Page 51 of Riding the Sugar High

Crossing my legs, I think hard of something else we could talk about.Anythingelse. “Do you date a lot?” I ask, then quickly add, “You know, when you’re not fake-dating me.”

He shakes his head. “At the risk of surprising you, no. I don’t.”

Right. I could have gathered that myself from—well, everything about him. “So you just kiss random people who crash into your bike?”

“Yes. In fact, I never even had a panic attack. It was all part of a long con designed to entrap you in my house, because I hate peace and sleep.” He shifts his pillow up. “I don’t want to talk about my dating life.”

“Fine.” I exhale. “So you admit you had a panic attack?”

He blinks, his shoulders tensing. “The last woman I dated was my ex. We broke up five years ago.”

I guess we’re back to the dating portion of the conversation. “Why did you break up?”

Holding himself up on his elbow, he looks up at me through a curtain of sleep-mussed hair. “We’d been together since we were kids, but as we got older, we started wanting different things. Can I go back to bed now?”

“Like what?”

He rubs his eyes. “Uh...she wanted to move. Focus on her career and all of that. I wasn’t willing to follow her, but I was also very resistant to the long-distance thing.”

Sure, with his love for phones. “So she left without you?”

Releasing a breath, he shakes his head. “She kept running away instead of facing our problems. She wouldn’t come back home for days and stay at her parents’ place to avoid seeing me.” He pauses, looking down at the mattress. “Then she cheated. Screwed her way out of the relationship.”

My lips twist. I’ve never been cheated on, but a lot about Logan makes sense now. How closed off he is—how distrustful and distant from everyone. “Did she confess?”

“I found out.” Folding an arm behind his head, he looks up at the ceiling. “I flipped out at first, of course. Then I told her I understood. It wasn’t even about sex—it was everything else. We were unhappy, and she searched for what was missing elsewhere.”

Well, cry me a river. There’s hardly ever an excuse to cheat, and this isn’t one of them.

“I’m not saying she didn’t fuck up,” he comments when he notices my expression. “She knew it too—she was desperate.”

“Did you dump her after that?”

One corner of his lips lifts, but it’s not enough to distract from the melancholic look in his eyes. “I begged her to stay. Begged her to choose me. I told her I’d do long-distance. That I’d leave Simon in charge of the farm and go with her, but...” He swallows. “It didn’t work out that way.”

Shedumpedhim.

She cheated on him, lied about it, then dumped him.

Maybe I am a violent person after all, because I’d like ten minutes in a room with her. Whodoesthat?!

“Does she still live here?”

“Yup. With him. White picket-fenced house, cute kid. So she probably made the right choice.” He closes his eyes, and I let mine trail up his chest, tracing the many tattoos intersecting all over his skin. With the silver moonlight coming in from the open drapes, he looks like pure art. “Lost something, Barbie?”

Skin heating, I look up at his face. “Uh, I was just admiring your?—”

“Yeah, I know what you were doing.” He huffs out a chuckle, then shrugs. “Was there anything else?”

“No. I’ll let you, uh...get back to it.”

“Thanks.” He turns around, pulling a blanket over his body, and I watch the rise and fall of his shoulders for a while.

“I swear to god, Primrose. It’s two in the morning, and I need to wake up in two hours. If you don’t?—”

“Can I sleep here?”

He turns to me, his brows scrunched so deeply his eyes are almost closed. “You want to sleep in my bed?”

---