Gargoyle (Woodland Creek)(17)
After glancing at the people behind me, their conversation having quieted further, his gaze snapped back to mine. They ran over my face, and his wide lips thinned even more so. “It’s not as bad as it sounds.” He glanced down at his food, his cheeks flushing deep red, and when he peered back at me, there was a fire in his eyes. “I didn’t f*ck her.”
I sucked in a harsh lung full, the sound wheezing through my constricted lungs, not even caring that the conversation had halted behind me. I stared at his silent fury. “Will it always come back to that?” My chin had trembled the barest bit before I caught it, my heart aching so damn badly. “I can’t take it back.”
He ran a hand over his face, glanced once behind me, then literally crooked his elbow on the table and rested his forehead on his hand, half shielding his face from the others and stared down at his food. “I don’t know, Kennedy.” His tone was so quiet. So different from anything I had ever heard before from him. He sounded just as miserable as I was. “Let’s just try to make it through tonight.”
I stared a moment longer, f*cking miserable as hell, and I nodded once and sat straighter on my chair, hopefully hiding him some from the uninvited behind me. “We can do that.” I lifted a hand over the table, pushing his plate toward him a bit. “Eat. We’ll watch a movie when we’re done.”
It was quiet for a few minutes at our table as we ate in silence, neither of us listening as the other four began speaking again. We just stared at our food, eating quietly. Until the discomfort began to diminish in our quiet, and we started getting seconds, both of us moving easily around each other placing the other person’s favorite on one another’s plates…a silent apology to one another for the pain we were living in. It was such a silent caring act that my heart swelled even more for him.
But I froze completely when a large, heated, strong palm landed on my shoulder from behind. I stayed utterly still as…Isaac…leaned over me, his stomach muscles clenching against the back of my head. He stared down into the open cartons in the middle of our table.
Jonathan stilled too, his gaze flying to Isaac’s hand on my shoulder, and watched as his thumb brushed under my hair to my neck, then stroked once gently in a semi-hidden gesture.
Isaac asked calmly, “Do you two have any more eggrolls? Caleb didn’t get me any.”
I made a choked noise in my throat as Jonathan’s eyes began to simmer vehemence, moving from the hand on my shoulder to Isaac’s stomach pressed against the back of my head. Jonathan’s nostrils flared, and his breakneck violent gaze slammed up to Isaac’s face, his tone deathly quiet, “Get off her.”
“Hmm?” Isaac hummed, still staring down into the containers, even lifting a few with his free hand, completely ignoring the deadly hunter staring daggers at him. His gripping hand on my shoulder swiftly released me, though, when he leaned further over the table, my chin literally pressed down to my collarbone as he reached for the sack, finding the eggrolls. He hummed happily. “Here they are.” He jiggled the bag, pressing away from my chair, away from me. “These are my favorite.” He simply walked away, the bag in his hand crinkling as he dug into it for an eggroll.
My lips were slightly parted as I blinked stupidly. The Mayor seriously shouldn’t have done that. Jonathan had told me that Gargoyles were weird about physical contact—because too many random people touched their statue form. And Isaac had just crossed over that line, showing blatantly he had them with me.
Black eyes flayed me so harshly that I was at a loss. My lips parted further, and I mumbled, “It’s not what you think.”
His gaze narrowed even further, not peering away from me, even as the room had quieted, no conversation occurring at all inside my apartment. Jonathan stayed silent for a full minute, his jaw clenching and unclenching. Until his gaze snapped from my eyes to above my head, his tone a menacing purr. “It was you.”
My fists clenched on top of the table as the crinkling of paper could be heard again.
Isaac was chewing as he merely stated, “That didn’t sound like a question to me.”
Jonathan gradually began to stand, his words a slow, deadly tick. “Isaac…was it you?”
More crunching sounded and the crinkling of paper. Isaac hummed softly. He murmured ever so gently, “That night was no one’s. It was the power that owned the night. The power that took control of everyone. If we were together then, it was neither her fault nor mine.”
I shrieked, quickly shoving my legs to the side, sitting on my chair sideways when Jonathan, in a fit of fury, lifted the table and slammed it against the wall faster than I knew him capable of. The room was silent as the plates and bottles shattered against the wall, the side of the table thumping heavily against the floor. The black wood was cracked down the bottom of it. I hugged the back of my chair, breathing heavily and staring at the wall where the remnants of our dinner remained, slowly sliding down to the floor behind the upended table in disgusting wet thumps.
Jonathan stood utterly still, his fists clenched down at his sides, every single muscle bulging in his body as he kept a tight rein on his growing fury, his eyes like lasers over my head on the Mayor, who had lowered the eggroll sack to the coffee table, his hands hanging loosely at his sides.
A fight was definitely imminent.
Yeah…that shit wasn’t happening in here.