Distracted By You: Book 1 in The Exeter Running Girls Series, стр. 23

“Not really,” he ran a hand across the back of his neck. A familiar sign of his I now knew signified he was stressed. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Okay,” I nodded trying to regain our happy afternoon as I rearranged in the chair. “Your turn to pick.” I threw the remote control and he caught it mid-air.

“Fancy a film?”

“Sure.”

It turned out that Tye had a taste for action films and two hours later of high-octane gun shooting, blood pouring, and pillow hiding, I felt frazzled.

“It wasn’t that bad,” Tye laughed, digging into a bowl of popcorn we had made from scratch using a saucepan and popcorn kernels. The bowl was balanced in his lap as he leaned into the other corner of the settee, his head turned towards me.

“It wasn’t the guns and shooting I had the problem with,” my voice was muffled from the cushion I had buried my face under as I leaned back on the settee arm. “It was the amount of blood.”

“Yeah, there was quite a lot of blood, even for my tastes. It wasn’t all action.”

“Excuse me? Pretty much in every scene someone died. Not even died but died dramatically and in a horrifying way. All scenes were death scenes. Apart from the sex scene.”

“You can’t tell me you didn’t enjoy that?” To his words, I pulled the cushion off my face and lifted my head to deliver a death glare. “You know your angry eyes just make me laugh?”

“That is the opposite reaction to what I’m aiming for,” I sat up on my knees, trying to appear taller, and slightly more intimidating, even though it was futile.

“It’s a quirk of yours,” he offered the popcorn bowl, smirking and knowing what he was doing.

“My angry eyes are a quirk?” I took a handful and started eating the popcorn one at a time. “It’s not supposed to be cute and fluffy; you should be terrified and apologising.”

“Sorry, princess. It’s like I told Sam, you have a bite. It’s just you don’t shout about it. So when you are mad it tends to come across as more… cute,” he shrugged his shoulders in that helpless, what can you do way.

“Cute? How dare you,” I snatched the popcorn bowl from his hands, stealing it for myself. “I’m surprised you’ve analysed me to such a degree. I had no idea I interested you that much?” I knew I was flirting, but I couldn’t help it. He was too tempting not to flirt with.

His cocoa eyes turned to me with their normal wink.

“Everything you do interests me.”

Ooh wow. I’m fairly certain I audibly sighed.

His phone started buzzing again, shaking the glass of the coffee table and breaking our eye contact. Tye checked the caller id, pausing as he had done before, then sat back, leaving the phone on the coffee table as it continued to ring.

“Your dad again?”

“Yep,” he kept his eyes trained forward. All the humour and flirtation we had just uttered had vanished, the tension was back in his jaw, evidence of the frustration.

“If you don’t want to talk to him, can’t you just answer and tell him so?”

“Have you ever said that to your parents?” He looked back at me with full expectation of my answer.

I bit my lip and shook my head. That’s not to say I hadn’t hung up on my parents. I had done that with my mum multiple times this last month, or made up reasons why I had to go, straight away. Lectures or seminars were a good excuse, she could never argue with that.

“I just don’t want to talk to him right now.”

“I get that,” I really did. At the thought I pulled my phone from my jeans pocket and looked at the screen. My mum had said she would ring at some point, but I had no desire to talk to her. No wish to listen to the endless complaining about my dad and inefficiency of the solicitors. I turned the phone off and placed it on the coffee table. At least now I couldn’t talk to her for a little bit.

“It’s just,” Tye paused and ran a hand across the back of his neck yet again. “We only ever talk about one thing. Smalltalk isn’t even a thing he’s capable of.”

“What is it?”

“The business.” He shook his head again, throwing his hand down on the settee arm and punching the puffy material with frustration.

“The business must be doing well,” I spoke softly and offered him the popcorn back, which he took though he didn’t look at me. “Well, the BMW is an indicator.”

“Yeah, it’s a car dealership.” He had mentioned before how he and his younger sister didn’t want to go into the business, though their older brother had. Tye hadn’t shown just how far this conversation had gone – by the looks of things, the resentment on this matter ran deep. Very deep. “I just want a break from that world. I don’t want to talk about it with him.”

“Can’t you tell him that?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he shook his head, illustrating that the brief open window he had given me to look through into his life had now been firmly shut. The glass all tinted black like one of his car windows, nothing more to see here.

“Tye?” At my voice, he looked up to me from where I was still kneeling on the settee. “If you ever do want to talk about it, you can.” I smiled softly, feeling him mirror the action half-heartedly.

“Thanks, princess. Let’s watch another film so I can forget about it.”

“Damn it, enough with the princess thing.”

“Enough? Why?” His lips curved into a genuine smile. “I like the nickname.”

“It doesn’t suit me!”

“Oh, it really does. Nah, I’m sticking with it.”

In the end, Tye