up again.
“No,” I said, “it isn’t. And beyond that, Michael doesn’t know me. None of them do.”
“Well, I don’t know you either,” Tria said. The venom had crept back into her voice. “You don’t tell me anything about yourself.”
“You know everything important.” I shrugged. I reached over to try to take her hand, but she pulled away again.
“How you got to where you are,” Tria said, “is important. I want to know, Liam. I want to know what happened to you and why you are the way you are.”
“How am I, exactly?”
“Cold,” she said without hesitation.
“That’s not what you say at night,” I replied as I wiggled my eyebrows.
“You see?” Tria jumped right back into it. “It’s shit like that. I say something that you should consider insulting, and you respond with a half-assed joke instead of being pissed about it, or upset, or whatever. You’re indifferent to everything around you, and I want to know why.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why does it matter?”
Tria’s chest rose and fell with her breaths as she tilted her head to look at me.
“I need to know how I can fit into this,” she said. “I can’t figure that out if you don’t tell me anything. If I can’t figure it out, well…”
She let her voice trail off as she shrugged and looked away from me.
“Well, what?” I tried to keep my voice down so the couple in the other room wouldn’t hear us. “Well, then you’ll just say fuck it and move on? Is that what you mean? Are you threatening me?”
“No,” she said quickly. “I’m not. I don’t mean to be, anyway. It’s just…I have to have more, Liam.”
“More?”
“I want to know more about you. More about your past.”
“You don’t want to know,” I told her, hoping it was true, or that I could at least convince her it was. I shifted uneasily on the floor.
“You have a habit of telling me what I want,” Tria replied. “Maybe you could let me decide that once in a while.”
I ignored her sarcasm.
“Can’t we just make out instead?”
She immediately moved away from me and looked at me pointedly. There was just no winning with her and her stubbornness. My best bet was to just get her to sleep, so I went with that angle. After all, it had worked pretty well the night before.
“You need to sleep,” I said.
“So tell me a bedtime story.”
“That shit isn’t going to help you sleep.”